There’s a brand new (il)literacy fable

To the editor:

In “How A lot Do College students Actually Learn?” (Sept. 25, 2024), Inside Larger Ed reporter Johanna Alonso repeats claims which might be inaccurate, damaging and demeaning to college students. “College students are turning to YouTube, podcasts and ChatGPT-crafted summaries moderately than really studying their assignments for courses. Professors are uncertain how one can adapt,” she writes.

Alonso’s article spreads what I’ve recognized as “the il-literacy fable” that kids, college students and lots of adults, together with school college students, received’t—and certainly can’t —learn.

By fable, I don’t imply false or fictitious, however untruths which might be accepted and propagated broadly as a result of they seem to agree with accepted presumptions. The age-old literacy fable doesn’t have in mind elements that may result in college students’ success or failure to learn, reminiscent of a scarcity of alternative or social inequalities. The impact is, as within the il-literacy fable, accountable the sufferer. It’s college students’ personal failing, not their instructors, establishments or lived experiences, which might be at fault.

Particularly vital, Alonso by no means considers the query “What’s studying?” particularly throughout media and totally different texts. There isn’t a one type of confronting or making which means from texts which might be nearly infinitely different. This, and the necessity for college kids to be taught to learn totally different texts in a different way, is seldom a part of the curriculum and is among the principal causes for college kids’ difficulties with studying. 

None of that is new within the ways in which Alonso presents it. All through the historical past of upper schooling (and first and secondary education, too), college students have been condemned for his or her lack of ability to learn or their disinterest and problem in studying. Simply as there isn’t a golden age of the liberal arts, there was no golden age of studying. 

Her point out of scholars turning to “summaries” of texts by way of ChatGPT is exemplary. For many years, quick, printed CliffsNotes supplied simply accessible summaries. Good instructors used them to help college students. They didn’t denounce them. College students have additionally used printed after which on-line encyclopedias from the Encyclopedia Britannica or World Ebook in addition to comedian variations of basic texts. Wikipedia, for higher and worse, preceded and continues to accompany AI.

Every of those can be utilized nicely or poorly. College students’ use or misuse of summarizing instruments is neither new nor unprecedented. Educated, good professors have at all times identified how one can adapt.

College students have at all times learn, and so they proceed to learn, throughout texts and media. In fact, it’s not at all times the texts that English professors and cultural warriors need youngsters and younger adults to learn. Not is it at all times by way of the medium of print or in a single sitting. More and more, universities, instructors and competing curricula intervene with that. It’s time to fulfill college students the place they’re with studying. Will professors lead?