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Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

nytimes.com

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Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#251

Post by ThrowMeAway1618 »

bgbntty2 wrote: post #59
stevewodil wrote: post #4

I don’t know if this matters much. When I was in school it was rare to actually read a book assignment anyways, and I’m sure with LLMs now it’s less. I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.

I think school ruined fiction books for me. I had to read long boring books about stories that didn't interest me, with useless sentences describing what the scene looked like or what someone had for dinner. Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases. Maybe if I wasn't forced to read a book in an outdated lan…

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Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#252

Post by ThrowMeAway1618 »

rawgabbit wrote: post #223
saltcured wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native US English speaker, I enjoyed Shakespeare and even when we read Beowulf and some Chaucer in mildly transcribed and annotated Middle English. More than any history lesson, it developed in me a feeling for how, in spite of lots of technological and other societal change, the basic human condition is the same. I imagine it would be interesting to read early texts in other proto languages too. Sadly, I'm not…

I graduated from public school a long time ago. I hated Shakespeare. The phrasing and Englishness of it was a complete turn off. And I read a lot. I believe I read almost a fourth of the books in my little public library in my rural town in Texas. As far as writing, I admire the writing in the King James Bible more than Shakespeare although I am Catholic. I would say most of the books I read were crap and written poo…

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Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#253

Post by rayiner »

scoofy wrote: post #74
tyleo wrote: post #40

Comments here are very strange, “Reading books should go the way of cursive! Education is more like childcare anyways.” It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?

Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people…

I’m a nerd, but we were never a nation of nerds and things turned out pretty well. The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise.

Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.” I went to the Iowa Caucuses back in 2019. These were democrats, but not highly educated ones. Mostly farm and farm adjacent people. But watching them ask questions and deliberate, there was a degree of level-headedness, practicality, prudence, skepticism, and caution that was just remarkable to watch. These are folks who don’t have much book learning but come from generations of people who managed to plan and organize their lives well enough to survive Iowa’s brutally harsh winters and short planting window (about 14 days—either side of that and you and your whole family die). You need smart people to do smart people things, but those conscientious normies are the backbone of a healthy society.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#254

Post by rayiner »

atmavatar wrote: post #79
scoofy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people…

> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted. For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts a…

My daughter, at her very expensive deep-blue private school, learned that the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois—who didn’t have written language—but didn’t learn about the English civil war where the ideas behind the constitution actually had their genesis.

In terms of being a citizen in America, it’s far more important to understand the English civil war, British history, etc. Those are the instruction manual for the actual society we have inherited. Even in my deep red state public school system, we spent way more time than was warranted on native Americans and other things that people feel guilty about. If you’re born in a multi-generational colony ship, you need to know how the CO2 scrubbers work. It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#256

Post by renehsz »

haizhung wrote: post #150

Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory . * Die Vorstadtkrokodile * Faust I * Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum * Antigone * Die Verwandlung * Bahnwärter Thiel * Der Sandmann * Die Räuber * Hamlet * Der Besuch der alten Dame * Im Westen nichts Neues * Unterm Rad * Woyzeck Im probably missing 5 books or s…

There's still plenty of mandatory reading. It's not unusual for high schoolers to have to read at least two books per semester. Here's the problem though: It's just too easy to... you know... not do it. Teachers have no way of reliably telling the difference between those students who complete their reading assignments honestly and those who make due with summaries and AI assistance. Don't ask me how I know ;-)

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#257

Post by Cayde-6 »

eimrine wrote: post #138
squigz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Literally buy books? What about ereaders? Install adblockers and de-shittify your OS? I don't have the problems you seem to have, and I'm on Windows.

Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it. Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices. Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goe…

If you have a library anywhere nearby, you don't need to worry about purchasing and selling individual books. Over they years they have gotten even more lenient with long loan periods, online renewals, mostly eliminated late fees, and (depending on where you live) returns at any library location within a regional system.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#258

Post by apparent »

rayiner wrote: post #249
apparent wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading I would not assume this, given that the states with the highest literacy rates are mostly rural and at least half red (NH, MN, ND, VT, SD, NE).

Yeah, reading scores are about how well you teach reading. In terms of NAEP 8th grade reading scores, New York, Georgia, Utah, Illinois, Rhode Island, and California cluster together in the top half, in that order: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/blog_na...

The linked chart says it's for "white students". How does it look when all students are included? ChatGPT shows different results (though these could of course be incorrect).

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#259

Post by shoobiedoo »

squigz wrote: post #120
shoobiedoo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

okay, but if you care about recall and activating regions of the brain that create a better understanding of what you're learning, handwriting wins according to research.

Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd. More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing woul…

Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) – available via Psychological Science / SAGE (DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581)

Longcamp et al. (2005) – PubMed or Elsevier (Acta Psychologica)

Smoker et al. (2009) – Human Factors and Ergonomics Society proceedings

Umejima et al. (2021) – Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (open access)

Ito et al. (2020) – HCII conference proceedings (Springer CCIS)

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#260

Post by eimrine »

Cayde-6 wrote: post #257
eimrine wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it. Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices. Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goe…

If you have a library anywhere nearby, you don't need to worry about purchasing and selling individual books. Over they years they have gotten even more lenient with long loan periods, online renewals, mostly eliminated late fees, and (depending on where you live) returns at any library location within a regional system.

My Ukrainian town used to have 3 libraries. Now the only library here is a school one. The reason so much libraries have got destroyed is the censourship. Now Ukrainian govt makes some active progress into censourship of anything printed by Russian language. Since most of the books accumulated for dozens of years were not yet prohibited but definitely unwanted - now I have no libraries at all.

I am very happy to hear that old and cool libraries are still a thing somewhere.

I use to teach local kids how to get pirated books with no DRM but I have a feeling that they will never use my recommendation. They just open their first page with no animated pictures and get lost immediately, their eyes are not even moving through the text in a proper way. They look to me like when I see some new musical instrument which I can not play because I have not observed it earlier.

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