Professors who are willing to stick their necks out often comment on the weak reading (and also aversion to reading) among their students. That explains why, as NAS recently found, the “beach books” for incoming freshmen are usually written at about a 7th grade level and why textbooks now are filled much more with photos, little boxes, bullet points, etc. and less with informative paragraphs.

This Federalist Paper piece by Jason Stevens helps to us understand why, namely that the level of reading expected of students in earlier grades has fallen. The evidence is a comparison of middle school readings of 1908 in Minnesota schools and those of today.

My suspicion is that many of today’s middle school teachers themselves would have difficulty with the books required in 1908. The recent literacy testing of prospective teachers in New York showed that many of them don’t have good reading skills and ed school programs don’t do much to build literacy. (See my Forbes piece on that.)

From kindergarten through grad school, education keeps costing us more, but delivering less value.