By: Cedar

Cedar
Sat, 16 Aug 2025 11:35:14 +0000

When I first came back from overseas, I picked up some temporary tutoring in English Literature at a northern university. After the first assignment, I was surrounded by a cohort of weeping students, beseeching me to alter their grades. I refused, but said I’d go through their essays with them, and show them why they got the grades they did, and how to improve. They wanted to come as a group, not individuals.

In the course of the conversation, two students admitted they had never read a whole book. They’d passed exams by memorising teacher hand outs. They had no curiosity about literature, no sense that we have a rich tradition worth knowing, preserving and handing on. When I asked why, then, they were doing a literature degree, they replied that they thought it would be easy.

When I read for my degrees, I was expected to be familiar with enough Old English to read some poems and Alfred’s letters; enough Old Icelandic to read a short saga; Middle English: Early Modern, i.e. Shakespeare and his peers: the Restoration; the Neo- Classical; the Victorians and the Modernists. We have 1500 years of writing in English: now, it seems that if my experience is general, English youth read nothing but brief contemporary snippets.