State school pupils struggle to read long books, Oxford professor claims

26 comments

1. Is that a schooling issue or a generational issue. I was slamming though books from the library at a rate of knots already I’m primary school, but then I didn’t have a smartphone and all its apps begging for attention while doing so.

2. Have you seen the reading material in state school?

   It would put you off reading for life.

   The only access to books for many are the ones at school, so stop making them read preachy, miserable shit in school, then maybe some would want to try reading a book outside school.

   Make reading pleasurable and kids will get better at it off their own backs.

3. “He told the broadcaster: “I’ve been teaching in British and American universities for 40 years, and when I began in Cambridge, you could say to students ‘this week, it’s Dickens, so please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House’.

   “Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.””

   Or maybe students are more likely to need jobs now so have less time to read.

4. > Because those students come from disadvantaged schools where the teacher’s main task is crowd control, the demands in terms of reading long books are just not there.” .. They were able students, but they simply hadn’t been exposed to large numbers of long books,” he said. “They hadn’t really developed that habit of concentrated, lengthy reading which private schools in both the UK and the US concentrate on.” .. Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.”

   That seems like an entirely fair comment to me. An Oxford Literature professor should have high expectations, at least he’s understanding about it. Though one big factor he’s forgotten to mention – smartphones & social media. I bet reading three books in a week was a lot easier when people didn’t have that distraction burning in their pocket.

5. I’m a terrible reader but a great listener. The moment I stopped trying to force a medium that doesn’t work for me (reading) and picked up one that does (audio books) I stopped struggling

6. I visited my children’s academy last week.

   The librarian retired last year and apparently there is no librarian now and the “library” seemed more like a common room than a library. It had very few books in it.

   This might well be part of the problem.

7. I used to read several large books a week (I finished Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy in four days and that’s because I needed a day to get the third book – each were about 1000 pages).

   Now I struggle to finish a Guardian Long Form article. I think the Internet and especially video/YouTube for me has really shredded attention spans.

   Exception for Dune which I’ve always struggled with for some reason and I don’t know why, it’s not a bad book by any means but I started it in 1986 and got as far as where the first movie ended in 2022.

   I might have finished it now if I knew where my copy was…

8. My attention span has definitely got worse. I used to read a book a month now it’s maybe 2 a year, max. I even joined the library, but it’s not much of a library anymore. It a has a small amount of books, mostly you have to request a book which takes a while. The largest part is dedicated to separate rooms for meetings, and community events.

9. Every child in my family I have bought a longer (for their age) book as part of their birthday / Christmas present each year. It’s not their ‘main’ present, and often it’s a book I’ve read myself.

   Often they are more excited for the book than their main present, and they love reading them, often with me or other adults in the family.

   If children have access to books, they’ll enjoy them. I find books that have a film adaptation are often talked about the most. The Ghibli ones like Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbour Totoro, When Marnie was There, Howls Moving Castle, those are very well received as they can have watching the film as a treat once they’ve finished the book, and they’ll point out the differences between the film and the book.

   The last book I gave had some weather damage since I took it out hiking and was hit by an unexpected storm. This, surprisingly, made the child 10 times more excited to receive it since it was proof I had read and enjoyed it myself.

10. Absolute bollocks. I’ve read hundreds of multi hundred page books, even at a young age despite going to an utterly appalling school.

11. My daughter is in year 2. She’s the “new gen”. She reads exceptionally for her age, she’s even in an advanced readers group. She reads daily… we also read to her daily since before she could talk

12. Primary school literacy lessons don’t encourage reading whole texts, just the extract for the day’s task. And the reading of actual books is always far more linked to the points gained by passing a quiz on them than on absorbing and enjoying and really thinking about the book. It’s a bit sad.

13. I went to private school and very few people there could read a long book. It was full of dummies who now work for their Dads.

    You don’t have to be intelligent for private school, just rich!

14. State school pupils who get into Oxford must be on average smarter than their privately education counterparts, so there is clearly something deeper, either classism bias or the other work state school pupils have to do to survive. Oxford is known for having a disdain towards state schools students, only excepting A levels taught at private schools, spoon feeding A level exam answers to private schools and so on.

15. I did English at Oxford, coming from a state school, and it is true that I struggled to keep up with the amount of reading required.

    But the main reason was because I was working full time during my holidays so that I had money to pay my way during term time, whereas with the amount you need to read on the Oxford English course, you kind of need to spend your Summers curled up on a sofa reading for the next term.

    I used to be reading seventeenth-century poetry on my lunch breaks in a factory, but it was still quite hard to keep up.

16. You know that when the Telegraph reports this, it is serving as an advert for private school.

17. Well, considering the Torygraph praises anti-intellectualism and pushes a mentality of meme equals expert opinion, they can hardly talk.

18. Interesting, a similar claim was made by a prof at a top American university. That students there aren’t capable of reading a full novel.

    I just hope that this doesn’t lead to further dumbing down in the name of ‘equality’ and not being ‘elitist’

19. I think part of the issue is that a lot of our English classes (unfortunately) do very little to induce a love of reading and literature. I remember sitting there for ages listening to people (haltingly) read their way through a book – to the point that we basically took the better part of half a term to *start* ‘My Family and Other Animals’. How can you enjoy a book if the process of reading it is so damn grating?

    Still, if that’s bad, then poetry was worse. I can’t think of a quicker way to kill a poem dead except by analysing it into the dust. I quite enjoyed things like ‘Half Caste’ when we started reading them at GCSE, but by the end I wanted to beat its writer senseless with a trench shovel…which probably wasn’t the reaction he was looking for.

20. As a someone who went to a state school, I don’t find this to be a bad take

    It’s true that privately educated students get pushed harder and taught more rigorously that we did

    And oxbridge is notoriously tough, privately educated students would know that and be prepared for that more than state school students

    I don’t believe that it comes down to factors like part-time jobs etc. (maybe to a small extent, but marginally) – it’s the reality of living in a two-tiered education system

21. When I was in a state school, many of the kids couldn’t read at their own age level. Partially due to poor education, partially due to not caring enough to get better at reading.

22. “I’ve been teaching in British and American universities for 40 years, and when I began in Cambridge, you could say to students ‘this week, it’s Dickens, so please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House’”

    As well as students’ behaviours changing, universities now pay more attention to student welfare and mental health, so he would be strongly discouraged from doing this today.

    I have read all of those for university, as well as for fun, and we weren’t asked to do all three in the same week 30 years ago. It wasn’t that we couldn’t, it’s that we *shouldn’t*. (You do all three a disservice if you’re rushing through, apart from anything else.)

23. State school educated man here. I happily read long books. Currently reading a 700+ page tome on bird migration.

24. I think one factor is that there is far, far more information available now and it is structured very differently.

    As a software developer I have always had to spend a lot of time reading and learning, as I have worked with many different languages and technologies over the years in several different industries (I started in the early 80s).

    The first Windows project I worked on, when Windows was still pretty new, there was basically one book that explained everything. Or, at least, if it didn’t explain something, you had to figure it out for yourself. The internet existed back then but the web hadn’t been invented.

    Now you can type a very specific question into Google and you will get 100 articles and 10 videos covering that exact topic in a ten minute read/watch. But alongside that, there is far more stuff you need to know these days.

    It is still very useful to have in depth knowledge of stuff in your brain. But there is a big temptation to rely mainly on quick answers from online sources. And if there is an easy route that works well enough, most people will take it.

25. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d have thought it rather unlikely that a person can get from state school to Oxbridge with out being able to read longer books.

    I’d have thought there’d be a greater chance of there being a less able student who got into Oxbridge from private school because of who their parents are and personal connections, and are not as clever as the state school applicants.

26. it is true. i’ve been reading this copy of don quixote for about 7 years