HN has logged 1300 comments in the past decade on a couple of apmreports posts about how a U.S. experimental reading methodology has destroyed reading capability: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=apmreports+teaching
Educational fads come and go. My brother is five (school) years younger than I am, which was time enough for our school to move from phonics to shape recognition. (His first-grade year will have been 60 years ago in September.) He survived and reads a lot. It didn't hurt that we grew up in a house with lots of books.
I had New Math somewhere around middle school. Probably the time could have been better used, but it didn't cripple me.
That has nothing to with anything. Books are less fun then youtube/netflix/tiktok/video games.
And unlike youtube and tiktok, they cost money and you have to go to bookstore or library to get them. There are no equivalets of kids journals/channels that would promote fun books to kids either.
Schools cant change that. When my generation read, a lot of it was cheap junk with formulaic plot. That was replaced by tiktok. And once that does not exist, the books are not perceived as potential fun for kids. They are just another homework
Reading a pulp novel as opposed to watching 10 second video clips is in no way comparable. I went to good schools but I hope most public schools still have libraries and if they don’t where I live the library is extremely cheap for young children. Also TikTok and YouTube aren’t free FFS, they’re commodifying your data anyways I don’t have children but if I did and I wanted them to read and the place where I live isn’t giving them an environment to do that I would try to create one myself (easier said than done I know) but kids can have book clubs just like adults do I would often hang out and talk to other kids about the books we both enjoyed reading.
My main point was that books are not treated as an entertainment anymore. It is education, chore, character development, duty. I am from generation that read more and a lot of that was us being bored and anything fun. All of that is tiktok/youtube now.
You did not had to go out of your way to find fun books, they came to you. There was kids journals with mini reviews of books and sometimes asked parents to buy one, because review sounded cool. Kids do not read kids journals either, they watch youtube and no youtube channel recommends books.
But, adults do not read for fun anymore either. The sort of demographics that read dumb books dont read at all. Those who read more sophisticated books watch more sophisticated shows. Basically only people who regularly read are those who are consciously seeking education.
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School libraries do not have pulp novels in them and if they did quite a few parents would call riot. Including people who complain on HN that kids are not assigned <insert whatever novel written for adults dealing with adult relationships that go over kids heads>.
Kids cant go to normal libraries unless someone drives them or accompanies them. And that someone has typically educational goal in mind, so that feeling you can pick pulp/junk and not be judged is not there.
> Also TikTok and YouTube aren’t free FFS, they’re commodifying your data
I dont think kids care about that. Or most of the population, which includes their parents and teachers.
> kids can have book clubs just like adults do I would often hang out and talk to other kids about the books we both enjoyed reading.
Kids don't have book clubs. To be honest, adult book clubs are something I have seen only in the movies. If you organize a book club for kids, it is another educational activity like math club. It can lead to some kids liking reading/math ... but it does not mean there is overall "math is fun" culture existing.
I remember the first time I read His Dark Materials trilogy as a kid and how much I loved it. I was able to escape to a completely different world, and it was the first love story I really enjoyed. I loved it so much I reread the books immediately, and begged my parents for the cassettes for the audiobooks. Makes me kind of sad that we seem to not value reading as a form of entertainment anymore because getting immersed in a book is a completely unique feeling I rarely get from any visual media.
> In Texas, she said, “There’s no way we would have been able to read the entire thing. It’s [Enemies: A Love Story] a beautiful book, but there is an affair in it.”
Wow. Wait'll they encounter Genesis, Samuel, Kings, etc.
> Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video...
In no world would I consider a person who says "it's okay if the next generation is illiterate" an education expert.
And the guy selling excerpts software says there's no data suggesting a deep, unsolvable flaw in his product. Cool.
> Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels.
... If anyone is working on reversing this I'd love to hear where you're starting.
Reversing it? We're on the cusp of the LLM era. You're on a site full of people trying to sell one kind of summarization or another as so thoroughly a replacement for reading full original texts that it can't be questioned without raising hackneyed accusations of objecting to the invention of the calculator. Before long people who read full novels will be seen the way we now see people who listen to music on vinyl.
My suggestion is get kids into audiobooks first and then get them reading, also don’t let kids watch tv or have a smart phone I wasn’t allowed to watch tv during the week as a kid, and I have neck problems because I read so much. Now I’m lucky if I get through a book a year.
HN has logged 1300 comments in the past decade on a couple of apmreports posts about how a U.S. experimental reading methodology has destroyed reading capability: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=apmreports+teaching
Educational fads come and go. My brother is five (school) years younger than I am, which was time enough for our school to move from phonics to shape recognition. (His first-grade year will have been 60 years ago in September.) He survived and reads a lot. It didn't hurt that we grew up in a house with lots of books.
I had New Math somewhere around middle school. Probably the time could have been better used, but it didn't cripple me.
That has nothing to with anything. Books are less fun then youtube/netflix/tiktok/video games.
And unlike youtube and tiktok, they cost money and you have to go to bookstore or library to get them. There are no equivalets of kids journals/channels that would promote fun books to kids either.
Schools cant change that. When my generation read, a lot of it was cheap junk with formulaic plot. That was replaced by tiktok. And once that does not exist, the books are not perceived as potential fun for kids. They are just another homework
Reading a pulp novel as opposed to watching 10 second video clips is in no way comparable. I went to good schools but I hope most public schools still have libraries and if they don’t where I live the library is extremely cheap for young children. Also TikTok and YouTube aren’t free FFS, they’re commodifying your data anyways I don’t have children but if I did and I wanted them to read and the place where I live isn’t giving them an environment to do that I would try to create one myself (easier said than done I know) but kids can have book clubs just like adults do I would often hang out and talk to other kids about the books we both enjoyed reading.
My main point was that books are not treated as an entertainment anymore. It is education, chore, character development, duty. I am from generation that read more and a lot of that was us being bored and anything fun. All of that is tiktok/youtube now.
You did not had to go out of your way to find fun books, they came to you. There was kids journals with mini reviews of books and sometimes asked parents to buy one, because review sounded cool. Kids do not read kids journals either, they watch youtube and no youtube channel recommends books.
But, adults do not read for fun anymore either. The sort of demographics that read dumb books dont read at all. Those who read more sophisticated books watch more sophisticated shows. Basically only people who regularly read are those who are consciously seeking education.
---------------
School libraries do not have pulp novels in them and if they did quite a few parents would call riot. Including people who complain on HN that kids are not assigned <insert whatever novel written for adults dealing with adult relationships that go over kids heads>.
Kids cant go to normal libraries unless someone drives them or accompanies them. And that someone has typically educational goal in mind, so that feeling you can pick pulp/junk and not be judged is not there.
> Also TikTok and YouTube aren’t free FFS, they’re commodifying your data
I dont think kids care about that. Or most of the population, which includes their parents and teachers.
> kids can have book clubs just like adults do I would often hang out and talk to other kids about the books we both enjoyed reading.
Kids don't have book clubs. To be honest, adult book clubs are something I have seen only in the movies. If you organize a book club for kids, it is another educational activity like math club. It can lead to some kids liking reading/math ... but it does not mean there is overall "math is fun" culture existing.
I remember the first time I read His Dark Materials trilogy as a kid and how much I loved it. I was able to escape to a completely different world, and it was the first love story I really enjoyed. I loved it so much I reread the books immediately, and begged my parents for the cassettes for the audiobooks. Makes me kind of sad that we seem to not value reading as a form of entertainment anymore because getting immersed in a book is a completely unique feeling I rarely get from any visual media.
> In Texas, she said, “There’s no way we would have been able to read the entire thing. It’s [Enemies: A Love Story] a beautiful book, but there is an affair in it.”
Wow. Wait'll they encounter Genesis, Samuel, Kings, etc.
> Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video...
In no world would I consider a person who says "it's okay if the next generation is illiterate" an education expert.
And the guy selling excerpts software says there's no data suggesting a deep, unsolvable flaw in his product. Cool.
> Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels.
... If anyone is working on reversing this I'd love to hear where you're starting.
Reversing it? We're on the cusp of the LLM era. You're on a site full of people trying to sell one kind of summarization or another as so thoroughly a replacement for reading full original texts that it can't be questioned without raising hackneyed accusations of objecting to the invention of the calculator. Before long people who read full novels will be seen the way we now see people who listen to music on vinyl.
My suggestion is get kids into audiobooks first and then get them reading, also don’t let kids watch tv or have a smart phone I wasn’t allowed to watch tv during the week as a kid, and I have neck problems because I read so much. Now I’m lucky if I get through a book a year.