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Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

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Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#281

Post by ayatollah »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #247
beezlewax wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have noticed the same behavioural issues amongst your adult friends or at times in yourself. I know I have. Anytime I give up doom scrolling for a week or two I feel instantly less anxious about the world and everything going on around me. Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Something akin to smoking.

> Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Not only will it not, autism will not last more than 25 years in it's current form. I bet money on both of those

Thanks for your input, I find this take intriguing. Could you elaborate on the link you see between social media and Autism?

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#282

Post by watwut »

buellerbueller wrote: post #273
watwut wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young adult fiction being the fing young adults read the most makes 100% sense.

If you are a student at any Ivy League, I expect you to have read and, yes, found enjoyment in something more weighty than YA Lit.

How did you travelled from "this is their favorite book" to "they dont find enjoyment in anything else"? That is absurd.

Second, why is it shocking that smart educated Ivy League student would enjoy a book written for the young adult category? They read manga, superhero comicd, they watch same series on TV. Are you similarly shocked they watch football and their favorite movie is not from 1959?

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#283

Post by ido »

jhedwards wrote: post #268
zhivota wrote: post #115

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…

Just for some perspective, my kids get about 1 hour of screen time a day, and a lot of my friends are shocked at how much they watch. I'm glad you made this change and saw the positive effect, especially to the extent that they started choosing other activities over screen time, but I can't image how much they were watching before you "cut down" to 2 hours a day, and how you could have felt that that was OK for child…

They didn't write how old the kids were, there's a big difference between a 3 year old and a 12 year old.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#285

Post by cobertos »

bawolff wrote: post #280
kuerbel wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what they are doing on the device, 100%. When I was a kid I got a GameBoy, one of those old red ones, played tetris or Mario Land for an hour and after that it was boring and I did something else. Got an N64 which was already way more engaging, but even then after an hour or two I was done. It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrol…

I think the internet is the real problem. Infinite choices, and sites designed specificly to keep you hooked. I feel like addictivity falls a lot when you are stuck with just offline things.

I think so too. The restrictions of offline software means it has less ability to nag you or pull you in a specific direction. The software you have at any given time is what you've got.

Same sort of theme I've being going for in my personal intranet. It's calmer offline.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#286

Post by drob518 »

helterskelter wrote: post #108
larrik wrote: post #33

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…

Yep, it’s a crisis. We’re raising kids that are illiterate and frankly just dumb. You ever watch those YouTube videos where they interview college kids (who were actually accepted to a college!) and they can’t correctly answer who fought in the US Civil War and other basic knowledge questions? They don’t know the difference between continents and countries (e.g. Europe and a country within Europe). They can’t tell you who the Vice President is, never mind their Senators or their state governor. Clearly the education establishment has failed in a big way. And clearly, technology in the classroom has not improved anything.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#287

Post by drob518 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #171
helterskelter wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Man, I literally never stopped as a kid - I always had a dogeared paperback on my person, in case a few spare minutes presented themselves to read. And when I say “spare minutes” I mean… any time anyone wasn’t saying “put down that fucking book!” - I don’t know if the phenomenon of hiding a novel in a textbook and looking very very studious in class is even a thing any more. These days I read almost exclusively on my…

Yea, I take my iPad everywhere for the same reason. I’ve gone digital simply because our house already has bookshelves in every room and they are all full, so I literally find it difficult to buy physical books anymore. But I’m always reading, though I confess to reading more non-fiction than fiction these days.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#288

Post by randusername »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #204
chicken-stew wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the result of reading, and the occasional jolt I get when reading, but not the activity of reading. I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes. The thing that gets me most happened after I got into Hemmingway: everything in a book happens in the forefront. In a movie you can have things happening outside your span od attention. Not in a book. You can’t have a doorbell happening in the back…

My apologies for over-commenting in this page but, uh, is there a way to read without reading the words? WTF does "I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes." mean? Are people reading with their eyes closed or using braille or listening to the paper or something?

I read a lot. My subjective experience of reading fiction is that I daydream it. After I build up speed over a couple pages I'm not really aware my eyeballs are sliding over markings or that my fingers are turning pages.

Some people can't do that, but who knows what their brains are doing that mine can't.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#289

Post by watwut »

darth_avocado wrote: post #74
damnesian wrote: post #2

The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.

So you need to look at complete data. This will give you that: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/reading/scores-pe... What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before. Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suff…

This is about pleasure reading, not about reading comprehenshion scores. Those are two different only somewhat related things.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#290

Post by frankohn »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #236
frankohn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having all the time the nose in a book is a disfunctional behavior just like being on the phone all the time is disfunctional. Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional. However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to…

Child raised with this mentality will throw you in a retirement home and disown you. I don’t blame them one bit.

Do you care to argument on what you disagree with my comment ?
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