ALT Screenshotted text: That may sound like an exaggeration, but higher education will almost certainly have to become more remedial. In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins: 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.