Academics at Oxford, the university that produced Boris Johnson, shouldn't denigrate state-school students

At Oxbridge, unrealistically long reading lists encourage students to skip, skim and blag, so that they learn showmanship rather than scholarship, with the inevitable result – Boris Johnson

Things ain’t what they used to be. Sir Jonathan Bate, professor of English at Oxford, complains that where once he could expect undergraduates to read three novels in one week, now they can barely manage to read one novel in three weeks.

The reason, he figures, may partly be down to social media eroding concentration spans. But he attributes it largely to the “access and diversity drive” at elite universities, to make their student population more representative of the public at large, 93 per cent of whom attend state schools.

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Teachers at state schools, he says, are so preoccupied with “crowd control” that they don’t teach students to read long novels. The result: weedy readers who can barely lift Bleak House, let alone finish it.

Energetic, excited but weary

While I respect Professor Bate’s own learned tomes, I think he’s wrong about students. I have been teaching undergraduates for almost 30 years and, despite a welcome increase at my own university in the number of students from state-school backgrounds, I see no diminishment of their powers.

Every year, I am moved by the energy and excitement that first-year students bring to their reading of novels including Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, A Passage to India, and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet. By the end of a 12-week semester, they’ll have read six novels, alongside poetry such as The Waste Land and Don Paterson’s 40 Sonnets. Can they make it to the end of long works? Absolutely.

But here’s the thing. Today’s students are not just digitally distracted. They are tired. Most have jobs. If they are fee-paying and not blessed with the pumpkin coach of a college fund, they are skivvying in kitchens, cafes, bars, with the evil stepmother of a debt and compound interest ahead of them.

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They’re also understandably anxious. If not reflecting on the likelihood that we have passed essential climate tipping points and are hurtling into a future of extreme weather, food shortages, and mass migration, they are thinking about how the average house now costs ten times average net income, making even the tiniest ‘castles in the air’ increasingly pie in the sky.

Reading as the Victorians did

I think it a remarkable testament to the power of imagination that, under these fraught circumstances, less-privileged students still commit to reading long novels at all. But they do. They need, though, an adaptable and inclusive approach to teaching that meets them where they are.

A wonderful colleague at Trinity College, Dublin, runs a course where students read Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White over a semester in weekly parts – as the Victorians themselves did, in Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round. Reading this way is an immersive experience that is perfectly authentic, allowing students to absorb complex plot points while looking at the news and ads that Victorian audiences saw alongside Collins’ serialised fiction.

It is also much more involving than bingeing the six-season box-set, like Professor Bate’s former Cambridge students, whom he said could read Dickens’ Great Expectations, Bleak House, and David Copperfield in one week. That’s some 2,500 pages in total.

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Oxford graduate Boris Johnson may have picked up some bad habits during his student days (Picture: Jim Watson)Oxford graduate Boris Johnson may have picked up some bad habits during his student days (Picture: Jim Watson)
Oxford graduate Boris Johnson may have picked up some bad habits during his student days (Picture: Jim Watson) | AFP via Getty Images

Cheap shots in the Culture Wars

In truth, having been a student at Cambridge myself, I don’t believe the students who said they read these three novels in one week ever really did read them thoroughly. Oxbridge reading lists have a long reputation for being unrealistic. They encourage intellectual Interrail: Washington Square to Milan (Kundera) in 24 hours. Students skip, skim and blag, learning showmanship rather than scholarship. The inevitable result is: Boris Johnson.

Reading one novel in three weeks, but reading it well, is a perfectly good target. Taking aim at state-school students and their teachers (even when you come to hand-wring rather than to snipe) isn’t. Such interventions easily become cheap shots in the everlasting Culture Wars.

Bate’s comments have inevitably been quoted in certain papers as evidence of the lamentable ‘dumbing down’ to which opening elite universities to more state-school students leads. One such article is even followed by an elite cheat sheet showing which Oxford colleges still admit most students from private schools. The silent telegraphy is clear. If the hoi polloi struggle to read Joyce, bring in more of the double-barrelled names who already read Henry James.

Novels that speak to you

But this is wrong, not just morally but practically. All the evidence points to the fact that those who attend university from a lower base in terms of pre-existing knowledge and experience have a very rapid rate of learning and often overtake their more privileged peers. They just need the right tools to do so.

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The biggest trick to reading a long novel is wanting to read it. To feel that desire, you need time and space. You also need to feel that, even if the language is unfamiliar, that novel is speaking to you.

Being hectored about one’s lack of existing cultural capital or stamina will have the opposite effect. All the great literature that Professor Bate name-checked in his recent interview was by men. Most students of English literature at his university, and my own, are women. Making reading lists more representative is one way to make them more accessible.

Tending flame of self-knowledge

Scotland has a proudly democratic tradition in education; one of the things that enables it is the four-year degree structure, where students have a chance to grow into their own minds, to change direction, to learn what they like and like what they learn.

Long novels are more approachable without short terms and the insistent pressure of the Oxbridge system, where the emphasis on competitive achievement in final exams drives many students to overwork, to cram without tasting, and perform ‘brilliance’ for the eyes of star dons without tending the quieter flame of self-knowledge that is fed by freedom to fail, to experiment, to wander and to dream.

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If we want young people to read Bleak House, then handing them ladders rather than throwing brickbats is definitely the way to go.

Dr Sara Lodge is a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews

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