To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.
This is a hard truth many wish to deny. An article published every month decrying the poor habits or lack of good habits of children, with a not-so-subtle implication that it is the fault of the children themselves.
It is 100% true that "you have to model the behavior of X" to your kids, otherwise all bets are off and headlines like this should not be surprising in the least.
My wife instilled a strong love of reading in all of our children from a young age. They all ask to go to the library, but my oldest became the most voracious reader. If we didn’t limit screen time, he probably wouldn’t sleep, but with unlimited time with books, he’ll easily finish a novel in a day, and sometimes two.
My parents and me are terrible readers, to the point where I thought I might have mild dyslexia. Once in a blue moon I find a book I can’t put down, but in the 80s I already had video games to fill my time.
Having a voracious reader at a reading level 10-years or more beyond his age is its own challenge. Most of the HN crowd thinks kids should have access to all books, but I assure you, there are many books inappropriate for various developmental levels, regardless of reading proficiency. There’s also little support from libraries or the industry (rating systems, content warnings, etc.) to make that easy for parents.
The best memories I have as a child are 'inappropriate' books (especially 'when I was five I killed myself' at ~12yo and 1984 at ~14.). I always had issues (disliked being touched, difficulties to empathize), but those books emotionally shook me, moved me so much, so hard I like to think I became a better version of me after reading them.
Started doing theater at 12 after Buten, started working as after school counselor for 6 to 8 yo kids and help them do their homework after reading 1984, ultimately becoming a youth camp counsellor at 17. Which were terribly outside my comfort zone, but Buten showed me how to improve myself, and Orwell how to improve the world (or at least try my best).
Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
It is pretty obvious that having "a screen which optimizes itself to keep you hooked for hours while you still have a developing brain, and no previous generation had anything similiar" is not very comparable to being able to throw away paper and have scratchpad because paper became cheap.
And the claim that hippies are doing fine isn't well substantiated[0][1][2]. Maybe we shouldn't claim to have answers for what we don't and exercise caution. Alert but not anxious.
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28008372/ ("... members with regular cannabis use and persistent dependence experienced downward socioeconomic mobility, more financial difficulties, workplace problems, and relationship conflict in early midlife.")
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9552770/ ("long-term cannabis users show accelerated biological ageing in midlife and poorer health preparedness, financial preparedness, and social preparedness for old age.")
In the hippie generation, not everybody was a hippie. And most gave up on that way of life pretty quickly or were never fully immersed to begin with. I had a girlfriend who dressed like a hippie, had many "alternative" friends and loved new age stuff, but otherwise worked full time and was completely part of the system.
I'm not saying everybody will be fine. I'm saying humanity will be fine because we will figure out how to create a functional world despite the underlying culture like we've always done. Part of my argument is that every generation is full of people saying "this time is different because of XYZ".
When someone refers to the Greeks and Romans they are refering to a time long before the medieval period. Things got continued to get better after their most well known thinkers died for a century. (well define better... The there is a lot we would hate about their culture, but they would have considered better)
the difference is you can have bookshelves full of knowledge to keep. those discord chats will be deleted / inaccessible at someone else's doing. thats different than going into peoples homes and libraries and burning books, which is what you have to do to stop readers from learning and sharing.
Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
>This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history
You've misunderstood the purpose.
Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.
You need the question before you can find the answer.
Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans in general that it is hard to take any questions it provokes seriously.
I can accept the impossible for the fun of it, but when something is impossible I don't take is serious. And it wasn't a good book in general.
Animal Farm is interesting partially because its satire is actually extremely poignant and directed; the characters are meant to represent the important actors in the Russian Revolution.
Old Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin Snowball is Trotsky, etc. Regardless of ones nationality or politics, the story of Russia in 1917 remains one of the most fascinating in our worlds history. For a lot of people, myself included, Animal Farm served as a nice way of being introduced to the tale without getting bogged down by the specifics.
Sounds like a problem of unrealistic expectations. I read Animal Farm when I was a kid and enjoyed it. No-one told me that it was going to profoundly change my life, and it didn't. Neither did my chemistry class, or my math textbooks, or most of the other stuff I learned in school. There's value in reading significant works of literature, both inherently and because it increases your ability to engage with long and complex texts. Obviously, reading Vanity Fair is not going to confer some kind of profound knowledge, or enable you to do anything in particular that you couldn't do before.
I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
Funnily enough most takes on the book misunderstand the point that was being made (probably due to Death of the author) . In his unpublished preface and subsequent analysis the view by Orwell , who was had Trotskyist leanings, his main critique is that they weren’t communisty enough but sellouts to capitalist tendancies, hence the analysis
"Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.");"[1]
Obviously once a work is in the public’s hands , interpretations may supersede even the authors original themes.Leaving it as a matter of interpretation/comprehension and generally accepted consensus. Incidentally a good measure of reading comprehension and analysis for the students studying he text.
Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
As I recall about half my class enjoyed it, and half hated it. I have nothing wrong with you being in the half that liked it. However I remain in the half that didn't like it.
That is one of the 3 purposes of school. The other two are to get a good job, and to make you a better citizen of the world... (there might be more, but those are the 3 I've come up with).
Animal Farm tries to be the last, but the flaws in it mean I can't take it seriously and so it fails. Well maybe it soft of works because nearly everybody has read it, but again, the flaws are so bad I can't take anyone seriously who cites it and so I consider it a failure.
I think you're quite confused about what Animal Farm is. It's a short work of fiction. It's not something that you'd "cite" in support of a particular point, and it wasn't written with the intention of making the reader "a better citizen of the world". Of course it has obvious satirical and allegorical elements, but there's no He-Man-style PSA at the end of it.
That's a non sequitur. But you see, this is the exactly kind of thing that a high school literature class could usefully dig into.
We know that Orwell was thinking of the Russian Revolution when he wrote the book. Many events in the story have obvious historical parallels to it.
On the other hand, Orwell was also a political journalist who wrote political essays. If his primary aim in writing the book was to make a specific critique of communism, why did he decide to express that critique as a work of fiction with talking animals? He would certainly have been aware that such a work is inherently open to wider interpretation.
Do you really think that a class of reasonably intelligent high school students couldn't find any moral in the story that's not inherently tied to communism? There are clearly all sorts of analogies that can be drawn between the story and historical or current events. And there are all sorts of conclusions you can draw. Maybe the animals should never have had a revolution in the first place; maybe they should have, but they went about it the wrong way, etc. etc.
>Is the purpose of school to make you do things that you'll enjoy?
ideally, yes, enjoyment should be one purpose of school. it's much easier to teach when students are enjoying learning.
learning to engage with something that you don't enjoy is also important, though, and why i think some of "the classics" should still be required reading.
One of the main reasons to encourage kids to read fiction is to expose them to stories outside their current experience. We don't get kids to read Treasure Island because they can inherently relate to a story about 18th century pirates.
While it's true that the finer political nuances of Animal Farm are likely to be lost on most children, it's a perfectly comprehensible story in its own right, and it needn't be read narrowly as an allegory about Communism per se.
i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids.
many of my college students feel like they've already lost at life. between ai, the economy, job prospects, etc. i am sure high schoolers are feeling the same way, which certainly isn't going to make them more eager.
Meh educational system probably lacking but parental support is the missing piece. So many parents just send their kids to school expecting them to auto learn - many reasons why parents dont have extra time --> also screen time addiction. Home environment is pretty big component to success.
i think lack of parental support has been around for ages though, which makes it hard to attribute the very recent and sudden drop in reading comprehension, math scores, etc. to it.
ive had to make pretty significant changes to my courses in the past two years. many teachers aren't, or are making changes slowly, which is causing some difficulty.
I would wager up until mid 00s you had one parent staying at home a lot more // work wasn't all encompassing -> which would probably equate to more attention on child rearing although I admit that is speculative. Also means a bit more attention to regulating screen time / inputs etc.
I'm not sure where you see velocity. The last major innovation in arethmetic was the introduction of zero when the hindu-arabic numeral system was adopted by medieval western societies. Likewise english grammar isn't exactly a hotbed of churn.
i'm confused by your reply, sorry. what part of my comment are you referring to?
if this is a response to "world is moving fast", i didn't mean "arithmetic is moving fast". i meant technology, the economy, geopolitics, etc. which inevitably changes the learning environment, the home environment, motivation, etc.
And sad thing is they will
be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.
I was about to downvote you because I read your username as reply to OP’s comment.
To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation.
Everything that was considered fancy and high-culture when I was in my formative years is fancy and high-culture now and everything after that is slop and mind-rot.
But it makes no difference: the older generations die and the newer ones take over either way, and what's acceptable or even high culture changes.
> It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation.
So this means that we have decided a priori that life can only improve in all aspects? That’s evidently absurd.
This is called a thought-terminating cliché. It’s as intellectually nuanced as putting your fingers in your ears and singing “la la I’m right”. It’s often used not because it is true, but because to prove otherwise is very hard and inherently subjective.
Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.
Not even just a category error -- this is blatant malpractice to have this as a headline! The article is talking about reading scores, and this is especially pernicious given the fact that the last couple of years has not been "typical" by any measure; I seem to recall a global pandemic that might have had some influence.
The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.
imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.
This is a hard truth many wish to deny. An article published every month decrying the poor habits or lack of good habits of children, with a not-so-subtle implication that it is the fault of the children themselves.
It is 100% true that "you have to model the behavior of X" to your kids, otherwise all bets are off and headlines like this should not be surprising in the least.
Reading with kids before bed was our wind down activity. I attribute that and limiting screens to an hour most days to their interest in reading.
> make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure.
Monkey see, monkey do! You have electronics addicted parents who never read wondering why their kids also don't read.
My wife instilled a strong love of reading in all of our children from a young age. They all ask to go to the library, but my oldest became the most voracious reader. If we didn’t limit screen time, he probably wouldn’t sleep, but with unlimited time with books, he’ll easily finish a novel in a day, and sometimes two.
My parents and me are terrible readers, to the point where I thought I might have mild dyslexia. Once in a blue moon I find a book I can’t put down, but in the 80s I already had video games to fill my time.
Having a voracious reader at a reading level 10-years or more beyond his age is its own challenge. Most of the HN crowd thinks kids should have access to all books, but I assure you, there are many books inappropriate for various developmental levels, regardless of reading proficiency. There’s also little support from libraries or the industry (rating systems, content warnings, etc.) to make that easy for parents.
The best memories I have as a child are 'inappropriate' books (especially 'when I was five I killed myself' at ~12yo and 1984 at ~14.). I always had issues (disliked being touched, difficulties to empathize), but those books emotionally shook me, moved me so much, so hard I like to think I became a better version of me after reading them.
Started doing theater at 12 after Buten, started working as after school counselor for 6 to 8 yo kids and help them do their homework after reading 1984, ultimately becoming a youth camp counsellor at 17. Which were terribly outside my comfort zone, but Buten showed me how to improve myself, and Orwell how to improve the world (or at least try my best).
Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
It is pretty obvious that having "a screen which optimizes itself to keep you hooked for hours while you still have a developing brain, and no previous generation had anything similiar" is not very comparable to being able to throw away paper and have scratchpad because paper became cheap.
And the claim that hippies are doing fine isn't well substantiated[0][1][2]. Maybe we shouldn't claim to have answers for what we don't and exercise caution. Alert but not anxious.
[0]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002204267800800... ("70% abandoned deviance as a way of life" not sure what that exactly means)
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28008372/ ("... members with regular cannabis use and persistent dependence experienced downward socioeconomic mobility, more financial difficulties, workplace problems, and relationship conflict in early midlife.")
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9552770/ ("long-term cannabis users show accelerated biological ageing in midlife and poorer health preparedness, financial preparedness, and social preparedness for old age.")
In the hippie generation, not everybody was a hippie. And most gave up on that way of life pretty quickly or were never fully immersed to begin with. I had a girlfriend who dressed like a hippie, had many "alternative" friends and loved new age stuff, but otherwise worked full time and was completely part of the system.
I'm not saying everybody will be fine. I'm saying humanity will be fine because we will figure out how to create a functional world despite the underlying culture like we've always done. Part of my argument is that every generation is full of people saying "this time is different because of XYZ".
> I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
reading and writing are corrupting your ability to remember everything you need to know!!
Greeks and Romans did experience a >99% loss of their literature during the medieval period...
When someone refers to the Greeks and Romans they are refering to a time long before the medieval period. Things got continued to get better after their most well known thinkers died for a century. (well define better... The there is a lot we would hate about their culture, but they would have considered better)
the difference is you can have bookshelves full of knowledge to keep. those discord chats will be deleted / inaccessible at someone else's doing. thats different than going into peoples homes and libraries and burning books, which is what you have to do to stop readers from learning and sharing.
> Discord chats, AI and social media videos
A.k.a: no trustable source.
They need to give them Opus and unlimited tokens, they'll be reading all day
Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
>This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history
You've misunderstood the purpose.
Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.
You need the question before you can find the answer.
Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans in general that it is hard to take any questions it provokes seriously.
I can accept the impossible for the fun of it, but when something is impossible I don't take is serious. And it wasn't a good book in general.
> Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans
Which parts specifically of Animal Farm are untrue? Greed, hypocrisy, cruelty, avarice? Or the talking animals?
Animal Farm is interesting partially because its satire is actually extremely poignant and directed; the characters are meant to represent the important actors in the Russian Revolution.
Old Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin Snowball is Trotsky, etc. Regardless of ones nationality or politics, the story of Russia in 1917 remains one of the most fascinating in our worlds history. For a lot of people, myself included, Animal Farm served as a nice way of being introduced to the tale without getting bogged down by the specifics.
It’s just the context. I grew up in a different culture and we all hated being forced to read at school, just different books.
I enjoyed reading Animal Farm but it was something I picked up by myself, and read on my own terms.
Sounds like a problem of unrealistic expectations. I read Animal Farm when I was a kid and enjoyed it. No-one told me that it was going to profoundly change my life, and it didn't. Neither did my chemistry class, or my math textbooks, or most of the other stuff I learned in school. There's value in reading significant works of literature, both inherently and because it increases your ability to engage with long and complex texts. Obviously, reading Vanity Fair is not going to confer some kind of profound knowledge, or enable you to do anything in particular that you couldn't do before.
I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
Every human organization degrades into Animal Farm. It is just most obvious in communism.
Every software developer above 35 has been in an org run by the pigs. You don't need a study. It is literally a profound lesson about life.
Funnily enough most takes on the book misunderstand the point that was being made (probably due to Death of the author) . In his unpublished preface and subsequent analysis the view by Orwell , who was had Trotskyist leanings, his main critique is that they weren’t communisty enough but sellouts to capitalist tendancies, hence the analysis
"Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.");"[1]
Obviously once a work is in the public’s hands , interpretations may supersede even the authors original themes.Leaving it as a matter of interpretation/comprehension and generally accepted consensus. Incidentally a good measure of reading comprehension and analysis for the students studying he text.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm
Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
It's also a story, and quite an enjoyable and well written one at that. My 8 year old son enjoyed being read it.
As I recall about half my class enjoyed it, and half hated it. I have nothing wrong with you being in the half that liked it. However I remain in the half that didn't like it.
Is the purpose of school to make you do things that you'll enjoy?
That is one of the 3 purposes of school. The other two are to get a good job, and to make you a better citizen of the world... (there might be more, but those are the 3 I've come up with).
Animal Farm tries to be the last, but the flaws in it mean I can't take it seriously and so it fails. Well maybe it soft of works because nearly everybody has read it, but again, the flaws are so bad I can't take anyone seriously who cites it and so I consider it a failure.
I think you're quite confused about what Animal Farm is. It's a short work of fiction. It's not something that you'd "cite" in support of a particular point, and it wasn't written with the intention of making the reader "a better citizen of the world". Of course it has obvious satirical and allegorical elements, but there's no He-Man-style PSA at the end of it.
The purpose was to make a statement about communism which in turn means it was intended to be the last.
> which in turn means it was intended to be the last.
That's a bold and misguided assertion of authorial intent.
Since you're a fan of the scientific method: you can please cite sources in support of your claim?
Read all the other replies. In particular foldr (sibling to yours) is a very good analysis that makes my point while looking like a rebuttal.
I read it. It's definitely a rebuttal.
That's a non sequitur. But you see, this is the exactly kind of thing that a high school literature class could usefully dig into.
We know that Orwell was thinking of the Russian Revolution when he wrote the book. Many events in the story have obvious historical parallels to it.
On the other hand, Orwell was also a political journalist who wrote political essays. If his primary aim in writing the book was to make a specific critique of communism, why did he decide to express that critique as a work of fiction with talking animals? He would certainly have been aware that such a work is inherently open to wider interpretation.
Do you really think that a class of reasonably intelligent high school students couldn't find any moral in the story that's not inherently tied to communism? There are clearly all sorts of analogies that can be drawn between the story and historical or current events. And there are all sorts of conclusions you can draw. Maybe the animals should never have had a revolution in the first place; maybe they should have, but they went about it the wrong way, etc. etc.
>Is the purpose of school to make you do things that you'll enjoy?
ideally, yes, enjoyment should be one purpose of school. it's much easier to teach when students are enjoying learning.
learning to engage with something that you don't enjoy is also important, though, and why i think some of "the classics" should still be required reading.
> Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
So, we shouldn't learn about history until we experience it ourselves? Seems like that would eliminate, uh, most of history.
I haven't experienced the harsh realities of the Cretaceous period but I still like reading about dinosaurs.
One of the main reasons to encourage kids to read fiction is to expose them to stories outside their current experience. We don't get kids to read Treasure Island because they can inherently relate to a story about 18th century pirates.
While it's true that the finer political nuances of Animal Farm are likely to be lost on most children, it's a perfectly comprehensible story in its own right, and it needn't be read narrowly as an allegory about Communism per se.
i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids.
many of my college students feel like they've already lost at life. between ai, the economy, job prospects, etc. i am sure high schoolers are feeling the same way, which certainly isn't going to make them more eager.
Meh educational system probably lacking but parental support is the missing piece. So many parents just send their kids to school expecting them to auto learn - many reasons why parents dont have extra time --> also screen time addiction. Home environment is pretty big component to success.
i think lack of parental support has been around for ages though, which makes it hard to attribute the very recent and sudden drop in reading comprehension, math scores, etc. to it.
ive had to make pretty significant changes to my courses in the past two years. many teachers aren't, or are making changes slowly, which is causing some difficulty.
I would wager up until mid 00s you had one parent staying at home a lot more // work wasn't all encompassing -> which would probably equate to more attention on child rearing although I admit that is speculative. Also means a bit more attention to regulating screen time / inputs etc.
I'm not sure where you see velocity. The last major innovation in arethmetic was the introduction of zero when the hindu-arabic numeral system was adopted by medieval western societies. Likewise english grammar isn't exactly a hotbed of churn.
i'm confused by your reply, sorry. what part of my comment are you referring to?
if this is a response to "world is moving fast", i didn't mean "arithmetic is moving fast". i meant technology, the economy, geopolitics, etc. which inevitably changes the learning environment, the home environment, motivation, etc.
And sad thing is they will be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608697
How are we to take arguments for teen literacy seriously when they ubiquitously use "screens" as a pejorative?
I had a 12 year old nephew ask me why I was reading while on vacation. I sent him a link to this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8
And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.
a fine way to point to the real issue. a loss of critical thinking.
I was about to downvote you because I read your username as reply to OP’s comment.
To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation.
Everything that was considered fancy and high-culture when I was in my formative years is fancy and high-culture now and everything after that is slop and mind-rot.
But it makes no difference: the older generations die and the newer ones take over either way, and what's acceptable or even high culture changes.
> It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation.
So this means that we have decided a priori that life can only improve in all aspects? That’s evidently absurd.
This is called a thought-terminating cliché. It’s as intellectually nuanced as putting your fingers in your ears and singing “la la I’m right”. It’s often used not because it is true, but because to prove otherwise is very hard and inherently subjective.
The future is bleak.
Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.
> They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics
Have you been around kids recently? I think we all know what they're doing on the phone, and it's not The Great Gatsby.
Wouldn't it be neat if anyone actually checked?
Not even just a category error -- this is blatant malpractice to have this as a headline! The article is talking about reading scores, and this is especially pernicious given the fact that the last couple of years has not been "typical" by any measure; I seem to recall a global pandemic that might have had some influence.
The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.
If they were addicted to their Kindles then why did their reading score drop?
Great question! It's a shame these studies don't investigate that, and instead stop at "phones are making kids stupid."
imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
And AI companies are stealing and destroying all the books. Thanks Silicon Valley!
More like, thanks judges and copyright laws
For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...
I’m guessing that passing the tokens through the visual cortex doesn’t matter as much as how you engage with the content.