A recent American study, called ‘They Don’t Read Very Well’, analyses the reading comprehension abilities of English literature students at two Midwestern universities. You may be surprised to discover that the title is not ironic. That they don’t read very well is an understatement along the lines of Spike Milligan’s ‘I told you I was ill’.
The study’s subjects were given the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and asked to read it out loud, parsing the sentences for meaning. A doddle, you’d think, for anyone reading Eng lit at a university. Well, you’d be wrong. Most participants were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense from Dickens’s prose. It’s as if, dumbfounded, they’d been confronted with Linear B.
This study’s findings feel existential. I can hear the rumblings of disaster, as if the foundations of western culture, eroded for decades, are teetering into collapse.
It won’t happen here, I hear you say. But across Britain, in our educational establishments, teachers gather in corners and murmur. A university colleague tells me that, in a seminar, a student described a Robert Frost poem as gibberish. ‘A mouse could have read it,’ he writes. ‘A small, not especially confident, mouse.’
Study after study points in the same grim direction. Children hardly read; their tech-blinded parents don’t care; their teachers don’t have the resources; and many think that making students read ‘difficult’ books is elitist.
Here, then, is the Dickens passage in question. I’m assuming that Spectator readers will be familiar with it. Otherwise, duck and cover, kids. Your capabilities are about to be strained to the max:
‘LONDON.
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