[firasd]

When it comes to undergrads I doubt people (let's say from the 1980s onwards) were ever doing all the reading assigned in the syllabus anyway. Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof

[oersted]

I found The Republic really quite entertaining! And it is surprisingly readable for such an old text.

It is written like a play where characters with real personalities have fierce and witty debates. It is rather fun!

[DrewADesign]

I don’t think they were arguing it was a bad or boring book — I think they were arguing that most students don’t have time/energy to do all that reading for all 5 or whatever classes they are taking every semester. I certainly didn’t.

[hombre_fatal]

I came to love all the books I read in uni philosophy and literature class, but I am incapable of enjoying them on my own without being shepherded through the context and meaning that make them interesting, sadly. Or rather it’s work I just can’t bring myself to do at my own leisure.

It’s amazing what a good professor can get you to do and love.

[JMKH42]

I also read that one. Though certainly I also skipped some texts in college.

[alexjplant]

I didn't read a good chunk of what we were assigned in high school because I was stuck there for almost 8 hours every day and had jobs and extracurriculars afterwards. In college I only had to go to five classes a few times a week so even with a part-time job I had more free time.

I also quickly discovered that English papers are surprisingly easy to write if I actually read the material and write random thoughts down along the way. I'd spend an evening making each bullet point a paragraph of analytical fluff buttressed by a few quotes (typically with the aid of a searchable PDF copy), edit the next day for flow and structure, divine some sort of rhetorical through-line to the whole thing, then turn it in. This seemed like less of a headache than trying to fabricate something passable out of secondhand internet summaries or Cliff's Notes.

[gregdaniels421]

> Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof

I think this comment says more about you than actual students who care. I did all the readings, even the extra ones. So did all the people in my study group for the class. Maybe select for more studious friends.

[popalchemist]

It's not an isolated incident, he is describing an increasingly common attitude which is utilitarian/"realist" at best and a grotesque materialist corruption of the liberal arts education ideal at worst. Education is generally no longer seen as an end in and of itself, but as a means to more money; insofar as one accepts that view, learning the material is aside the point; getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

[majormajor]

> getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

If there's a revolution in work due to AI the first jobs to fall are going to be the ones that don't require any originality or critical thinking. Any number of paper-pushing middleman jobs.

These have already been tightly squeezed by automation - see the rise of the bachelors-having-barista trope who can't find a job despite their degree.

Question is, how long would it take for the idea that if you don't train yourself to put some creative effort in, the machine is gonna replace you to propagate through the world enough to change how high-schoolers and college students behave? Whether that means pushing them into tangible hands-on fields, or into more original-creation as the robots replace manual labor too...

Or if we get some sort of UBI first instead? Or Skynet?

[jruohonen]

> getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

But then there still is a lever, I suppose, including for reading.

[runarberg]

I‘m not super versed in sociology of education but I was always under the impression that over assigning was a real problem in undergraduate and collage setting (even in high school to an extent I heard last).

My post-modern mind went straight to thinking this was the system working as desired. We over-assign to weed out students of from lower classes such that they are more stressed and less likely to graduate, therefor maintaining a status quo of higher classes being more educated and more deserving of the fruits of the labor of the less educated working classes.

[sublinear]

Lower socioeconomic status students are getting most of their stress from elsewhere. Compromising the syllabus doesn't work. All these debates have been tried before.

[runarberg]

Classism has a way to go for the overkill. I don‘t think the post-modern interpretation is 100% correct... I think this is more complex and nuanced, but your rebuttal is not very good.

Higher classes have both the time and the space to read everything on the list. They also have the training to know where to pay attention, and what they can skim through. If you over-assign you do weed out more students, and the students you do weed out are biased against the working classes.

When I took my BSc in psychology at the University of Iceland in 2011, some of my teachers admitted to this practice (but not the purpose). They told us that the reading list was too long for any one person and that we just had to go through the abstracts and find out which papers to read carefully and which to skim over.

[sublinear]

Yes, but why does someone need to be of a different socioeconomic class to have prioritization skills? I'm just saying they have the extra burden of consequences for prioritizing school.

I think it's a realistic skill to need in the real world regardless. What's stopping someone wealthy from developing a toxic relationship or addiction? You can say that's trashy, and I'd agree, but that only proves my point that "class" is not that significant.

[maxweylandt]

I did, but I was probably not the modal student in the (required) intro to political philosophy course. Fair enough.

[BrenBarn]

Maybe not "all" in the sense of every word, but I think a good number were at least taking a stab at each assignment, and even more were taking a stab at most of the assignments. It's hard to know for sure without some kind of hard data but my impression is there's been a shift from a situation where by default people "basically" did do the reading to now where by default they basically do not.