Eloquently put. I am of an age before the canon wars but observing friends of mine‘s children, I’ve seen the consequences. In fact, I suffer also, I suspect because of my electronic, auxiliary brain. Not too many years ago, pre-iPhone, I used to read at least five books a week, now I’m lucky to read five a month and many of those are of dubious utility other than requiring me to sit still and focus.
Indeed. When I began university, there were still one or two professors emeriti teaching, at least in my department, who held firmly to the canon. We used to call them “dinosaurs,” and we did so affectionately. Sadly, they’re all gone now. If you’re lucky, you might still find someone like that, but functioning in today’s academic environment is difficult under those conditions. That is, in large part, why I left.
Your point about technology is absolutely right. I don’t envy the coming generation. Their brains are being fried by the needless crack cocaine that social media has become. I’ve seen children barely able to string a sentence together before compulsively returning to endless scrolling. Those damned shorts are insanely addictive. The other day, I lost an hour watching short videos about German shepherds before I even realised what I was doing, and I’m a grown woman.
It feels to me that we are at war with technology for our sanity, and most people are unaware of the damage this will do to the younger generation, who haven’t yet developed the capacity to pause, reflect, and correct their own doomscrolling.
Also left the academy, for similar reasons. Literature has always been a source of inspiration to me, an opportunity to reflect on the mysteries of existence. I found I was constantly swimming against the current, surrounded by the hermeneutics of suspicion. I have high hopes that Substack can be a context for studying literature as a source of consciousness. My Substack is called Things I Love, and I post critical essays on the literature (and films et al) that fascinate me. Thank you for this article. Subscribed.
I noticed my attention span slipping as far back as 2012. That book The Shallows, which talked about the effect the internet has on attention spans, was big at the time.
I get up early now and read for an hour before opening my phone. Once I get sucked into the phone, my attention starts to fragment. Reading in the morning really helps.
I call it my exo-brain. And like my gooey brain before smart phones were invented it contains a lot of highs and lows. Ulysses and Gilligan’s Island, for example. My exo-brain is similarly voracious. Scientific papers and slop. And of course, cats. Cat memes are, after all, why Al Gore invented the internet. I can engage with other people more now with my exo-brain. Wendell Berry says stay down on the farm. but I say, “FTS, Berry. I don’t tell you what to do.” (Not to worry- he can’t hear me. He’s outstanding in his field.)
Many of his readers now at the end of life are faced with what to do with large personal libraries. Our children and grandchildren don’t want them. I have thousands.
Good question. Perhaps build a mausoleum that can hold you and your books. It would be a service to archeologists at some distant future date and give you something to do in the hereafter.
The problem starts early with the readin wars in grade school. Students are not taught phonics and never develop reading fluency. Those that develop fluency are not taught cultural literacy which includes history, mythology, and religion especially the Bible and Christianity. Without this background information they never develop the reading reflex and cannot comprehend the meaning. Reform will start in the grade schools and high schools in the burgeoning classical schools. Only then will the colleges be able to be reformed.
Agreed. One dimension I haven’t addressed in this post, but plan to take up in a future one, is the way academic infantilisation trickles downward. The decline in rigour, the consequences of the canon wars, and the broader intellectual flattening at the university level do not remain confined there. Universities shape how education is understood more broadly: they influence which books are taught, which authors are deemed acceptable, and what counts as legitimate knowledge well before students ever reach higher education. Not least, they train future teachers who then move into upper elementary and secondary education. In the end, this creates a vicious feedback loop between universities and lower levels of education, each reinforcing and accelerating the decline of the other.
In that sense, the problem is not isolated to universities at all. It begins much earlier, at the primary and secondary levels, and is, in many respects, a downstream consequence of developments within higher education itself.
"Agreed. One dimension I haven’t addressed in this post, but plan to take up in a future one, is the way academic infantilisation trickles downward. The decline in rigour, the consequences of the canon wars, and the broader intellectual flattening at the university level do not remain confined there. Universities shape how education is understood more broadly: they influence which books are taught, which authors are deemed acceptable, and what counts as legitimate knowledge well before students ever reach higher education." The whole problem, here, is an increasing failure and politicization of k12 imo. Eventually you produce an entire class of indoctrinated dimwits who can't reason objectively. I hope there is a movement away to defunding public education to a degree that reflects taxpaying parents' desire to want their dollars to go to the kind of schooling you seem to advocate. This is the biggest threat to the frauds who require your money to keep their jobs and careers because they can't cope in truly meritocratic environments.
Thank you. An ironic reminder, as the current wider situation required one to take on academic infantialism et. al. on their own terms. Eg:
“…Uranus was the first Olympian to catch wind of this situation - no surprise there to the Greek mythologists. He immediately installed a dome that trapped the poodium particles which would normally rise up to the clouds. During the entire shamateurism era the poodium particles hit the underside of Uranus’s dome. There they crystallized and grew bigger, until they fell back down on the Olympus timeline, unable to bear the accumulated weight of the VIPs’ hypocrisies.”https://quantifiablesyncdata.substack.com/p/wally-occams-trip-to-olympus
Yes 👏 And when higher education moved to e thought of as “career preparation” rather than learning to be an intelligent and productive member of society … that lit the embers of the seismic shift in academia. I look forward to your next essay.
"In the end, this creates a vicious feedback loop between universities and lower levels of education, each reinforcing and accelerating the decline of the other.
In that sense, the problem is not isolated to universities at all. It begins much earlier, at the primary and secondary levels, and is, in many respects, a downstream consequence of developments within higher education itself."
This is a very simplistic comment that I am about to make, but I see this a lot in my daughter's elementary school - at the very basic level of spelling. I believe this really relates to literacy and while my daughter loves to read and eschews digital formats in favor of analog books, her spelling (and that of her classmates) is seriously behind what I was doing at the fifth grade level (Gen X, growing up in Australia) a million years ago. I'm trying to rectify this at home but am really astounded by the lack of focus on teaching these basics.
I should add that all her teachers have been wonderful but a lot is directed by local and state educations departments/committees and focused on meeting numeric goals and levels rather than content and learning.
That’s a very insightful comment. You’ve put your finger on a key issue in how we think about education for children. It needs much more attention than it’s getting, especially in light of AI and how effective these tools really are as teachers. I’m actually working on an article on this, because the issue feels especially important right now.
One thing I did mean to touch on which is more relevant to your article. About three years ago (?) the NYT published an article about how university students were showing up to classes completely unprepared academically but also emotionally for what was expected of them. I forwarded this article to a friend of ours who is a professor of history (and the same age as us) and he said that while the article was on point, the timeline was off. He said that this lack of competency as well as a tendency to always be looking to find excuses or get professors to award extensions had been going on since 2015. Your article went even farther back than that which is enlightening.
You are correct about reading fluency, without which comprehension of the longer theme, narrative or argument is not possible. Fluency is neither a goal nor a considered outcome in reading instruction - as though being able to call out words on a page were the essence of the act. With fluency, which can only be developed by sustained, daily reading, degraded as ancillary to reading, elementary students lack even an awareness of their deficit with the result that they are prey to any and all screen enticements.
“Less than Words Can Say” has some years on it, but Prof. Mitchell did a superb job of foreseeing this problem back in the Seventies. Freshmen arrived unable to read and the faculty balked at teaching them how, saying that should have been done K - 12. They were graduated without literary skills and weren’t competent to teach, in turn, their pupils.
Are you referring to private schools, or reinstating the quality of public education, or both? In my area, classical schools are exclusionary sites of segregated privilege. I would think reform has to happen simultaneously in public and private education.
“You cannot go on seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. . . . If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see.”
Your thoughtful essay effectively condensed much history in a clear manner, and resonated with my experience of the periods in question.
My high school students struggle to read and some won’t. At the same time part of the problem is that classrooms have grown oppressively quiet so it’s difficult to judge what students are thinking. Speaking thoughtfully has become “cringe” unless points are awarded and then it’s like carp to feed pellets in the Japanese garden. No love of learning; just love of points.
I agree that there is a small space for hope. Over the years, I have participated in several book groups filled with readers ages twenty to seventy that were anxious to discuss the text rather than search for ideological affirmation.
I think “second tier” universities may also teach the text rather than the theory. I think one of the attractions of theory is that it makes you look smart and it gives the opportunity to attack a text and show how righteous you are which rewards the pleasing feeling of being right. In other words theory is about ego. Working class students don’t have time or interest for the abstract show-boating—at least that’s been my experience. Additionally most theory is so cryptically written, it’s easily discarded for an engaging tale.
Finally, within religious traditions there is a respect for text, and—again in my experience—much time is invested in close careful reading for edification. This doesn’t mean that every religious person reads or that there don’t exist plenty of other obstacles to reading diverse literature. But in my experience, with the people I grew up with, there was a love of reading, thinking and growing.
All of the above provide small glimmers of hope for me, but I think they will remain, unfortunately, only pinpricks of light in a vast and dark sky.
Yes. The irony is that Foucault, Derrida and Barthes were extremely read in classical literature, modern and classic (in the original).
Your article rightly points out in my view the fact that tech was preceded by "deconstruction". That said, smartphones, social media and now AI are a formidable accelerating factor.
It will be very hard to regain concentration and the ability to focus.
And there is more: this cognitive zapping is increasingly prevalent in the mew generations. Which means that the generation after that will not inherit anything bdcause their parents simply do not know how to focus on a text.
I agree that it looks like one reader at a time. But I still believe an institutional turnaround of magnitude would be the fastest way there.
And also beyond literature, what about reading complex monographs etc? Probably not looking brill either...
A beautiful and very sad essay. I studied Eng. Lit. in the 1980s, first in the UK, then in the US, where “theory” was already taking hold. I had intended to go into academia myself, but after having to read a whole book by Bourdieu for a course about Shakespeare began to have second thoughts. What really clinched it was a seminar about a poem by Yeats which began with the immortal words: “Well we won’t waste time reading the poem…”
In my high school, mid-nineties, there were alternate forms of teaching that were available featuring independent learning. You could basically create your own curriculum your grade was determined whether your advisor thought you taught yourself sufficiently.
In college freshman English, late nineties, my entire first semester was dedicated to learning none other than the book you mentioned: Orientalism. My second semester English centered on pop culture analysis.
So it's pretty clear in hindsight was always an attack on canonicity. I appreciate your analysis and help explaining the questionable choices of my previous educators.
I'll add that Stoner, by John Williams, is a great fictional story that includes a fight over canon in academia. While it was published in 1965, before the "canon wars", and it was set before the postmodern movement, it was definitely a warning about the decline of academic rigour.
Your post is both sad and indisputable in equal measure.
I wish to thank above all for your optimistic ending; that we might somehow find a way to climb out of this ditch of mediocrity we have somehow placed ourselves in.
Just before reading your insightful essay, I happened to read this line from Robert Bly’s 1996 book, “The Sibling Society.” From the chapter called ‘Teaching Our Children That Nothing Works’:
“We can say that Deconstruction is a form of technology, like gunpowder and the tank. It is used against our own students.”
An excellent account of How We Got Here. I graduated with a BA in English in 1978, after having attended two very different private liberal arts colleges. "Deconstruction" was all the rage at the more prestigious school, but once you've studied under a professor who understands great literature is great for a reason, it's hard to believe believe people could fall for such idiocy. Over the years, though, I've come to believe it was almost inevitable we'd end up with not just clueless faculty but clueless students: Even back then you were lucky if one in 10 professors knew what they were talking about. Over time, given the pettiness of those in thrall to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it was inevitable entire departments would evolve to become circuses of ignorance.
Wonderful post, and hits so close to him. Indeed, the aforementioned canon wars have broken my heart as our cultural literacy of the great books has begun to disappear. Yet we're nothing, if not people of hope, for continuing to carry the torch as best we can!
Indeed, the true victim of the canon wars was the genuine love of reading. It deprived many people of access to beautiful masterpieces that, in my opinion, should form an essential part of every person's education.
Can I add that “humility” is also a victim of the canon wars? It’s deeply humbling to be pulled back in time, whether the truths or the fantasies of people long gone, yet whose shoulders we stand upon. It’s the ultimate punch in the gut to the ego, but to experience it is essential to mature adulthood. “Humility without humiliation” as they say in AA.
As surely as spring follows winter, a reaction to the anti-canon activism is approaching.
While in school decades ago, I happened upon a collection of letters from Civil War soldiers. I was struck by the elegant writings of farmers and cobblers … youths who went off to fight and die for their chosen cause. Reading those letters, I wondered how such simple, uneducated people could so clearly articulate their thoughts better than my class mates … not to mention better than journalists and political leaders. I read those letters before the 80’s, and so I saw the dystopia through the lens of a larger timeline. I am not disheartened.
As a crop depends upon the soil, our universities depend on the cognitive abilities of students. Absent cognition, soaked in poisonous philosophies, denied the lessons of history, and pruned of dissident viewpoints, it is no wonder students in our universities are withering. The universities are in collapse and fear is spreading regarding the value of university degrees. They ask what is the point of student loans? This is the winter of our educational infrastructure.
But a reaction is coming. The value of reading is budding, little shoots appearing as in early spring, signs that the tree did not die. True, few buds are visible because not having burst open, they are hard to see. The spring will challenge and change our education system. I am hopeful because as proved by letters in the 1860’s written by 17 and 20 year old sons of farmers and country store clerks — young men lacking what we now call higher education — all we need is some of the next generation to have access to well written books. A few will mature and sow new seeds. Generations from now, their thoughts and ideas will continue. And replenish the soil on which our civilization depends.
I’m not very familiar with the “canon” wars as my degrees are in psychology, philosophy and law—and an undergraduate in the 1980’s and graduate student in the early ‘90s. That being said I am a voracious reader of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, science, and really anything that happens to appear. Working interferes with my passion for reading. I have been curious about why reading levels are declining for some time now but I am having trouble believing that postmodern critique (of culture) is the predominant “causal” mechanism behind reading decline. Maybe it’s a factor, but there are/were so many other changes occurring in Education and Society… for example: “back to basics” movements, de-funding public education in order to make charter schools possible, “teaching to the test” that occurred after performance criteria was introduced, and the view that education (particularly college and university level) are to prepare students for a “job”.
You are right: the canon wars are not the sole cause of the decline in reading. Technology has undeniably played a major role by reshaping attention, habits, and the conditions under which reading occurs. Nevertheless, the canon wars fundamentally altered how literary works were valued within the culture, with lasting consequences for their circulation not only among students, but also among the wider public.
Their influence extended well beyond literature departments. The canon wars fostered a broader cultural posture of cynicism toward the Western tradition, encouraging its foundational works to be approached primarily with suspicion rather than as an inheritance. While critical attention to marginalization and exclusion is often legitimate and necessary, an exclusive focus on these concerns has gradually eroded the sense that these works are worth sustained engagement at all.
This orientation filtered downward into lower-level curricula, shaping decisions about which texts were considered essential and which could be discarded. As a result, works that once formed the backbone of a shared literary education were quietly sidelined long before students reached university.
The contrast with nineteenth-century education is stark. Then, the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, along with Shakespeare and Milton, was foundational and unavoidable for anyone with even a modest education. Today, by contrast, it is increasingly common to encounter individuals with advanced degrees, even PhDs in literature, who have never read Shakespeare or John Milton. This reflects a deeper shift in how literary inheritance is understood, valued, and transmitted.
Thank you for this further elaboration. I will definitely think about this more. Postmodern philosophers (as a whole)were not only critical of Western tradition (in culture) but also found fault with science and technology (thinking of Kuhn here) in their efforts to understand and elaborate on a broader perspective of “power” dynamics (marginalization and exclusion were just examples). It was an endeavor to challenge us to question rather than take for certain many aspects of society taken for granted. So if administrators in education were influenced by these philosophers to change curriculum then it was an epic failure in understanding. Ian McGilchrist argues that Western culture suffers from an over reliance on the brain’s left hemisphere narrow detail-focused perspective neglecting the right hemisphere’s holistic, contextual understanding. This has created a world perspective that values science over art. Even when I was an undergraduate so long ago there was a push to eliminate the humanities (including philosophy) as unnecessary (nonessential) for what students needed in the “modern” world.
This is an excellent analysis of one of the saddest chapters in the academy.
I was a graduate student in the late 1980s in a humanities field, and saw 'Theory' unfolding around me like a great fire blanket suppressing the quiet but fierce joy of reading literature.
What I learned: after a brief spasm of unwarranted and childish intellectual excitement, pomo theory is boring, boring, boring. The questions and the answers are always the same. 'Flatness', indeed.
Setting the literary issues aside, what does it mean for other fields? Arguably, similar skills are needed for mathematics, business, writing business plans for example, engineering, the ability to analyze and design complex structures. The list is endless. I think I need those antidepressants, that Home Steader was referring to.
Eloquently put. I am of an age before the canon wars but observing friends of mine‘s children, I’ve seen the consequences. In fact, I suffer also, I suspect because of my electronic, auxiliary brain. Not too many years ago, pre-iPhone, I used to read at least five books a week, now I’m lucky to read five a month and many of those are of dubious utility other than requiring me to sit still and focus.
Indeed. When I began university, there were still one or two professors emeriti teaching, at least in my department, who held firmly to the canon. We used to call them “dinosaurs,” and we did so affectionately. Sadly, they’re all gone now. If you’re lucky, you might still find someone like that, but functioning in today’s academic environment is difficult under those conditions. That is, in large part, why I left.
Your point about technology is absolutely right. I don’t envy the coming generation. Their brains are being fried by the needless crack cocaine that social media has become. I’ve seen children barely able to string a sentence together before compulsively returning to endless scrolling. Those damned shorts are insanely addictive. The other day, I lost an hour watching short videos about German shepherds before I even realised what I was doing, and I’m a grown woman.
It feels to me that we are at war with technology for our sanity, and most people are unaware of the damage this will do to the younger generation, who haven’t yet developed the capacity to pause, reflect, and correct their own doomscrolling.
Also left the academy, for similar reasons. Literature has always been a source of inspiration to me, an opportunity to reflect on the mysteries of existence. I found I was constantly swimming against the current, surrounded by the hermeneutics of suspicion. I have high hopes that Substack can be a context for studying literature as a source of consciousness. My Substack is called Things I Love, and I post critical essays on the literature (and films et al) that fascinate me. Thank you for this article. Subscribed.
"I don’t envy the coming generation. Their brains are being fried by the needless crack cocaine that social media has become."
They are snorting bad lines that go directly to their brains.
I noticed my attention span slipping as far back as 2012. That book The Shallows, which talked about the effect the internet has on attention spans, was big at the time.
I get up early now and read for an hour before opening my phone. Once I get sucked into the phone, my attention starts to fragment. Reading in the morning really helps.
Yes, but don't worry about it if you can. You get your attention span back in 2-3 days if you cut off and disapper with a bag of books etc.
I call it my exo-brain. And like my gooey brain before smart phones were invented it contains a lot of highs and lows. Ulysses and Gilligan’s Island, for example. My exo-brain is similarly voracious. Scientific papers and slop. And of course, cats. Cat memes are, after all, why Al Gore invented the internet. I can engage with other people more now with my exo-brain. Wendell Berry says stay down on the farm. but I say, “FTS, Berry. I don’t tell you what to do.” (Not to worry- he can’t hear me. He’s outstanding in his field.)
Many of his readers now at the end of life are faced with what to do with large personal libraries. Our children and grandchildren don’t want them. I have thousands.
Good question. Perhaps build a mausoleum that can hold you and your books. It would be a service to archeologists at some distant future date and give you something to do in the hereafter.
Pretty funny
Us readers.
There are still youngsters that would love to have such a library!!!
I’m 30 and am homeschooling my young children. I’m daunted by the cost of all the books I wish I could buy!
The problem starts early with the readin wars in grade school. Students are not taught phonics and never develop reading fluency. Those that develop fluency are not taught cultural literacy which includes history, mythology, and religion especially the Bible and Christianity. Without this background information they never develop the reading reflex and cannot comprehend the meaning. Reform will start in the grade schools and high schools in the burgeoning classical schools. Only then will the colleges be able to be reformed.
Agreed. One dimension I haven’t addressed in this post, but plan to take up in a future one, is the way academic infantilisation trickles downward. The decline in rigour, the consequences of the canon wars, and the broader intellectual flattening at the university level do not remain confined there. Universities shape how education is understood more broadly: they influence which books are taught, which authors are deemed acceptable, and what counts as legitimate knowledge well before students ever reach higher education. Not least, they train future teachers who then move into upper elementary and secondary education. In the end, this creates a vicious feedback loop between universities and lower levels of education, each reinforcing and accelerating the decline of the other.
In that sense, the problem is not isolated to universities at all. It begins much earlier, at the primary and secondary levels, and is, in many respects, a downstream consequence of developments within higher education itself.
"Agreed. One dimension I haven’t addressed in this post, but plan to take up in a future one, is the way academic infantilisation trickles downward. The decline in rigour, the consequences of the canon wars, and the broader intellectual flattening at the university level do not remain confined there. Universities shape how education is understood more broadly: they influence which books are taught, which authors are deemed acceptable, and what counts as legitimate knowledge well before students ever reach higher education." The whole problem, here, is an increasing failure and politicization of k12 imo. Eventually you produce an entire class of indoctrinated dimwits who can't reason objectively. I hope there is a movement away to defunding public education to a degree that reflects taxpaying parents' desire to want their dollars to go to the kind of schooling you seem to advocate. This is the biggest threat to the frauds who require your money to keep their jobs and careers because they can't cope in truly meritocratic environments.
Thank you. An ironic reminder, as the current wider situation required one to take on academic infantialism et. al. on their own terms. Eg:
“…Uranus was the first Olympian to catch wind of this situation - no surprise there to the Greek mythologists. He immediately installed a dome that trapped the poodium particles which would normally rise up to the clouds. During the entire shamateurism era the poodium particles hit the underside of Uranus’s dome. There they crystallized and grew bigger, until they fell back down on the Olympus timeline, unable to bear the accumulated weight of the VIPs’ hypocrisies.”https://quantifiablesyncdata.substack.com/p/wally-occams-trip-to-olympus
Yes 👏 And when higher education moved to e thought of as “career preparation” rather than learning to be an intelligent and productive member of society … that lit the embers of the seismic shift in academia. I look forward to your next essay.
"In the end, this creates a vicious feedback loop between universities and lower levels of education, each reinforcing and accelerating the decline of the other.
In that sense, the problem is not isolated to universities at all. It begins much earlier, at the primary and secondary levels, and is, in many respects, a downstream consequence of developments within higher education itself."
Word.
This is a very simplistic comment that I am about to make, but I see this a lot in my daughter's elementary school - at the very basic level of spelling. I believe this really relates to literacy and while my daughter loves to read and eschews digital formats in favor of analog books, her spelling (and that of her classmates) is seriously behind what I was doing at the fifth grade level (Gen X, growing up in Australia) a million years ago. I'm trying to rectify this at home but am really astounded by the lack of focus on teaching these basics.
I should add that all her teachers have been wonderful but a lot is directed by local and state educations departments/committees and focused on meeting numeric goals and levels rather than content and learning.
That’s a very insightful comment. You’ve put your finger on a key issue in how we think about education for children. It needs much more attention than it’s getting, especially in light of AI and how effective these tools really are as teachers. I’m actually working on an article on this, because the issue feels especially important right now.
One thing I did mean to touch on which is more relevant to your article. About three years ago (?) the NYT published an article about how university students were showing up to classes completely unprepared academically but also emotionally for what was expected of them. I forwarded this article to a friend of ours who is a professor of history (and the same age as us) and he said that while the article was on point, the timeline was off. He said that this lack of competency as well as a tendency to always be looking to find excuses or get professors to award extensions had been going on since 2015. Your article went even farther back than that which is enlightening.
Get "The writing road to reading" which gives an an essential script for learning the phonogram rules (reading) and spelling rules (writing).
Yes, and this is by targeted design. The privatizers interested in dismantling public education have been very successful here in the States.
You are correct about reading fluency, without which comprehension of the longer theme, narrative or argument is not possible. Fluency is neither a goal nor a considered outcome in reading instruction - as though being able to call out words on a page were the essence of the act. With fluency, which can only be developed by sustained, daily reading, degraded as ancillary to reading, elementary students lack even an awareness of their deficit with the result that they are prey to any and all screen enticements.
“Less than Words Can Say” has some years on it, but Prof. Mitchell did a superb job of foreseeing this problem back in the Seventies. Freshmen arrived unable to read and the faculty balked at teaching them how, saying that should have been done K - 12. They were graduated without literary skills and weren’t competent to teach, in turn, their pupils.
Are you referring to private schools, or reinstating the quality of public education, or both? In my area, classical schools are exclusionary sites of segregated privilege. I would think reform has to happen simultaneously in public and private education.
You are assuming that a sufficient number of people have these skills and that those people can teach the skills. Not sure about that at all.
Very insightful!
“You cannot go on seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. . . . If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see.”
C.S. Lewis saw this coming in the 1950's: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/The_Abolition_of_Man-C_S_Lewis.pdf
Your thoughtful essay effectively condensed much history in a clear manner, and resonated with my experience of the periods in question.
My high school students struggle to read and some won’t. At the same time part of the problem is that classrooms have grown oppressively quiet so it’s difficult to judge what students are thinking. Speaking thoughtfully has become “cringe” unless points are awarded and then it’s like carp to feed pellets in the Japanese garden. No love of learning; just love of points.
I agree that there is a small space for hope. Over the years, I have participated in several book groups filled with readers ages twenty to seventy that were anxious to discuss the text rather than search for ideological affirmation.
I think “second tier” universities may also teach the text rather than the theory. I think one of the attractions of theory is that it makes you look smart and it gives the opportunity to attack a text and show how righteous you are which rewards the pleasing feeling of being right. In other words theory is about ego. Working class students don’t have time or interest for the abstract show-boating—at least that’s been my experience. Additionally most theory is so cryptically written, it’s easily discarded for an engaging tale.
Finally, within religious traditions there is a respect for text, and—again in my experience—much time is invested in close careful reading for edification. This doesn’t mean that every religious person reads or that there don’t exist plenty of other obstacles to reading diverse literature. But in my experience, with the people I grew up with, there was a love of reading, thinking and growing.
All of the above provide small glimmers of hope for me, but I think they will remain, unfortunately, only pinpricks of light in a vast and dark sky.
Yes. The irony is that Foucault, Derrida and Barthes were extremely read in classical literature, modern and classic (in the original).
Your article rightly points out in my view the fact that tech was preceded by "deconstruction". That said, smartphones, social media and now AI are a formidable accelerating factor.
It will be very hard to regain concentration and the ability to focus.
And there is more: this cognitive zapping is increasingly prevalent in the mew generations. Which means that the generation after that will not inherit anything bdcause their parents simply do not know how to focus on a text.
I agree that it looks like one reader at a time. But I still believe an institutional turnaround of magnitude would be the fastest way there.
And also beyond literature, what about reading complex monographs etc? Probably not looking brill either...
A beautiful and very sad essay. I studied Eng. Lit. in the 1980s, first in the UK, then in the US, where “theory” was already taking hold. I had intended to go into academia myself, but after having to read a whole book by Bourdieu for a course about Shakespeare began to have second thoughts. What really clinched it was a seminar about a poem by Yeats which began with the immortal words: “Well we won’t waste time reading the poem…”
> having to read a whole book by Bourdieu for a course about Shakespeare
Classic!
In my high school, mid-nineties, there were alternate forms of teaching that were available featuring independent learning. You could basically create your own curriculum your grade was determined whether your advisor thought you taught yourself sufficiently.
In college freshman English, late nineties, my entire first semester was dedicated to learning none other than the book you mentioned: Orientalism. My second semester English centered on pop culture analysis.
So it's pretty clear in hindsight was always an attack on canonicity. I appreciate your analysis and help explaining the questionable choices of my previous educators.
I'll add that Stoner, by John Williams, is a great fictional story that includes a fight over canon in academia. While it was published in 1965, before the "canon wars", and it was set before the postmodern movement, it was definitely a warning about the decline of academic rigour.
Yes!! stoner, that takes me back. :)
Your post is both sad and indisputable in equal measure.
I wish to thank above all for your optimistic ending; that we might somehow find a way to climb out of this ditch of mediocrity we have somehow placed ourselves in.
Just before reading your insightful essay, I happened to read this line from Robert Bly’s 1996 book, “The Sibling Society.” From the chapter called ‘Teaching Our Children That Nothing Works’:
“We can say that Deconstruction is a form of technology, like gunpowder and the tank. It is used against our own students.”
An excellent account of How We Got Here. I graduated with a BA in English in 1978, after having attended two very different private liberal arts colleges. "Deconstruction" was all the rage at the more prestigious school, but once you've studied under a professor who understands great literature is great for a reason, it's hard to believe believe people could fall for such idiocy. Over the years, though, I've come to believe it was almost inevitable we'd end up with not just clueless faculty but clueless students: Even back then you were lucky if one in 10 professors knew what they were talking about. Over time, given the pettiness of those in thrall to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it was inevitable entire departments would evolve to become circuses of ignorance.
Wonderful post, and hits so close to him. Indeed, the aforementioned canon wars have broken my heart as our cultural literacy of the great books has begun to disappear. Yet we're nothing, if not people of hope, for continuing to carry the torch as best we can!
Indeed, the true victim of the canon wars was the genuine love of reading. It deprived many people of access to beautiful masterpieces that, in my opinion, should form an essential part of every person's education.
Can I add that “humility” is also a victim of the canon wars? It’s deeply humbling to be pulled back in time, whether the truths or the fantasies of people long gone, yet whose shoulders we stand upon. It’s the ultimate punch in the gut to the ego, but to experience it is essential to mature adulthood. “Humility without humiliation” as they say in AA.
As surely as spring follows winter, a reaction to the anti-canon activism is approaching.
While in school decades ago, I happened upon a collection of letters from Civil War soldiers. I was struck by the elegant writings of farmers and cobblers … youths who went off to fight and die for their chosen cause. Reading those letters, I wondered how such simple, uneducated people could so clearly articulate their thoughts better than my class mates … not to mention better than journalists and political leaders. I read those letters before the 80’s, and so I saw the dystopia through the lens of a larger timeline. I am not disheartened.
As a crop depends upon the soil, our universities depend on the cognitive abilities of students. Absent cognition, soaked in poisonous philosophies, denied the lessons of history, and pruned of dissident viewpoints, it is no wonder students in our universities are withering. The universities are in collapse and fear is spreading regarding the value of university degrees. They ask what is the point of student loans? This is the winter of our educational infrastructure.
But a reaction is coming. The value of reading is budding, little shoots appearing as in early spring, signs that the tree did not die. True, few buds are visible because not having burst open, they are hard to see. The spring will challenge and change our education system. I am hopeful because as proved by letters in the 1860’s written by 17 and 20 year old sons of farmers and country store clerks — young men lacking what we now call higher education — all we need is some of the next generation to have access to well written books. A few will mature and sow new seeds. Generations from now, their thoughts and ideas will continue. And replenish the soil on which our civilization depends.
Amen to that 🙏
I’m not very familiar with the “canon” wars as my degrees are in psychology, philosophy and law—and an undergraduate in the 1980’s and graduate student in the early ‘90s. That being said I am a voracious reader of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, science, and really anything that happens to appear. Working interferes with my passion for reading. I have been curious about why reading levels are declining for some time now but I am having trouble believing that postmodern critique (of culture) is the predominant “causal” mechanism behind reading decline. Maybe it’s a factor, but there are/were so many other changes occurring in Education and Society… for example: “back to basics” movements, de-funding public education in order to make charter schools possible, “teaching to the test” that occurred after performance criteria was introduced, and the view that education (particularly college and university level) are to prepare students for a “job”.
You are right: the canon wars are not the sole cause of the decline in reading. Technology has undeniably played a major role by reshaping attention, habits, and the conditions under which reading occurs. Nevertheless, the canon wars fundamentally altered how literary works were valued within the culture, with lasting consequences for their circulation not only among students, but also among the wider public.
Their influence extended well beyond literature departments. The canon wars fostered a broader cultural posture of cynicism toward the Western tradition, encouraging its foundational works to be approached primarily with suspicion rather than as an inheritance. While critical attention to marginalization and exclusion is often legitimate and necessary, an exclusive focus on these concerns has gradually eroded the sense that these works are worth sustained engagement at all.
This orientation filtered downward into lower-level curricula, shaping decisions about which texts were considered essential and which could be discarded. As a result, works that once formed the backbone of a shared literary education were quietly sidelined long before students reached university.
The contrast with nineteenth-century education is stark. Then, the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, along with Shakespeare and Milton, was foundational and unavoidable for anyone with even a modest education. Today, by contrast, it is increasingly common to encounter individuals with advanced degrees, even PhDs in literature, who have never read Shakespeare or John Milton. This reflects a deeper shift in how literary inheritance is understood, valued, and transmitted.
Thank you for this further elaboration. I will definitely think about this more. Postmodern philosophers (as a whole)were not only critical of Western tradition (in culture) but also found fault with science and technology (thinking of Kuhn here) in their efforts to understand and elaborate on a broader perspective of “power” dynamics (marginalization and exclusion were just examples). It was an endeavor to challenge us to question rather than take for certain many aspects of society taken for granted. So if administrators in education were influenced by these philosophers to change curriculum then it was an epic failure in understanding. Ian McGilchrist argues that Western culture suffers from an over reliance on the brain’s left hemisphere narrow detail-focused perspective neglecting the right hemisphere’s holistic, contextual understanding. This has created a world perspective that values science over art. Even when I was an undergraduate so long ago there was a push to eliminate the humanities (including philosophy) as unnecessary (nonessential) for what students needed in the “modern” world.
This is an excellent analysis of one of the saddest chapters in the academy.
I was a graduate student in the late 1980s in a humanities field, and saw 'Theory' unfolding around me like a great fire blanket suppressing the quiet but fierce joy of reading literature.
What I learned: after a brief spasm of unwarranted and childish intellectual excitement, pomo theory is boring, boring, boring. The questions and the answers are always the same. 'Flatness', indeed.
Setting the literary issues aside, what does it mean for other fields? Arguably, similar skills are needed for mathematics, business, writing business plans for example, engineering, the ability to analyze and design complex structures. The list is endless. I think I need those antidepressants, that Home Steader was referring to.
This is not a student failure.
It’s a lagging indicator.
The practices that made deep reading possible were dismantled decades ago. We’re only now seeing the downstream effects at scale.