Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 April 1880 — People Who Do Not Read Books. [ARTICLE]

People Who Do Not Read Books.

Those who have to deal with the education of the young get revealing glimpses into the state of culture in the households of our highly intelligent country. A professor in one of our leading colleges told me, not long ago, that a Freshman came to him, after he had been recommended certain books in the literature class, and said he had never read a book in his life. This was literally true; except his text-books, he had never read a book; he had passed a fair examination, but of reading he knew no more than a Kaffir. Another professor in another college, also one of the highest in the country (both of them are Eastern colleges, in the center of the best culture in America), told me more recently that a Sophomore who stood well in his class came to ask him where he obtained certain facts which he referred to in the class-room. It came out that the young man never had read a book, didn’t know what the sensation was, or how to set about it, and had not the faintest conception of literature. He had no notion of the pleasure or profit to be got from reading; the world of books was absolutely beyond his imagination, and he could not conceive what people found in it. The professor at length induced him to read one of Scott’s novels, but the boy found it a very tedious and uninteresting occupation. These two instances are extreme, but only in a degree; a taste for literature is not common, and ignorance of it is common even among college undergraduates. —C. D. Warner, in Christian Union.