Reading Comprehension, Current Year A.F.*

*After the Flood

Pittsburgh. Spring semester lately over, and the professor in Victorian literature sitting in her office on campus. Implacable April weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would be not wonderful to meet a Felis Draconis, nine thumb-lengths long or so, cat-stepping like a Dickensian allegory up Mount Washington.

A decade ago, two professors of English set a group of Midwestern students an exercise in reading comprehension. There were eighty-five students, all majoring in English, two thirds of them women, all graduates of Kansas public high schools. Most of the students were “Caucasian” and thought of themselves as A- or B-level in their English studies. They should, one would hope, have no trouble reading from a classic of Victorian English literature—right? Right?!

The exercise involved sitting with a student facilitator and reading out loud from the text. The readers were permitted to use their own cell phones to look up words in the dictionary or check Wikipedia for details, while the facilitators would prompt them with questions about what they were reading. The taped reading sessions were then coded for narration (18 codes) and reading comprehension (62 codes), with the data entered into Excel sheets by a faculty colleague in mathematics.

At which point, having compiled the data, the professors sat back in horror and exclaimed, “Our students cannot read! Only four of them can be coded as anything like ‘proficient.’ Most of them (49 of the 85) understood so little of what they were reading that they would not be able to read the full novel on their own. Thirty-two of them could understand more vocabulary and some figures of speech, but they could not interpret more than half of the literal prose. And these were college students, whom we, as professors, typically assume can already read!”

I paraphrase, much as the professors hoped the students could do.

The response of late on the Internet has been scathing:

These are college students majoring in English. About half of them are English Education majors, which means they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating. But they themselves cannot understand the literal meaning of the sentences in the opening paragraphs. —Vox Day

I myself took quite a few literature and writing courses in college. This was decades ago, and while I wasn't an English major myself, most of the students in the advanced courses were. I found that a majority of them had a lot of trouble understanding metaphor and allusion in the assigned reading, couldn't grasp even obvious themes and character motivations, and could not reliably construct grammatically correct sentences in their own writing. Almost all of them went on to be awarded BAs in English. —The Kitten

Paraphrasing the paraphrase: the flood has come and gone. Our students, like the dogs, horses, and cats on the streets of Dickensian London, are covered in mud, slipping and sliding their way along the cobblestones of their education to a bleak and meaningless future. There is fog everywhere, and nobody can see how bad it’s gotten because we are all lost in the mist, surrounded by clouds.

You're horrified. I'm horrified. Vox Day and the Kitten are horrified. But what is to be done? The statistics are awful. The students are doomed. Their students are doomed. Our culture is doomed. Because, after all, if our students can't read Bleak House... how will they ever make enough money to live?!

Wait, what?

You think I'm kidding, don’t you? But it's right there in the text:

Although there are many graduates who probably succeed without advanced reading skills, the evidence from long-term studies reveal that lower literacy skills affect college graduates throughout their professional careers. The PIACC (Programme for the Assessment of Adult Competencies) has been continually testing since 2012 what it formulates as “the literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving” skills of the working-age population (ages 16–65) in over 40 countries, including the U.S., (“Program” 1). The research has shown that high literacy rates in reading and math are a main indicator of professional and financial success. From the PIACC results in 2014, only 12.9 percent of the U.S. population had a 4 or 5 literacy level, which is the level of reading proficiency needed to understand Dickens’ novels and most other texts in the literary canon (U.S. Department of Education). According to an ETS Center report, which analyzed the PIACC data, those with the highest literacy skills will make 38 percent more a month than other college graduates (Fogg 30). The report observed that “College graduates with higher levels of literacy and numeracy proficiency also had a higher likelihood of working in a CLM (college labor market) occupation” (Fogg 21). It does not stop there. A student who graduates college with below-level literacy (a “3” on a 5-point scale) risks becoming what the ETS calls the “mal-employed”—that is, “an employed college graduate who works in a job that does not require the proficiencies associated with a college degree to obtain employment in the occupation” (Fogg 13). The “mal-employed” were earning wages that were only 14 percent higher than their colleagues with high school degrees while those employed in the CLM were making 125 percent more a month than high school graduates (Fogg 32–33).

Oh, wait, sorry, wrong passage. Here it is, in the text the students were asked to read:

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”

Do you need me to spell it out for you, or do you notice what I just did?

Why should we expect our students to be able to read for scriptural allusions and figures of speech, images and cross-references and patterns of meaning, for symbolism and beauty and the resonance of phonemes, when everything in their education is telling them that reading is a skill that they need to make money, and making money means filling in the right forms to get shipments from China or contracts from India? Why should we expect our students to enjoy reading when we have reduced their education to a series of bullet points that they might as well get from SparkNotes or chatGPT? Why should they care about reading when their souls have been rendered statistics in the calculation of our national GDP?

Truly, it is as if the waters had only just retired from the face of the earth and the dinosaurs, dragons, and unicorns had all drowned, leaving behind rotting skeletons of the joy that we once had in singing to God.

And we wonder that the students cannot look up from their phones.

References

Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, Diane Miniel, “They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities,” CEA Critic 86.1 (March 2024): 1-17.

Vox Day, “MPAI: Even Worse Than You Think,” Vox Popoli (May 23, 2025).

Kitten, “College English majors can't read: They have one job and they can't do it,” Substack (May 20, 2025).

Neeta Fogg, et al. Skills and the Earnings of College Graduates. The ETS Center for Research on Human Capital and Education, March 2019.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1852-1853).