A survey on the first day of class confirmed the expectation. Between them, the sixteen students could produce the titles of only eight novels that they had read (but that not all of them had read), and of these the three most-mentioned (five students had read all three) were Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2008), its sequel Catching Fire (2009), and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (2005). Four students listed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925); one listed Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890). Six out of the ten coeds, but none of the men, had read Jay Asher’s adolescent female suicide-story Thirteen Reasons Why (2007). A few students had read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but none had read Hamlet or The Tempest. No student could name a poem by William Wordsworth, John Keats, or Robert Frost.
There is, however, a bright side:
"I return to a point that I have made elsewhere in writing about student encounters with Richard Wagner and H. G. Wells. Contemporary college students are not stupid, but they are often far more ignorant than they need to be, having been ill-served both by the jejuneness of North American K-12 and by the ideological tendentiousness, verbal abstruseness, and hackneyed content, of the postmodernity under which the majority of their college preceptors have also been educated. Given patient, orderly instruction, and, more importantly, the opportunity to confront non-trivial ideas and rich objects of aesthetic contemplation, they are capable of initiating independent thought and of enriching their notions of art, literature, and the world."