141–150 of 350 posts
If you go to the original link [0] you will see that things are actually pretty stable and okay? 0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos? I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rot…
My pen weighs in at 10g in my backpack and is capable of durably recording information for thousands of years. No battery to charge, cheap, and plentiful.
Why is reading for pleasure always placed on some sort of pedestal? I would argue that what is being consumed is more important than the medium of consumption. 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.
Quality of what's produced in that medium might be one thing. People reading for pleasure are usually reading works published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality. Sure, it might be "trashy" novels relative to literature, but at least there's a floor to the quality level or else it just doesn't get published. But with the advent of other forms of media, more easily produced and…
You can say the same for movies and tv if you filter by IMDB score (which i do). Heck even podcasts get millions of views before I ever hear about them.
We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort. 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 ar…
We should recognize its not a generational issue but something that affects us all-young and old
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My parents had a rule where the default answer when I asked them to buy me things was no—except for books. Combined with the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere and did not have cable TV, books were by far the most appealing thing around.
Isn't this the problem though, books are no longer attractive with all the other options? How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?
You don't need to pretend it didn't exist, you need to legislate and ensure that access to it is cut off uniformly for developing minds. We already see the emergence of this kind of legislation with Australia enforcing a ban for social media under 16s; and other countries in the process of legislating ones.
I happen to favor this approach because "pretend it doesn't exist" strategy doesn't work for addictive things that are left lying around the house for kids to access. If society in general can prevent children from getting access to alcohol before 21, there's no particular reason the same can't be done for addictive "social" media algorithms.
It's worse than this. 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…
I read an Economist article a few years ago that mentioned a literature professor at Columbia who said that most his undergrad freshmen students have never read a book cover to cover. Of those that have, their favorites were young adult fiction. Most of his students couldn't even focus on a single sonnet. Apparently kids nowadays are having difficulty focusing on individual sentences, and a lot of them are just effec…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Herd mentality, anti-intellectual culture, poor reading skills, and ADHD are widespread issues. Those mothers sound lame, and ultimately the joke's on them. Reading is awesome, and making fun of someone for it just shows what basic bitches they are.
Hey, come on... I have ADHD and love reading. No need to use that as a bludgeon. It's unnecessary...
It's worse than this. 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…
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos? I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rot…
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?
This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure. 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.
The quality of modern literature may well be declining, but the is literally endless reading material everywhere