Can’t say the author’s fixation on reading long texts resonates with me. I’m sure Newton’s Principia is interesting and all but… no I’m not going to read that.
Conciseness is a valuable thing. It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive.
On some level long form content just seems… poorly written. It’s long for the sake of being long.
There are things to be concerned about with students today. They are generally shockingly bad at literacy and numeracy. But I don’t buy that a lack of long form books are the culprit.
Reading books is good for your brain. Even just fiction [0].
But I do think people often approach this issue wrong. Especially, as demonstrated by the OP article:
> “Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet,” Horowitch wrote.
It's a wrong question to ask why people can't focus on a sonnet.
The real question is: why do the students who are not interested in literature choose to major English? What societal and economical incentives drove them to do that?
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4733342/
I would say that fiction is incredibly more important than reading non-fiction, in general, for human development.
Reading sets up, programs and tunes the holodeck in your brain. The better the holodeck is programmed, the better and more accurate the simulation is.
“I don’t buy that a lack of long form books are the culprit”
I agree that they might not, in themselves, be a necessary requirement, however: the ability to engage with material, short or long, at a level of deep focus and intentionality is important. And one of the (extremely common, historically) stronger methods of doing this is with long form content, the less passive and more challenging the better.
It touches on the topic of generally transferable— or diffuse, neurologically speaking— skills. It’s what is frustrating when speaking with folks who insist on ideas like “I shouldn’t have to take all these non-STEM courses”. A truly myopic world view that lacks fundamental understanding of human cognition, especially for the subgroup with this sentiment that will readily affirm the inverse: Non-STEM folks should nonetheless have a strong grounding in maths and sciences for the modes of thinking they impart.
Why the difference? It’s a strange, highly mechanistic and modular view of how critical thinking faculties function. As though, even with plenty of exclusivity, there isn’t still enormous overlapping structures that light up in the brain with all tasks that require concentration. The salience network in particular is critical when reading challenging material as well as during stem-related thinking, eg Math. Which, ironically, means the challenging courses involving analytical literature are precisely the courses that, taken seriously, would lay down neural pathways in a persons salience network that would be extremely useful in thinking about challenging math problems with more tools at your disposal, more angles of attack.
It really shouldn’t require much of an intuitive leap to realize that reading and interpreting complex works of literary creativity or other areas of a GenHumanities topics will help impart the ability to think in creative ways. It’s in the task name. Spending 3x16 hours in a class for a semester, roughly the same for work outside the class, 6 or 7 times throughout a 4 year college stretch is a very small cost for value.
I think the foundational failing of education for the past decades falls into all of these gaps in understanding and the inability to engage with the learning process because too few people can even articulate the relevance of highly relevant material.
I don’t really agree about the premise here. We want people to surpass some basic level of competency in literacy and numeracy skills. The bars which people fall below here are not impressive. Are forced courses a good means to achieve that? In my opinion, no, these forced courses are functionally useless.
You can’t teach things students don’t care to learn.
Any course is functionally useless if you don’t do the work, and my comment was not about people having to take forced courses. It was about people being naive, and willfully so, about the practical value of these courses and then making factually incorrect statements about them being useless for the area of study where they want to make a career. It is identical, only with different subject areas, to a computer science student saying that analytical algebra is useless and has no value. I think most readers in these spaces would see that and say “huh? maybe you’re never going to be working on a CAS system or some other application of it but do you really not comprehend the basic idea, you’re not understanding that there’s direct practical utility in your future career in training yourself to be capable of thinking in those ways?”
It is a failure of factual understanding in how cognitive function and critical thinking arises from the brain. If a person isn’t going to do the work then by all means don’t waste their time, but don’t indulge their factually incorrect stance that it has no utility simply because they also don’t have the basic knowledge to know what that utility is.
But I think you’re blurring the lines between “this is theoretically useful” and “this is a fundamental thing that we should invest in everyone having”
> Can’t say the author’s fixation on reading long texts resonates with me
It’s an attention and working memory test.
I don’t think I’ve ever prided myself on focus. But signing off social media ten years ago has absolutely left me in a competitive place when it comes to deep thinking, and that’s not because I’ve gotten better at it.
> It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive
This is entirely ahistoric. Pamphlets and books published in volumes, where each volume would today be a chapter, was the norm. The novel is a modern invention.
> This is entirely ahistoric. Pamphlets and books published in volumes, where each volume would today be a chapter, was the norm. The novel is a modern invention.
I’d be curious to see some examples but I doubt these are anywhere near the size of a one or two page blog post.
The referenced example is principia mathematica
> I’d be curious to see some examples
Victorian-era serialised fiction [1]. The Federalist Papers. Everything on clay tablets. Technologically speaking, you don't get a lot of large volumes until the advent of the printing press and mass literacy [2].
> referenced example is principia mathematica
Published in the 20th century.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_books#The_printing_...
I agree with your main point, though with an asterisk.
I don't think concise is necessarily better than long, nor do I think long is better than concise. The thing is, humanity tends to go in cycles. Poems for Babylonians, long epics for the Greeks, back to poems for Shakespeare and Goethe, then the Russians brought back epics. Kind of a mix during the 20th century, but poetry seemed to slowly fade, and novels trended generally shorter. (All of this is very 30K foot-view; of course there were many exceptions in every era).
Philip Roth predicted the end of the era of the novel at some point, long (relatively) before AI [1]. He said that, similar to poetry in the early 20th century, humanity has evolved past the meaningfulness of the long-form novel.
This doesn't mean "the humanities is dead." It just means that we're entering another cycle where a different from of humanities needs to take over from what we've had in the past.
Anyone arguing that the death of the long-form novel is equivalent to the death of humanities is missing the fact that "humanities" is not a precisely-defined set of topics written in stone. Though it can seem like this is the case at any one point in time, humanities can, and must, exist in many forms that will invariably change as humanity's needs do likewise. That's why its prefix is "human".
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/books/philip-roth-apprasi...
> It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive.
I don’t think this is true, people have been printing newspapers, pamphlets, and leaflets for hundreds of years.
It isn’t only long form content that the printing press was good for, It’s just that the long term content tends to be remembered longer. Probably because it isn’t just long for the sake of being long :p