In 1940, the translator and educator AJ Jenkins organized an investigation Reading habits for working class children. The study, mainly of students who would leave school to enter the labor market at 14, examined what they had read outside the school program the previous month. Jenkins feared that boys, in particular, read too little, then only detective novels or adventure stories. However, from the point of view of the 21st century, what stands out is the depth of reading their classic works.
Among the books that the children had read the previous month, there was THE Progress of the Pilgrim,, Gulliver trips,, Jane Eyre,, Pickwick papers And The Silk Mill. The boys had succeeded four to six pounds, the girls one or two more than that.
This is a list, and an appetite for reading, which could challenge a lot today. The surveys suggest that both children And adults Read less than before and find less fun doing it. Even academic students seem to fight. Oxford teacher Jonathan Bate said last year that once students can read three books a week, today they work to finish one in three weeks. Others suggested that students find it Difficult to read whole books – A perception that is also echoing on the other side of the Atlantic.
Transforming universities into companies has pushed a lot on the verge of bankruptcy
These statements are often disputed, and there is sometimes a breath of moral panic. Nevertheless, the contrast to reading habits a century ago – especially among workers – is again striking.
“I sat there on my toolbox, half a million surface,” wrote the minor of Nottinghamshire Gaw Tomlinson in his autobiography Coal minor“To a nearest church mile, and apparently hundreds of kilometers from God, reading Canterbury talesLamb TestingDarwin Origin of speciesWilde The ballad of the reading scabies, Or everything I could succeed.
Once it was so absorbed by the poem of Oliver Goldsmith The deserted village that it allowed the bins full of coal to crash into the gaps.
Tomlinson was not alone in his obsession with learning. In his classic The intellectual life of the British workers' classesJonathan Rose finds the hidden stories of Lanarkshire workers in the south of Wales, and their battles to get involved, to create their own libraries and colleges and to enter a cultural world refused to them by class and schooling fractures.
The pleasure of transformed knowledge, in the words of Cynon Valley Miner Robert MorganWho later became a poet and engraver, “necklaces making subordinate and dangerous jobs in the bowels of the earth” in “privileged human beings exposed to something extraordinary”.
This tradition of the working class, and the meaning of the precision of learning that it embodied, can have eroded, but understanding it helps to clarify not only the past but the present too.
Consider, for example, the current debate on the impact of AI on reading and thought habits. Most university students now use Generative AI modelsLike Chatgpt, mainly for research. However, there is an increasing concern about opportunities cheat – For students to transmit to the text generated by AI as their own in missions and tests. Many people are also worried about Impact on human cognitive skills And on our Ability to creativity And critical thinking.
As with all the new powerful tools, AI has the ability to improve and degrade our lives. It is important that university authorities are thinking about how to preserve academic integrity and rethink how students could be examined. In a large part of the debate, however, the problem is seen through the bad end of the telescope. It is less than AI is the cause of the degradation of reading and thought, and more than the creation of a culture which considers knowledge mainly in an instrumental manner has facilitated the use of AI.
In 1963, The Robbins report In British higher education pleaded for the expansion of universities on the grounds that learning was a good in itself. “The search for truth,” insisted the report, “is an essential function of higher education establishments”.
If knowledge is only a commodity, why not cheat to bypass the need to think?
Half a century later came The Browne report On the financing of higher education, published in 2010. His tone was very different. “Higher education is important,” he insisted because it allows students to acquire “higher wages and better work satisfaction”, which facilitates the transition from one job to another “, and to” produce economic growth “.
The main message, the historian and the critic Stefan Collini observedwas that “we should no longer consider higher education as the supply of a public good” but rather as a “regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of a choice of students, is sovereign”.
Universities transformed into companies have pushed many things on the verge of bankruptcy and have led them to reduce the subjects deemed insufficiently “commercial”, in particular history,, music,, classic And literature.
Given all of this, is it surprising that many consider AI as a tool not to help think but to replace it? After all, if knowledge is only a commodity, whose purchase allows you to take an exam or get a job, why should it have importance if we deceive or use AI to bypass the need to think?
Until we recognize that the debate on AI does not only concern what machines can do, but also on the way humans should enhance education and knowledge, it will remain embedded in confusion. This is why stories of people like Tomlinson and Morgan, and their recognition of human value of knowledge remains important today.
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