Perhaps college professors need to take a cue from second grade and start hanging colorful banners proclaiming ""Reading is Fun!"" around their classrooms. A recent study shows college students are embarrassingly lacking reading skills: MSNBC reports that ""more than 50 percent of students at four-year schools ... lacked the skills to perform complex literary tasks.""
In other words, over half of college students cannot follow the argument of a newspaper editorial.
Needless to say, this is very scary. Not only does our generation have the reputation of being apathetic and ignorant, but it also appears that we cannot read. The best remedy for ignorance and apathy is reading itself: As simple and over-stated as it may be, it is a truth that is little taken to heart.
Obviously, an increase in reading will help the students who are unable to read at a ""complex"" level. However, even students who are competent readers can benefit from reading outside class assignments. This statistic highlights a bigger issue: College students do not read enough.
Though university students are at the very epicenter of knowledge and ideas, they often have a very narrow mind set. Here at UW-Madison, for instance, students are generally surrounded by peers of a similar socioeconomic background, and due to the very nature of college, are narrowly focused on their chosen field of study.
However, instead of using their free time to read about people, places and subjects they have little knowledge of, the majority of students spend it partying and ""facebooking.""
Students must be active in their education, learning all they can about the world outside their campus, or they will leave knowing nearly as little as they did when they entered, excepting the area of their major. Reading is the easiest and most thorough way to be an active learner.
According to UW-Madison English professor Henry Turner, ""One tends to remember and incorporate more fully ideas that one has found on one's own: there's an organic relation between the person and the idea when you go out and find it yourself, when you go looking for an answer to your own question.""
While non-fiction can obviously supplement learning, it is fiction which is the most powerful teacher. Not only does it improve vocabulary and general knowledge, but it creates empathy, imagination and thoughtfulness. One understands the experience of someone completely foreign, or even what it was like to live centuries ago. These are things that no college education can supply.
Most importantly, reading gives a person an ease and self-possession within their own mind, thoughts and internal world. Reading takes place completely within the mind, and readers must rely on the imagination to fill in many blanks.
They are also asked to interact with the text by coming to their own conclusions, struggling with the questions that authors bring to the surface. This strengthens one's self-reliance and confidence in their reason and mental world.
Now, some excellent, personal book recommendations for the college student looking to expand the mind (really, they're better than drugs): simultaneously experience true love and the mind of a tortured pedophile in Vladamir Nabokov's ""Lolita,"" go on a mind-bending journey in which readers must think for themselves in John Fowles' intriguing ""The Magus,"" laugh at the absurdity of human nature in John Kennedy Toole's hilarious and whimsical ""A Confederacy of Dunces."" Really. You will not regret it.
And if your scaling of the literary mountain culminates in the Harry Potter series? Don't be ashamed.
Any true Harry ""Pothead"" will have felt more emotion at the end of the sixth book than some people feel in a year. And that is more than any college education can give.
