Before I even read this article I just want to say that I read hundreds of pages of bleak house, but couldn’t finish it because I just thought it was really boring.

Edit: okay I’m reading the article now. I always liked the beginning of bleak house though. It’s depressing that so few people seemingly have the ability to enjoy it.

Spoiler alert, but I remember that there’s a character in this novel who proves he can read by writing a single word on a chalkboard, and then later in the novel he just randomly explodes, I think.

I feel like I’ve encountered this phenomenon enough times to discern a pattern but not enough to figure out what’s going on. The phenomenon is this: some medium blogger gets linked on here writing a fairly cohesive critique of Americans and I click on some of their other posts to discover their politics are a little off.

In this case I can’t tell you if Iron Council is tendentious and bad but I’m really wondering where the hell this brainwave is coming from:

What constitutes “right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people. My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art. We don’t want to make the same mistake the left did by insisting that art satisfy our political priors. This will distort our creative undertakings in all sorts of ways that will reduce the quality of art and therefore reduce its cultural power (and therefore its political power). Instead, all a new cultural right has to do is tell the truth.

In conclusion, yes I think literacy and reading comprehension are in crisis but on the other hand the author of this blog is a weirdo.

This explains a lot of the behavior of the lost libs that stumble in here like the guy yesterday demanding exhaustive sources and when provided with such simply said “I ain’t reading all that”.

More than 80% of Americans are functionally illiterate

Dickens feels like an odd choice to display functional illiteracy, given that while it’s technically written in modern English it’s also marred with the cultural baggage of Victorian England; “wonderful,” for example, is meant in this passage to mean that it produces awe or astonishment, but that’s not how the word is used by anyone in modern times. The dinosaur portion is part of a larger metaphor using Noah’s Ark which is only really going to pop to someone with decent familiarity with Christian mythology, and worded in a way that still takes someone literate a moment to digest and understand it.

I’m not entirely sure the form of the study helps either; most of the responses seem like they threw a passage at an undergrad and immediately demanded their interpretation in a clinical (read: atypical and somewhat uncomfortable compared to normal reading) setting. How many of the readers would have re-parsed the passage given another moment or two and understood it? Furthermore, the opening passage isn’t even particularly important to the plot, and it seems like the vast majority of people reading understood at the very least that “it was a shitty morning in London” is the point here. Is that functional illiteracy, or simply skimming purple prose that isn’t all the relevant to the story?

This example feels only a little removed from laughing at undergrads for not understanding why Homer spent so goddamn long in the Iliad charting random Greek soldiers’ entire family trees only to kill them off a breath afterwards, and calling them illiterate for not grasping cultural context from literal antiquity.

I’ll be honest, I only read this article to make sure I was literate. Can report, I am one of the smarty pants who can read Bleak House. this system of measuring literacy by levels 1-5 seems most common in Britain, and the test was done on Americans at two Kansas universities. The Dicken’s passages seem to contain some culturally specific clues, though would the results be an different if they used Melville instead of Dickens? Maybe not.

Level 5 Literacy is basically the same, but across multiple sources at once while being critical: “Adults can search for, and integrate, information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence based arguments. Adults understand subtle, rhetorical cues and can make high-level inferences or use specialised background knowledge.”

I expect this competency to be demonstrated by a graduate with a Bachelor degree, this sort of literacy is equally important in STEM. I think my friends when I studied Engineering could do it, but I was friends with strivers, and I met a lot of idiots in random assigned group projects, and they graduated in the same class as me.

It was really muddy

Honestly, doing any amount of reading will put you a solid 50% ahead of literally anyone in any industry. I am in computers and I genuinely think that most computer science majors didn’t do any of the reading whatsoever. It’s becoming abundantly more clear as I’m going back for my masters that of my class of say 20 maybe seven actually read part of our required reading.

Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.

This is the more troubling bit than not recognizing archaic English (I get why the one kid assumed Michaelmas was a name). Not being able to recognize that one has presented a contradictory argument speaks to a severe deficit in reasoning. I’m not sure if that’s a failure of education or a reflection of a society that presents introspection and self-criticism as weakness.

However, I do want to push back a little on this:

In the end, the lesson is clear: if we teachers in the university ignore our students’ actual reading levels, we run the risk of passing out diplomas to students who have not mastered reading complex texts and who, as a result, might find that their literacy skills prevent them from achieving their professional goals and personal dreams.

This begs the question, what are the professional goals that are stymied by not being able to deconstruct Dickensian prose? Is this something that major publishing houses care about when hiring people? If these kids are able to graduate and then go on to have successful careers despite being below what’s considered “standard,” is it possible that the standard is simply irrelevant to “real world” demands? That these kids are simply prioritizing what their “professional goals” demand rather than being incompetent?

I don’t think this is new. I once encountered on an online political debate forum a guy who was constantly misspelling things and couldn’t (wouldn’t?) understand metaphors, hyperbole, or analogies. Someone would use a word like “proliferate” and he would assume it meant “pro-life.”

He revealed later he had graduated with a degree in English after topics around literature came up. This was over a decade ago and Spark’s Notes helped many people scoot by. Not surprising colleges are becoming diploma mills since so many of them always have been.

Ngl the dinosaur bit tripped me up until I recalled wonderful could be indicative of astonishment (USain reporting for duty! ) then everything clicked and flowed pretty seamlessly.

I don’t know how none of the people in the excerpts picked up that it wasn’t literally about a dinosaur in the street (or the fact they only recognized it was an animal and not a dinosaur, even when I had no fucking clue what it was meant to imply I still understood it was figurative. The fact none of them realized it was setting a scene was even more asinine. I felt illiterate reading this fact I needed a dictionary for some of the terms was disappointing (I read too much low-effort fantasy slop), and think the bar for “competent” was far too low.

I took some English in college and none of it really required older texts though so I could see how it could be overwhelming. Frankly, I am mildly concerned that I wouldn’t have been able to parse it if not for the fact I studied philosophy and their prose is so much worse (in the difficulty and often in the enjoyability as well). Thinking of my fellow friends, I have I believe 2 that would probably be able to read this competently though most of my friends from other countries I know definitely could parse this, including many that learned English in their late teens.

I’m young too, so this means I likely had the same or worse literary education as everyone interviewed, the only difference would be my major and the fact I do read for leisure (or as a hobby for the gamers in the chat). (Edit: I also know a bit of a second language and can read texts in it but my proficiency is still low so I am used to strain while reading, maybe there is an acclimation effect there?)

Other than the first sentence of the first passage (“Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”) these were not particularly difficult to understand. A bit verbose, but generally quite clear.

I’m not surprised that university students struggle with this though because the difficulty level and expectations for reading have fallen through the floor. Most students don’t read anymore, and I assume many just use chatgpt to summarize at this point. Reading is a lot like working out a muscle and if you don’t keep it up it atrophies.

I feel like it’s easy to blame social media, and I know it’s melted my own brain, but I don’t think students are challenged to read enough at any level of education anymore and aren’t helped enough to learn how to parse difficult texts. Class sizes continuously growing and funding being cut definitely doesn’t help. It’s hard to imagine a different outcome under the logic of neoliberalism.

Idk why but its funny to me that you posted this after an english major shot up some Israeli ambassadors

Not shocking for a country where education isn’t exactly prioritized.

I’m sorry but this article really rubs me the wrong way. The example used (the intro to Bleak House by Charles Dickens) doesn’t seem like it would have a whole lot of cultural relevance to the sample of students tested who were from public colleges in Kansas. If you’re the kind of person who already reads Dickens and/or watches British period dramas like Downton Abbey, you’ll probably perform much better in this exercise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are functionally illiterate or lack reading comprehension skills in a general sense. If the reading sample in question was something like Trainspotting, would it mean that Scottish readers have a unique talent for reading that others don’t have? Of course not. It just means the others aren’t Scottish.

A better example imo would have been something more universally difficult, like… A Clockwork Orange or Finnegan’s Wake, but in reality it’s hard to remove cultural bias completely. Or… You know what? Fuck it. Everyone should just be forced to read Hegel and be considered illiterate unless they can completely understand each and every sentence. How does that sound?

no metaphor left behind