Other than the first sentence of the first passage ("Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.") these were not particularly difficult to understand. A bit verbose, but generally quite clear.

I'm not surprised that university students struggle with this though because the difficulty level and expectations for reading have fallen through the floor. Most students don't read anymore, and I assume many just use chatgpt to summarize at this point. Reading is a lot like working out a muscle and if you don't keep it up it atrophies.

I feel like it's easy to blame social media, and I know it's melted my own brain, but I don't think students are challenged to read enough at any level of education anymore and aren't helped enough to learn how to parse difficult texts. Class sizes continuously growing and funding being cut definitely doesn't help. It's hard to imagine a different outcome under the logic of neoliberalism.

[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago

I feel like it's easy to blame social media....I don't think students are challenged to read enough at any level of education

Yeah like I said earlier in the thread, I don't think this is anything new. I remember being in middle school over 20 years ago and tons of kids didn't read. People were blaming video games and MTV. A lot of it had to do with kids being made to read books they weren't interested in, so they couldn't read denser material, either.

Neoliberalism is focused on churning out a workforce using as few resources as possible. It's not interested in making educated human beings.