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Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

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Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

#71
post #5

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 o…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

#73
post #16

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 .

They have a term for it, it's called brain rot. That's what I witness them watching anyway.

Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

#74
To be fair, I don’t see enough discussion about education since the 2000s. Parents are the only ones who complain and put some pressure, but once they no longer have kids in school, they stop caring about the quality of education. There needs to be a better framework for assessing quality than the student-parent generational comparison.

Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

#75
post #6

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

Smoking has morphed into vaping and zyn.

Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

#76
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

usual disingeous HN response. Nobody except you is talking about history.

Today, the obvious communist societies are China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba perhaps the lesser-known of the bunch.

Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

#77
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

usual disingeous HN response. Nobody except you is talking about history. Today, the obvious communist societies are China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba perhaps the lesser-known of the bunch.

> Nobody except you is talking about history.

You're kind of missing the point of my comment. You said, in essence, that it's impossible to learn about Communism unless you've experienced it personally.

> China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba

Of those countries, how many have you experienced personally, and thus, by your standard, are qualified to comment on?

To what extent is modern China actually Communist, as opposed capitalist-authoritarian?

Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"which inevitably changes the learning environment"

This, right here, is the most commonly repeated trope in "tech" circles whenever the topic of education comes up. It's infrequently questioned at all, much less challenged outright, despite there being literally no foundational shifts in any of the individual curricula that a basic education is constructed from. So from an academic standpoint the world isn't actually moving much at all. It's this rhetoric that has lead the charge for tech infiltrating the classroom, a shift which has produced measurably poorer educational outcomes.

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