Students Struggle to Read Long Books, Oxford Professor Claims

Sir Jonathan Bate, a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, has said that many young people applying to higher education have not read extensively.

Bate, who is also a foundation professor of environmental humanities at Arizona State University, said that this drop in ability can be pinpointed down to one key factor - diversity drives at higher education establishments.

He conceded that shorter attention spans are also to blame, though the problem lies within recruitment drives.

Speaking to the BBC, he said: "The currently fashionable answer is that it’s to do with the attrition of attention span due to smartphones, six-minute YouTube videos, and instant TikTok dopamine hits."

"It all begins in schools. You only have to look at the thinning of the GCSE and A-level syllabuses and the tendency to prescribe works because they’re shorter. I think of it as the John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men effect — they would never prescribe the Grapes of Wrath anymore but Of Mice and Men is nice and short."

He said that a key difference between students in state schools and private schools is the length of literary material they are exposed to.

Bate added that it was "an unintended consequence of the push in both the elite British and American universities towards diversity and access … because of course, those students come from disadvantaged schools where the teachers’ main task is crowd control, and so the demands in terms of reading long books are just not there."

Elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge have been trying to recruit more state school students, with successful applicants more than doubling in the last six years.

Meanwhile, admissions from private schools have dropped.

Bate said that he had witnessed this attainment gap firsthand whilst teaching at Oxford.

"They were able students, but they simply hadn’t been exposed to large numbers of long books," he said. "They hadn’t developed that habit of concentrated, lengthy reading which private schools in both the UK and the US concentrate on."

He said that in previous years, students could get through three novels in a week, though now many will barely be able to read one every three weeks.

Bate said that this is worrying for the future if the reading levels continue to dip.

"If you haven’t got readers, what are writers going to do? The intensive, thoughtful, quiet reading of great books is good for mental health. It’s very, very good for developing skills of concentration and critical thinking, and if that falls away, that is problematic for businesses, for society, for individuals."

By Holly Bishop