Why Do Students Regard Reading as Torture?

The first and most popular complaint that I received when teaching undergraduate students was that of "too much reading."

One might dismiss such complaints by attributing them to laziness. Maybe students have developed the expectation that they can coast through university, do minimal to no academic work, while still receiving high grades.

In other words, maybe they have adopted the "something for nothing" mindset. Possibly, they have become too comfortable with the convenience of PowerPoint slides that free them from having to read books.

Maybe the students have no time for readings, because their schedules have been filled already with socializing, sports games, beer-pong tournaments, and video games.

It is easy for a teacher to blame the students. They are young, sometimes immature, and subjected to plenty of peer pressure.

If I were a university administrator, my automatic response would be to blame the teacher. It must be something the teacher did wrong.

Maybe the teacher has not "engaged" the students enough. Maybe the teacher has used the incorrect "learning style." Maybe Johnny is a visual learner rather than an audio learner.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer two questions that I often posed to myself. Why did I feel as if I were teaching junior-high-school students in university, and why did nobody in authority seem to care?

To try to answer these questions, I did two things. I recorded some of the complaints that I received and some of my observations. I then created a model as an attempt to explain my historical observations and experiences.

My thesis is that university students, generally speaking, are academically unprepared for a rigorous education because they are victims of the whole-word method of reading instruction.

The whole-word method created a crisis of vocabulary. The vocabulary crisis made books inaccessible to students, which then necessitated a drop in content-knowledge levels.

This lack of content knowledge made it futile for teachers to expect students to think critically and independently. The system then created a number of ways to cover up this problem.

"A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made."

I began this paper by mentioning one of my favorite complaints, namely, "too much reading." This complaint applied not only to books but also to test scripts. To expect students to come to class with the assigned readings done ahead of time was to expect a miracle.

Moreover, I noticed that I could use vocabulary as a shortcut for spotting plagiarism. If a word looked somewhat complicated, then it probably was not the student's word. A simple Google search of a phrase was sufficient to demonstrate this.

I was accused of being "condescending" for using "big" words. How to explain Keynesian economics without mentioning "desired aggregate expenditure" or "the multiplier effect" in order to use a "noncondescending" vocabulary was a mystery to me.

Another popular complaint was the insolent demand "Just tell me the answer." This complaint usually arose if I did not tell students directly the answer but rather posed questions to them.

Assigning written case studies to students>>>>>>>>>continue reading: http://mises.org/daily/5472/Why-Do-Students-Regard-Reading-as-Torture