I am going to go out on a limb and say it was never typical for students to read "Great Expectations," "Bleak House," and "David Copperfield" in a single week.
Yeah and I'm going to call BS that 40 years ago students (who presumably were taking 3-4 additional classes) could tackle 3 Dickens' novels in a week. I took a Tolstoy/Dostoevsky class in college (23 yrs ago) and we had all semester to read 4 books. Still daunting & I confess to some cliffnoting!
But to your larger point, no doubt in all eras of transition, the curmudgeons come out & they are usually wrong. So it is super likely I am just a middle-aged dinosaur, but looking at teenage depression rates and Gen Z Trumpy rates, I do wonder if the books for Tik Tok trade really is a loss.
You know, there is something to be said for the loss of reading by students...but as a English major 20 years ago, this is bullshit. Assigning Great Expectations to read in one week would even seem too much.
Not only do I not believe this, I also don’t see the point in speed-reading great novels—-you process less, reflect less, remember less. What is the big rush?
Granted that having to read those three novels in a week is excessive, I still think it's a shame that/if students are no longer assigned complete novels. I haven't really looked into it, but I'm guessing it's not a widespread practice in college lit courses.
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That said, accusations of people just posting pics of books and not reading them happen frequently.
(we are old)
Dems: "Hunched over their backs like pale monks, they can neither declaim with proper force nor hold the attention of the crowd."
GOP: "Man's worth was measured by the strength of his voice and the quickness of his wit in debate."
Honors freshman English teacher 5 years ago at our local high school was notorious for ruthlessly assigning hundreds of pages of reading.
Newer teacher now talks about “multimodal” learning, so now less pure reading & more podcasts, etc.
Other than MAYBE a university on Great Books program, no undergraduates in 1985 were reading three Dickens novels in a damn week.