Free The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein Page B

about in- and out-of-class habits and goals, and one of them queries students about their book reading “for personal enjoyment or academic enrichment.” Here are the results for number of books read for 2003 and 2005.
     

     
    The low rates suggest that for a majority of college students intellectual life belongs mainly to the classroom. Perhaps freshmen spend too much of their leisure time adapting to campus life, searching for ways to fit in and find themselves, choose a major and envision a career, not create a bedtime reading list. But the reading rates don’t get much better as they approach graduation. For young Americans who’ve passed through six semesters of coursework to receive a liberal arts education at a cost of up to $200,000, the gains here seem a disappointing improvement. If 81 percent of freshmen in ’03 read four books or fewer in a full year’s time and seniors lowered that dreary figure to only 74 percent, one wonders why college courses didn’t inspire them to pick up books at a faster rate. Does campus social life dampen their inquisitiveness, dividing what they do in class and what they do at night cleanly into the pro-studious and anti-studious? Has the undergraduate plan become so pre-professionalized that the curriculum functions as a high-level vocational training that dulls the intellectual curiosity that encourages outside book reading? Perhaps the rise of business as the most popular major signals a new careerism among undergraduates, a loss of interest in general education. Maybe many of the best and brightest students aim for medical and law school, not the humanities, and the competition for graduate admissions leaves them little energy to read on their own.
     
     
    Whatever the reason, the upturn looks feeble, for all a larger increase in the NSSE numbers requires is that students add another book or two every 12 months. The school year lasts only 30 weeks, leaving 22 weeks to plow through some trashy novels at the beach or pick up a popular text or two related to their studies, Freakonomics for econ majors, for instance. Coursework should inspire more intellectual probing. It won’t hurt their chemistry grades, and outside books might even raise their scores on the GMAT and the LSAT, which have reading-comprehension sections. Young Americans have everything to gain from reading, more civic and historical knowledge, familiarity with current events and government actions, a larger vocabulary, better writing skills, eloquence, inexpensive recreation, and contact with great thoughts and expressions of the past. And yet even in the intellectual havens of our universities, too many of them shield themselves from the very activity that best draws them out of the high school mindset.
     
     
    Compare their attitude with that of young Frederick Douglass, a slave in Baltimore whose mistress started to teach him the ABCs until her husband found out and forbade it. Years later, Douglass remembered his master’s words as brutal truth: “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world,” he overhears him say. “Now if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass listened closely and realized well the liberating power of written words (and why Southern states made teaching slaves to read illegal) . “Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher,” he pledged in his autobiography, “I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.”
     
     
    Or that of John Stuart Mill, the great Victorian liberal intellectual. Born in 1806, Mill was a prodigy, learning Greek starting at age three and algebra at age eight, and by his late teens he’d acquired expert knowledge of logic, economics, and history. But a crushing depression hit him soon after, “the dry heavy dejection of the melancholy winter of 1826,” he called it in his