I refuse to believe that the decline of our education system is some inevitable, intractable problem.
It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
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Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm afraid I am addicted to short-form video and wish I could go back to spending more of my free-time reading books.
Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.
Part of that might be your book choice.
I found that when trying to rekindle my reading habit, book choice had a big effect. Some books are like vegetables you know you should eat but really don't want to and other books are junk food. Empty calories that you love.
Pick from the latter pile at first and rebuild the muscle.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#13This is not a fair comparison:
> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.
It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#14I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person. Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a l…
I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all.
I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.
In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#15I read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence.
Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.
There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#16> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.
Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#17> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent. Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
I don't think I learned this skill from the sat.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#18[flagged]
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#19This is not a fair comparison: > Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pl…
Yeah, at least it should be over the same time period!
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#20This is not a fair comparison: > Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pl…
Your selective quote left off the part that made it a fairer comparison. "Only 38 read a novel or short story" was a follow-up to "fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022." That's a year-long stat.