English Majors Trying to Read "Bleak House"

Somebody who calls herself (I suppose) "Kitten" nicely summarizes an experiment in which some college English majors were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House (1853). The methodology was to ask the students to read these paragraphs out loud, allowing them the use of a dictionary and their phones to look up unfamiliar words. They then discussed the passages with an experimenter, who asked them to express the sentences in their own words. Many did abysmally, which is why the study has gotten somewhat famous. (College students can't read!) But I think the study actually raises a much deeper question about what education is for and why anyone should pursue it.

Here is the first paragraph of Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Here is a sample interview:

[Pause.] [Laughs.] So it’s like, um, [Pause.] the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no . . . [Pause.] so everything’s been like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he’s says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill.

The general conclusion of the study was as follows:

• 58% of students understood very little of the passages they read
• 38% could understand about half of the sentences
• 5% could understand all seven paragraphs

Ok, that's pretty bad.

But why should we care if anyone can read this passage? One of the students looked up "Michaelmas Term" on her phone and found only references to education, which led her to think that this was set in a school; what American would ever think that law courts had terms just like universities?

How about the seventh paragraph:

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”

Anbody out there without an advanced degree in history or literature who does understand what this is about? I dislike the writing, which is why I bounced off Bleak House the first few times I tried to read it and did not finish it until a few years ago, and the Court of Chancery is pretty obscure even to modern Brits, not to mention that much of what Dickens said about it was wrong. The mingling of a Noah's flood reference with a muddy Megalosaurus is (I would say) a lousy metaphor, and to really understand it you need some knowledge of how educated Britons of 1853 might think about those two subjects.

I have this knowledge, since my dissertation was largely based on English legal records, European intellectual history and Victorian Britain are two of my hobbies, and I like Dickens. (Go me!) But why should anyone else know any of this? Wouldn't it be a lot more useful to assign students contemporary novels that deal with worlds they understand and the legal system they might one day get caught up in? The authors of the original study admit that they chose a challenging passage, but I would say they chose a ridiculous one. What definition of "reading comprehension" includes the 19th-century British court system?

I know very smart people with Ph.D.s who think reading novels is an utter waste of time and would no doubt scoff at these paragraphs. Ok, they're weren't English majors, but they have a point: nobody needs to be able to do this. 

What do we want educated people to know? And what place does Bleak House have in that system?