An Obituary For The Humanities?

    I read books. Lots of books. I know; many of you think I need a life, and that may or not be true! I’m still working on it. That said, I am reading, and have written, that a growing number of high school and college students do NOT read books…ANY books…AT ALL! I cannot tell you how much that saddens me. However, these kids aren’t unique. The decline in full-length reading is well documented and cuts across all age groups, but it is especially problematic at our high-end educational institutions nationwide. That is not a complaint; rather, it is the starting point for any honest conversation about what is happening to the humanities and social sciences and the observation which Sam Kahn builds on in his powerful piece in Persuasion.

    Kahn lays out the damage so that even a dope like me can understand. Some examples of the sadness: The University of Syracuse recently shuttered 93 academic programs, many classics courses among them. Hampshire College, once a bastion for the humanities, is closing its doors altogether. Intended humanities majors at Harvard University have fallen from 30% in the 1970s to under 10% today. Students at Columbia University report never having read a book cover to cover in high school (are you f@#% kidding me?!); students at other elite universities openly admit running much of their work through AI, often with faculty looking the other way. I weep for the future of this nation.

    Kahn’s diagnosis is that a cognitive shift has occurred. The perceived utility of longform reading has declined in a world shaped by digital tools and artificial intelligence. Students are responding to that shift and so are institutions. His prescription, in part, is to move serious humanistic life outside the university, into reading groups and lifelong communities of readers, because the schools, as businesses answerable to student-clients, will keep drifting toward whatever students want. That is a description of incentives, not a justification for surrender. Institutions, I think, should try to shape incentives. They are not helpless before them.

    I believe he is right about much of it. He is right that the usual fixes—digital integration one decade, blue books the next—are evasions. He is right that the intrinsic case for the humanities has been crowded out by instrumental ones, and that they are worth pursuing for their own sake: as a way out of the ego, as continuity with minds across the centuries. Not that anyone cares, but I would sign my name to that right now. Where I part company with him is on the role of the schools. The problem is not that universities have been overtaken by forces outside their control. The problem is that schools have stopped requiring the habits that make the humanities possible and have done so as a matter of choice.

    Everything I have read and talked to teachers and professors about, for a decade or more, has quietly adjusted downward. Syllabi moved from books to excerpts. Assignments were redesigned for accessibility. Reading loads were cut on the theory that we should meet students where they are. Well, we did. This is where it leads: A vast number of high school and college students cannot read anything more challenging than Harry Potter…if that! 

    I believe that education is not supposed to meet students where they are. It is supposed to move them somewhere they would not have gone on their own. When students do not read books, they do not build the cognitive skills and architecture that sustained reading requires. They cannot hold an argument across 200 pages because they have never been asked to. They find themselves in eternal infantile reasoning. They think putting the word opinion before stating something frighteningly stupid means that they can never be wrong; because "It's my opinion!" They write in fragments because they read in fragments, or they do not read at all. And they arrive at college, or even adulthood, perfectly capable of having opinions, but unable to test them.

    This is not only an innovative teaching issue, it is a civic one. My old friend Alexis de Tocqueville understood that self-government requires citizens capable of forming independent judgments, and that particular capacity is formed slowly, through the habits a serious curriculum enforces, and deep reading. Strip out the habits, and the capacity goes with them. What you are left with is a citizenry fluent in overblown, emotional reaction, and grossly, and I mean GROSSLY, illiterate in argument. Trust me, I see and hear this every day. That capacity does not regenerate on its own once lost. The schools were the institutions designed to form all this. Nothing else in American life is positioned to replace them at such large scales.

    Artificial Intelligence sharpens the stakes. The machines are already excellent at producing the kind of output many humanities courses now reward: a competent five-page essay on an assigned text. If that is now what college is for, it’s game over; the universities have lost and the philistines have won. But that was NEVER what the humanities were for. Reading an entire book is an encounter with beauty, adventure, and a structured mind, at length, on its own terms; the capacity hardest to build, easiest to lose, and one a free society cannot do without.

    Kahn’s reading groups are a genuine good, and I wish them every success. Adults who want to keep reading seriously at ages 40 and 60, deserve better than what the internet offers. But the case for reviving humanistic life outside the university does not require giving up on the university. Sadly, most young Americans will encounter serious reading in college or not at all. That is the ground on which this fight is actually lost or won.

    The harder answer is to restore what the schools gave away: Faculty willing to assign difficult books, administrators willing to back them when students push back, and an institutional culture that treats formation as the point and satisfaction as a byproduct.

    If students do not read books, it isn’t because books stopped mattering. I think it’s because we stopped insisting that they do.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com