We’re not going to sugar coat this. The state of education is bleak. There seems to be a dense fog clouding the minds of students, who are incapable of reading seven randomly chosen paragraphs from a work of nineteenth-century serial fiction without understanding more than the basic facts presented in those paragraphs. Oh, sorry, my writing proficiency isn’t as good as my reading proficiency. I meant to say that there is a dense fog clouding the minds of certain college professors who don’t understand the irony of their own ambush. On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies discussed the newly-released study (of a ten-year-old test) given to 85 college English majors that was conducted by three college professors. The test was designed to code into an Excel spreadsheet the answers that students gave about their understanding of the text they were given to read, and the conclusion was that the students failed. Many tsk tsks were expressed and warnings given of how these failures’ future ability to make money was affected. In what can only be described as an exercise in irony, the text they tested the students on was from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Join us as we discuss how this may have been one of the biggest self-owns of the academic-industrial complex, and please add your thoughts to our discussion in the comments!—Streamed May 30, 2025

Take the test: https://fencingbearatprayer.substack.com/p/reading-comprehension-current-year