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sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party
Jul 3, 2026, 12:19 AM
@alex
These were students attending seminars with at most a dozen in the room, this including the professor. The formulation "Small classes, cheap or free tuition, well resourced students...true investment in higher education" is rearguard action.
By the time students arrive in college, let alone grad school, let alone again post-education employment, their preparedness or not to read fluently, to engage with a text critically, is already established. And that preparedness was largely lacking well before the current crop of snake oil salesmen came onto the scene.
When myself arrived at undergrad CS program in the 90s, most of my classmates had never touched a computer keyboard before, let alone learned how to touch type, let alone again learned how to type commands at a prompt.
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sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party
Jul 3, 2026, 12:20 AM
@alex
Yet reading without the scaffolding of tools to avoid the friction of reading is also "one of those skills that they didn't tell us that we needed experience with before getting to campus," and this was just as much the case a generation ago.
College professors notice students who read attentively, and manage to do so in the time allotted to do that reading. They stand out, by violating norms established before ever reaching higher education.
One would expect the social behavior and cultures of media, from birth onward, that contribute, and have been contributing for decades, to a lack of engagement with reading, to be of some interest to sociologists. Instead, we get a prefigurative "mental model of how you think the world works" anchored in gesturing toward the numismatic nomenklatura and a workerist narratives of job markets.
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sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party
Jul 3, 2026, 3:17 AM
@alex
As a further aside:
The argument of "Why would they risk having a bad grade?" points to why students arrive in college unprepared to read, and have been doing so for decades.
Not because they are overscheduled. Myself was working three jobs at one point, while taking a full 18 credit load (meaning finding two credit classes to round out the other required four credit classes), during regular semesters, and taking a full load of summer semester classes, to boot. Yet was still reading all the assigned material and plenty of other books every week that were beyond the scope of the syllabi for any of my classes.
This was something myself had been training to do throughout secondary school and primary school before that. Not because getting a good grade depended on it, but because books were how to get to information myself wanted to explore for my own purposes. My reading outside of class had nothing to do with grades, thus my reading in class had nothing to do with grades either.
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sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party
Jul 3, 2026, 3:18 AM
@alex
One develops the muscles of reading effectively by reading with self-directed purpose. Reading to get something out of the text, something the author may not even have intended; not because one is going to be graded on having done the reading in accordance with external expectations.
Likewise one develops the muscles of writing by writing to work out one's own ideas in an expressive form, not because anyone is going to grade one for doing so. Let alone because anyone is going to give you a job on the say so of those doing the grading.
But if one arrives at college not having developed those muscles—if one arrives at college seeing reading and writing as tasks to be performed to prove to some external authority that you did the thing assigned to you—then of course shortcuts will be sought, as they always have been when someone is doing work that they see as a social expectation and nothing more.
And that's a sociological phenomenon that would seem worth study.
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