I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Apparently kids nowadays are having difficulty focusing on individual sentences, and a lot of them are just effectively illiterate. This just blows me away. I'm roughly your age and sometimes as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop, sunrise to sunset if I liked the book, and I knew a bunch of kids who would do the same thing. They weren't even what you'd call huge readers. It's just what you did if you were bored, or had an okay book with nothing else to do.
And when I say “spare minutes” I mean… any time anyone wasn’t saying “put down that fucking book!” - I don’t know if the phenomenon of hiding a novel in a textbook and looking very very studious in class is even a thing any more.
These days I read almost exclusively on my phone, for much the same reason. If you flip open a paperback because you’re out for dinner and every other fucker isn’t talking but rather doomscrolling you look weird. If you give the appearance of also probably doing instragram or whatever, it’s socially acceptable.
Idk. I’m in my 40s now, I remember being mocked for being a bookworm when I was a kid, and I suppose this is just the same pattern - reading, knowing things, expanding your horizons - these things are not cool, and I don’t know if they ever were.
Same! Our local library had a thing where you'd keep a list of all the books you read over the summer, and the week before school started you could turn the list in for a prize. I don't at all remember anything about the prizes, but I remember all the fun and joy I had reading the books and imagining other lives and worlds than my own.
-some teacher from Brooklyn that I know
I'm interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree or disagree with my take. I'm not saying audiobooks are bad, but, they are not at all equivalent to real reading.
All that stuff about listening to an audiobook while working out, or cooking, driving, or anything is crystallized bravado from people who think it makes them look clever that they can do two things badly at the same time.
I think the only people who claim audiobooks are the same as actual reading are people who have never bothered to do much actual reading.
It is okay to listen to audiobooks, but there are other things going on with reading, and more with a physical book. When I read, I choose what to emphasize, and how to pace. I parse out the clauses, the phrasing, the pronunciation, enunciation. If I read Tolkien I give the songs tunes. I give voices to the characters. I remember where on the page something happened, and may go back for it, especially in nonfiction. I pause to digest.
Audiobooks are a different experience. And I, personally, am prone to breaks in concentration. But I think any adult should be capable and should actively practice all forms: silently reading books, listening to a book being read to you, and reading aloud to another. Consuming books is not just a matter of downloading information. It also is to be actively digested and felt. For TV shows, for example, some people watch on high speed, or play it in the background, but I feel that even if they get the plot points they miss a lot. So too with books when not given proper attention.
Edit: I’ll add, some works are meant to be listened to, they may have some tone or rhythm, trope or cantillation. Maybe even gestures. If I said “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” you know how how it sounds. And I think practice in recitation lets us preserve this in the art.
On the other hand, one of my kids has a pretty severe eye problem mixed with dyslexia, so audiobooks are basically his only real option (large print is hard to find, especially for books aimed at younger readers, and tablet reading is tiring). So, I'm glad they exist, at least.
That said, I would argue that a voice actor is far more significant than page formatting when it comes to novels. A good voice actor can turn a good story great, and sometimes a poor story to... acceptable.
I've read thousands of novels over the decades, both with and without audio, so I'm reasonably confident about the above.
I like stories and all of the above are simply ways of hoarding more stories. The way I'm getting the story is not important, the story is.
Definitely. When I was in school we started to have projectors in classrooms but I honestly don't think they added much at all. Seeing a "modern" classroom with electronic whiteboards and tablets everywhere is horrifying.
I doubt any paedagogues were asking for this. What's more likely is Microsoft and Google realised there were education budgets all over the world they weren't yet harvesting.
Math concepts, especially visualizations, become so much more accessible.
One math teacher in my school used an analog overhead projector as part of his workflow: he would write math on a long transparency roll, sitting at his desk, facing the class, so every student could see exactly how their work should be reasoned-about and laid out properly. He could rewind (literally) to any previous point in the lesson.
As always, it comes down to one's ability to use the tools effectively.
Famously most of asian kids wear glasses from studying all the time, well we need up up that up! What if they overtake us in some rat race. Not the best parenting but some folks are like that and then it shows on kids, thats true.
It's NOT the schools. They are well funded and as you say, pretty helpless because teachers, even younger ones, just aren't able to deal with kids whose parents shoved a smartphone into their hands at age 3.
It's NOT the parents - in order to keep up with the jonses in those towns, you have to work like a dog and most likely, both parents are in high stress demanding environments in order to make enough to live there. I was fortunate that my dad did quite well for our family, but there's no way I could raise a kid in that environment.
It's the fucking devices, and the drive to put tech everywhere in the classroom. When I was a kid we had a single Mac in the classroom (besides the teacher's computer), mainly to dick around with Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, or some typing app. We wanted to play games? We went outside and played sports, or stayed inside and played games like scrabble or chess.
In high school we had to do genuine research 15-20+ page papers as early as Sophomore year. There was zero Wikipedia, much less ChatGPT or Claude.
Of course, a book, which requires attention, effort, and has no distractions, is not going to capture the attention and imagination of someone who has had the world and all of its distractions at their fingertips since they gained consciousness, and weren't made to socialize without devices.
And no, we cannot allow people to pass to the next grade without mastering the skills required of their current grade. This needs to be completely iron clad and not up for debate. I was nearly held back 3-4 times. I am an idiot. I was miles ahead of where elementary school and middle school kids are today. I don't care if a wealthy Ivy grad and his management consultant wife donate a bunch of money to make sure their kid can pass - if their kid can't read or write, their kid can't pass.
I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.
In a world where AI is empowering existing experts while risking junior hiring, the young should be aiming to be competitive with those experts, not aiming below even current juniors. If, as a human, you're just acting as a glorified harness around an LLM, you're more replaceable.
Im not saying it is the best for everyone, but it has been proven repeatedly to beat out any other method in the majority of the population. Plus its time stability and storage is much easier and reliable.
It also could have other side benefits like focus or perhaps something like visual acuity, much like how writing by hand can develop good hand-eye coordination. If someone struggled to write with a pencil for example I would be very wary about handing them sharp tools or knives.
Reading, writing, and math are foundational skills that, aside from having enormous utility in their own right, are also crucial for developing sharp, creative, and analytical minds.
Take writing as an example: it challenges you to organize your thoughts, patch up the weaknesses of your arguments, and find effective means of connecting with your audience. In so doing, you restructure your own understanding of the world, deepening your expertise and mental schemas. That's something an LLM can't do.
Are you suggesting that a lower attention span has no impact? I don't know how I would learn things if my attention span was shit, or even sit with difficult problems or emotions and resolve them. Even just general productivity, which, sure there are some arguments about good vs bad productivity, but in general, any form of productivity will benefit from better attention span I think?
Reading, writing, being able to focus on things... these are healthy things that healthy brains do. And I don't think that's just a case of it always being that way in the past, so any change to that is bad. I think humans as a species will die if we give this sort of thing up, and I don't think I'm exaggerating or engaging in AI doomerism here.
Not to mention that AI isn't that good. Maybe it will be, but I'm skeptical. Human progress will basically stop if we lose a generation of kids to this brainrot, with barely-capable AIs that can't even design their successors and move humanity forward. Who else will push humanity forward, if the next several generations of kids are intellectually incapable of doing so?
It works well and the children are both happy and do well academically
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/devil-s-...
How sad it has come to this.
We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.
After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.
It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrolling and such. How is a child supposed to withstand this onslaught? I only managed this by uninstalling YouTube and all apps with shorts.
Take control of what your kids play, and you can help them find more beneficial uses of electronics which is not an endless loop of bite sized low quality entertainment! :)
I feel like it got worse not because games became more sophisticated, but because they got dumber and require less and less brainpower.
I spent my childhood playing ridiculous amount of video games, probably same amount or more as kids nowadays do. I had literally hundreds of Playstation games back in the day. And I turned out fine. But the difference was that I was playing a ton of games that required you to put some thought into them, and weren't easy, and often were story-heavy (e.g. JRPGs in particular; being from a non English-speaking country that's how I actually learned English!).
Today, you can see the engagement engineering everywhere. ESPECIALLY IN MOBILE... omg the FOMO, flash colors, 3 second screen transitions, gambling mechanics. It's an addicts nightmare.
Now I waste time reading about how those old games were made!
Since, I’ve always been aware of and wary of the possibility of this kind of dopamine cycling.
I see it in others. My wife discovered YouTube shorts a year or so ago, and now she’ll lose entire days to watching 20 second clips of reality TV.
Thing is, with a grown ass adult you can’t limit their screen time. You have to let them dig to the bottom of the pit all by themselves, and only when they ask for help to get out of it can you help - otherwise nothing is learned.
It’s honestly not at all dissimilar to friends who I’ve seen fuck their existences up with drugs. They’ve had to hit rock bottom before they quit - or they died. Can’t think of anyone who just went “actually, today I won’t have any heroin”.
Do you give them some kind of additional time budget that they can manage themselves over a longer period? There are things that you can do on a screen that just take more time than one hour at once, especially when you're playing with friends (or even learning something by programming etc.).
While I'm now on my phone too much, and I don't read fiction as much as I used to, I'm grateful for those foundations.
The friction and discomfort that come from reading/exercising/learning/growing is so important, and I hope we can find a healthier balance for the next generation.
I watched Harvey price, a fairly famous autistic person in the UK edit his own video on an iPad, adding sounds etc. I think that's fantastic self directed learning and it came from, shock horror, a screen. I think this anti-screen sentiment is hysteria, plain and simple.
Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Something akin to smoking.
Not only will it not, autism will not last more than 25 years in it's current form. I bet money on both of those
That anyone is pretending otherwise is mind boggling to me.
We should recognize its not a generational issue but something that affects us all-young and old
It is the business model. There is an incentive to make games addictive. Like arcade games the goal is to keep kids as much time on the machine as possible. But now the arcade is in your pocket 24/7.
Even worse, there is an incentive even to just open the app as it is an opportunity to show you an Ad. Notifications, and periodical rewards make sure that there is a constant need to interact with the phone.
Unregulated markets will always end up in scams and addiction. Because both are the fastest and more reliable way of getting money.
They sound deprived, why haven't you got them a bike if you're complaining about screen time?
> It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
You sound like you're convincing yourself here.
Everything else is just an empty blah. Every single time there is unruly kid, I look at parental behaviors and its pretty obvious. Reverse is also true - every properly caring involved parent has much better behaving kid(s) around.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.
Granted, people are not doing any long form reading and writing on these devices, but they are reading and writing.
This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.
I (90s high schooler) was made fun of merely for being on the internet or being able to fix electronics. The early days of Facebook were amusing (when everybody was friending everybody), seeing the same people that bullied me spending hours on end playing FarmVille.
While I never physically fought back, but one of my friends (who had a LOT of success almost immediately after high school) did pass on of our tormentors working construction in the street and made eye contact...in his very expensive SLK Mercedes. Not to degenerate construction work, but there was a lot of satisfaction for him in that moment.
It still surprises me how the peking order in schools so poorly represents real life. A few years ago at a previous job, we had an HR woman who was almost certainly a "popular" kid in school, comment how much fun being around us "nerds" was.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/koyNVSD2vyU
There were many performative hot takes at the time. The best part though, for me, was coach Nick Sirianni defending him when asked about it after the game. Sirianni said:
> Some guys pray in between, some guys mediate in between. A.J. reads in between. Whatever these guys need to do to put their mind in a place where they can play with great detail and great effort, I fully encourage them to do that
And yeah, by far the strongest predictor I've ever seen for "does the kid do X that everyone agrees is good for people to do" is always "do the parents do it?". You lead by example. Kids are great at picking up on whether you enjoy it or not.
Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.
However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.
I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.
Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
The quality of the scans are usually poor and occasionally pages are missing and many have been removed. It's been great for us.
https://openlibrary.org/people/duiznwudidj/books/want-to-rea...
For a shorter classic I found Robur the Conqueror highly entertaining.
I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.
I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.
I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).
It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.
LLMs can be much better at recommendations. Honestly, Amazon needs to spank their recommendation teams into doing something productive with this. They clearly have the ability to run LLMs at scale. But their in house recommendation teams seem to be stuck in the pre LLM era and there hasn't been any material change in their very broken and underwhelming recommendations in well over a decade.
I actually dumped the list of books I've bought on Amazon over the last 15 years as a text file at some point and dumped that in ChatGPT. Quite interesting to see it pick up on my tastes. What works really well is taking a few books that you enjoy and asking it to find similar books. You need to set a few guard rails. Recommend new authors, don't recommend stuff I already have read, etc. But that's not a huge amount of context. Amazon seems incapable of doing this. It always funnels me to the same tired list of recommendations of shit I've declined to buy from them for years.
Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
I told my daughter that when I was her age I liked to read Animorphs, and girls were reading Babysitter's Club. She brought home these books from the school library and... they were graphic novels.
Apparently the school library is stocked with comic books and the kids can just read those instead of real books. And comic books don't have descriptions of scenes, they have almost no internal monologue or exposition, no symbolism or (literary) imagery, they really can't teach reading comprehension.
Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.
Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.
My kids both started on and enjoyed graphic novels, then progressed to reading chapter books without pictures etc, I'd say in part because of the graphic novels.
It’s no surprise kids are reading way behind what previous generations did when this is what they are bombarded with.
The quality of modern literature may well be declining, but the is literally endless reading material everywhere
I think parents have to counteract the negative effects of this by exposing their kids to the joys of words and reading. I agree with you 100% that there's an amazing diversity of texts out there now! Every so often when I grab an ereader I think about how blown away I would have been as a kid to think that I could take HUNDREDS of books with me on vacation.
When I was a kid I had a ton of books from my parents in the house and when bored I could pick one up.
That's not the same as having a computer, tablet or phone, cause kids will gravitate towards non-reading activities.
(If everyone in the family owns an e-reader this obviously would be a different situation)
Huh? When I was growing up we had the newspaper, Readers Digest, and maybe a library book at home to read (out side of school books). Now I have access to pretty much anything ever written on my phone. Lack of options is not why people read less.
The real culprit is probably more in line with far more alternatives to reading for entertainment.
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
Did it work? :)
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.
It looks to me far away over there in the "what's my profit in reading" direction I'm afraid.
Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura.
Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement.
The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.
Now that technology CAN give us content at faster speeds, isn't it better for the brains to change to adapt to the short form cycles? Otherwise you'll be left behind stuck on topic one when the new generation have absorbed 1, 2, 3, 4. etc.
Kids would even read in class and get their novels confiscated for the hour
I think the middle ground is important.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
But with the advent of other forms of media, more easily produced and consumed, the quality of what is being consumed is lower than the quality of pleasure reading. Combine that with the firehose rate at which it's being consumed and pleasure reading seems better than it might once have.
Even looking back at my mother reading Stephen King and romance novels … her reading undoubtedly shaped her and helped her understand the world and her experiences within it.
Note: this comment written from the bathtub after putting down “The Stand” by Stephen King, you know, one of those “little value” books.
It's not the work, but the medium. Bad dimestore romance novels are therefor superior to someone watching one of those drivel tiktok soap opera things (no idea what they're called). The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.
Children learn from their parents. If you spend all day in front of screens, so will they. If you don't read, they won't read. School isn't the only place they should read. Doing activities outside of the home is also important. Go rent a cottage in the country and get out of the city.
Some parents limit screen time and delay giving their children phones, but if their peers all have phones and spend much of their time on screens, the parents’ influence may lose out.
In your example, if the friends that came over pulled out their phones and spent most of their time on the phones, the others would eventually follow suit.
And, of course, the reverse is often true — if friends are sitting around talking/interacting, it can sometimes get the others off their screens.
But I’ve also seen many cases, unfortunately, where this wasn’t the case — even though many are interacting, they’ll still keep their face in their screen.
This is often true in adults, too.
I recall being immediately out when one of the boys asked which football team I support, to which I replied "none". So I got sorted to the much smaller group of kids who are not into that and we had our own common interests to bond over.
Looking at my daughter's social circle it starts as early as in preschool.
Few people have a clue about what education is actually for. How can you possibly educate students well if you don't know the destination? And how can you know the destination if you don't know what it means to be human? To be human entails a destination that is definitive for the species.
Overwhelmingly, education today is a shaped by the logic of consumerism. Consumerism begins with a false anthropology, that of the hedonistic homo economicus.
1. Schools send a strong message, whether explicitly or implicitly, that education is about "getting a job". It's about being able to secure a career. At the very least, it is sold primarily as a ticket out of poverty and a means of moving up the social ladder. In a competitive, hyperindividualistic, and consumerist society, status is measured by consumption, so education is a means to increase your power to consume.
2. How many times have we heard teachers say "knowledge is power"? That's a Baconian turn of phrase that represents a turn in scientific history where understanding and knowledge are subordinated to technical power and control. Understanding nature is here dethroned to make way for dominating nature. "Know-how" for us is more important that knowing the "what" and the "why".
3. The coverage of topics and how they're addressed is often jumbled and incoherent. There is some ordering, sure, but it is usually superficial and sloppy. Its practice is like that of some mysterious and obsolete ritual. Many pedagogues are simply bad.
4. Understanding is not rewarded as much as producing supposedly measurable results. In schools, the ultimate result is the grade. The grading system is inherently competitive and designed to rank people first and foremost in a technocratic fashion under the pretense of objectivity. This has "management science" written all over it.
5. Education fads and attempts to artificially infuse technology into education is motivated by profit and abetted by ignorance. Indeed, education in general is big business. Forget tablets and computers. It suffices to note the rapacious practices of the textbook industry, made worse by the fact that these textbooks are almost invariably terrible from a pedagogical standpoint.
Given the soullessness and mechanical nature of modern education, why should we be surprised by what we observe? (I'm not proposing some kind of squishy curriculum. Much of the "reform" of the last few decades that has received just derision is just as misguided, or even worse.) Just as we can talk about factory farming, we may talk about factory education. Students are numbers. But education occurs through relationships. This must begin with parents, but parents are too busy making ends meet or chasing the next promotion. When families were large, older siblings would pick up the slack.
The primary purpose of education is intellectual and moral freedom. Not hyperindividualist freedom, which is about the satisfaction of appetite and the ability to do whatever you happen to feel like doing. The classical view of freedom, which is the ability to do what is objectively good and the ability to be more fully human. Since human beings are essentially intellectual beings and moral beings, it follows that our greatest and most essential expression of freedom is found in the intellectual and the moral.
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...
Reading for pleasure is only loosely related to that.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
Monkey see monkey do. If you want kids to read habitually then you need to read habitually.
Having lived on this planet for a while now, I am under the impression that anything non-adults do always is a problem, no matter what it is.
"Damn you four legged abomination; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee"
It’s not just screens.
Teenagers are overscheduled compared to years past. My son’s purpose in high school seems to be to build a resume for a future college. OTOH I got into a decent college with mediocre grades and not even trying.
He reads a lot - but it’s assigned reading.
So nerdy, smart kids like my son get taken out of the reading for fun group. Exactly the kinds of kids that would have been reading casually in decades past.
There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.
Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.
I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.
Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.
I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
Both of our kids read a lot, one is a bookworm, the other could take it or leave it tbh, but at least he can sit down and read, which is not a skill to be taken for granted anymore unfortunately.
I read frequently to my two-year-old son. It's a fun challenge for me, as I attempt to give every character a different voice and keep it consistent, to emulate the professionals who narrate the audiobooks that I listen to. Currently, he is enjoying Archie comics. I hope the effort I'm putting into it now will help secure his attraction to the medium once he's reading independently.
I love video games as much as I do novels. My parents restricted them for me severely (along with all other screen time) as a child, though, so the amount of time I spent on them was much smaller than the amount I spent reading novels. I thank my folks for that now. I'm not going to be as strict as they were with my son, but I hope I can find a happy medium. He's already very attracted to television, but we try to keep that to short, occasional sessions.
But I read to my son every night and I love it. Not because I'm performing good parenting, but because it's one of the only times he just wants to sit with me rather than run off and do something else. He's completely absorbed. I get to be there with him in that.
He loves books in a way I never did and I'm glad. I wouldn't want him to have my relationship with them. The thread here keeps treating reading as a single thing — either you do it or you don't, and if you don't you're missing out. But being read to and reading alone are completely different experiences, and I think we underestimate how much the first one matters even for kids who will never be readers themselves.
Modern kids / YA fiction seems so blah.
Kids did read more when stories were more about friendship, horses and/or adventure and sci-fi rather than pre-approved content-filtered social studies messaging? Surprise.
The obvious solution would be to force kids to read more from the approved reading list, courtesy by the school board⸮ That'll make them enjoy reading again⸮
(I am not saying technology is innocent in this development. I'm saying: there are several factors, and screen time is by far not the only one.
Every minute of the day dedicated to homework, or a structured activity that can be a bullet point on a college application.
And how are the parents/adults doing?
It's just that the obvious first place to look every time some statistic like this comes out is the parents/teachers/adults. I'd put money on 'Reading for pleasure: all-time low'.
On any given day we're either telling him to put away his switch or his book because that's how engrossed he gets.
A book takes days to finish. A YouTube video minutes.
We need it in 9”. That is if the opening dance is good enough to commit to the next 7”.
Eventually, I started to notice that nearly all the books seemed to essentially be repeating every other book. I stopped reading.
Today I get occasionally read books, but honestly I feel like 95% of book material is just filler.
I get far more from reading websites like this one.
I challenge the notion that reading books is something that leads to smart and well educated people. I just don't think that's true.
What I think it is that leads to that, is curiosity.
Phones take curiosity and run it into overdrive and born out. That's the issue with them for me at least.
I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.
Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.
It's the damn phone.
I was born in the 80s, in USSR, and learned reading at 3 y.o. thanks to my mom who would read stories to me constantly while I was sitting next to her, trying to figure those mysterious symbols out.
When I got to elementary school, one of the topics kids would discuss first is how old they were when they started reading, and it turns out that 3 y.o. readers were not rare at all, quite opposite - most of my classmates started reading around the ages of 3 & 5. And if someone admitted they didn't start reading by the age of 6, they would get concerned looks from us all, like "Are you even ok mate?". A couple of kids who went to school not being able to read on their own, write and count at least up to 100 struggled to study and were lagging behind.
And that wasn't the case of our parents trying to raise prodigies, that's just where the bar was at the time. Also lack of any kind of digital entertainment and 3 state TV channels.
Apparently in the UK it's up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cze93wggw74o
During the pandemic I took my kids out of public school for the first year of it. They went to an outdoor/nature based private school that popped up. It was a part time arrangement. The rest of their week was homeschooling. They read even more and even started doing math problems for fun. I stopped reading to my daughter because she wanted to read her own thing. I continued with my son who is two years younger.
After that year the kids went back to public school. My daughter was of age to go into high school. I was reticent because of the positive experience they just had and how happy my kids were at the time, and the awful experiences other kids were having with being stuck home online trying to have virtual classes at that age. The other kids were in and out of school with masks and sanitizing. Most have bad recollections of that first pandemic year. It was the opposite for us.
When they started high school there was an expectation to be connected via smartphone and social media. Without it, you were socially disconnected. The decline in reading for fun started there. The difficult experiences in high school, like bullying and social pressures to fit in, were amplified by the smartphones. By the time my daughter finished high school she stopped reading for fun entirely. My son is nearing the end of high school and he had similar experiences. They became less physically active, gave up on most sports they used to play.
Although, if I were to say what was the cause, I wouldn’t point to the devices, but the inability for the school system to adapt. The “social” media are gamified, pushing the psychological buttons of not only the kids, but for everyone. There’s the proverbial dopamine hit, toxic engagement, and reaction farming. Kids are potentially carrying a casino, brothel, and drug dealers in their pockets. Adults are having to deal with the same issues themselves. However, kids are in school. There’s an institution in place to guide them.
If we know attention spans and over-use of social media are a problem, the schools can adapt and compensate the other way. Remove it from the equation. Make education more physically hands on, more about training focus and self-discipline. Train them on tasks requiring longer periods of concentration. Go completely non-digital if you have to, or use fixed-in-place desktop computers where needed. Instead, they’ve allowed smartphones and social media to completely dominate the environment.
