By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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I was minding my business when a friend sent me a link to a Tweet that was quoting an article in The Atlantic Magazine: “The elite students who can’t read books” by Rose Horowitch.

Apparently, students coming into a number of elite American colleges have been confounding their professors of late. Many of them have never been asked to read an entire book and then grapple with it while in middle and high-school, so they were struggling.

It is a good piece that tries to investigate this phenomenon, if it is in fact a real phenomenon, by looking at the ways in which American education and culture might be changing. But it was also disturbing to read because I actually kind of envy America having this problem with their education.

Eti, their students entering college cannot handle ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or ‘The Illiad?’ Talk about First World Problems.

Especially coming after a different conversation in which another friend was lamenting the fact that a youngster they know is aspiring to a text-heavy career but admitted that they don’t read. He was surprised by this. I was not. We don’t read over here, and too many of us have been proud of that fact for a long time.

In fact, the term for people who have a higher education/academics/intellectualS is “Wasomi”, which English might barely accommodate as “readers” perhaps, or “well-read folk”.

It is often used as a pejorative, the implication being that people who read and therefore think too much are not very pragmatic or useful to society. I mean. I’m not even going to try to unpack that whole situation in this one opinion.

But we can sit with the consequences of this mindset by revisiting the First World Problem of American children who can’t read too good in their first year of college. Their Tanzanian counterparts face the same problem.

Oddly enough, both seem to be a product of educational disappointment at a critical juncture, as well as shifts in what we think important skills are. And of course, the effects of technology. Social media and video platforms have figured out how to capture, quite literally, the precious attention of young people.

The tedious, if rewarding work of becoming a ‘msomi’ type reader cannot compete with stimulating digital content. Besides, digital content is just much more democratic by nature — open to almost anyone to be a creator as well as a consumer.

Reading culture

I would know. The digital world is my jam, and it has been good to me even as a writer who still believes in producing what the young ones call “walls of text”.

I just wish that this wasn’t contributing to the continuing erosion of the culture of reading as central to the overall intellectual capital of individuals, and of society.

In the event, reading isn’t going anywhere. I know that it feels as though education systems are resigning themselves to a less ‘literate’ approach, but I take the long-term view.

Television didn’t kill radio, radio didn’t kill newspapers, newspapers didn’t kill novels and novels didn’t kill religious texts.

At the core of all these endeavours remains the ultimate human super-power: Communication. And we have never come up with a better technology for the preservation and transmission of knowledge than literature.

If reading is embattled now, in Tanzania as in America, I am concerned for the youth who are being underserved by their education systems rather than the culture of reading per se.

One will live forever, and the other is vulnerable and facing a hopefully long and complex human lifetime. Should they merge, they would both be the better for it.