Since over 60% of high school grads go on to enroll in college, we know for a certainty that the vast majority of them are below level 4 in literacy. College kids are functionally illiterate. QED.
But what about those level 5 literate types, the ones who comprise around 1% of adults? What can they do?
This is the subject of a recently released study making waves in the education world. Researchers decided to sit with current college English majors and see how much they understood of what they read. They chose a very challenging text for the modern student, Bleak House by Dickens. Specifically, the first seven paragraphs. Here’s the first one.
LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
The methodology is that an interviewer sits with each student one on one and listens to them read the passages from the book aloud. As the students read, they must translate what they read into modern English, explaining what each passage means. They have a dictionary, reference material, and their phones on hand to assist in looking up any unfamiliar terms, such as “Lord Chancellor”.
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To summarize even further for those skimming:
- 58% of students understood very little of the passages they read
- 38% could understand about half of the sentences
- 5% could understand all seven paragraphs
These are college students majoring in English. About half of them are English Education majors, which means they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating. But they themselves cannot understand the literal meaning of the sentences in the opening paragraphs.
