Students reading decline

A sign that Sherds saw in a bookshop recently claimed that ‘reading is cheaper than therapy’, but universities in the UK are reporting the opposite: that students suffer stress when asked to read. Back in the last century, weekly essays were the norm, and this usually involved extensive reading, but universities are now having to offer ‘reading resilience’ courses to teach students how to concentrate long enough to read a book. According to the academics quoted in a recent article in The Times, phones are partly to blame, but so is the way that English is taught. Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway University, says that ‘terrible