Kids Can't Read Books

The article completely misses the most likely cause: educators have <i>massively</i> screwed up reading education!<p>Instead of teaching kids phonics (&quot;what sounds do those letters make?&quot;), they are being taught alternative forms which boil down to whole-word recognition and <i>guessing</i>. Don&#x27;t recognize a word? Just make up something which feels right in this context. The result is that kids have incredibly poor reading skills, so they don&#x27;t read books because they simply <i>can&#x27;t read</i>.<p>It&#x27;s made even worse by the &quot;students are less likely to identify works of literature as favorite books, instead referencing young adult books like the Percy Jackson series&quot; elitism going around. If you want kids to read, stop force-feeding them boring and outdated &quot;classics&quot;. Those books aren&#x27;t fun, they don&#x27;t align with their day-to-day life, and kids just don&#x27;t care about them. Would you rather have a kid who ends up with the idea that reading is horrible because they were forced to go through Ulysses and who is never going to read a book again, or do you want a kid who thinks reading is fun because they read a dozen Percy Jackson novels and who is going to branch out beyond YA later in life?<p>It&#x27;s easy to blame social media and TikTok, but we&#x27;ve heard those same lazy arguments blaming &quot;modern innovation&quot; for <i>decades</i>. First with radio, then with television, then with internet, then with games, and now finally with social media. It&#x27;s wasn&#x27;t true then, and it&#x27;s not true now.<p>And stop trying to drag &quot;the left&quot; and student lone forgiveness into this: it has <i>absolutely nothing</i> to do with kids&#x27; reading skills and only undermines whatever argument you&#x27;re trying to make.

A couple of nitpicks with this article:<p>- I don&#x27;t watch movies nor hear music from the in-flight-entertainment system, because I find mainstream American movies less engaging than the flight map :-) (the non-mainstream ones are sometimes quite good). In my mind, or in my laptop, I complete stories that I&#x27;m writing or want to write. Or I consume an audiobook in my own phone+headphones, if I&#x27;m lucky enough to have something interesting to read.<p>- One of the things that motivates me to write is that every time I board a train, I find a bunch of people reading a thick volume or another, from all ages. Once, I traveled with a fellow writer from my town, who, luck had it, sat in the seat next to mine.<p>But, full disclaimer, I live in northern Europe. When I travel to USA, it surprises me how many people use tablets in airplanes to watch movies and series...

It&#x27;d be interesting to hear what happens when these &quot;no attention span&quot; kids enter professions where at-length focused reading is mandatory. Say, some parts of law, where the documentation for a case is often &gt;1k pages, and the deadlines are real.

The article author is not reading attentively. He is referencing a story about &quot;Illinois high school teacher who themed her English course around decision making and, instead of having students read The Odyssey, assigned excerpts along with articles, music, and other media&quot;<p>I clicked on it and it is story teacher who assigned parts of Odyssey as a part of &quot;unit about leadership&quot;. There is no mention of students having to read whole Odyssey previously (or at all). Just that it used to be more books focused and now it is mix of text and other media. I would even argue that having to read 560 pages of Fagles Oddyssey translation would be quite excessive and offtopic to the &quot;unit about leadership&quot;. Only small parts of the Odyssey have to do with leadership.

The author of this pro-books piece is an MD at Achieve Partners which pumps e-learning (chromebooks, iPads, ar&#x2F;vr in classrooms). Is the author speaking candidly out the side of his mouth here? Maybe he quit recently in disgust and just hasn’t updated his CV.

So seems like the future expressed in Neil Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” where the underclass can’t read and instead uses “mediaglyphics” interact with computers is becoming true

I cant help but roll the eyes over &quot;incoming college students are less likely to identify works of literature as favorite books, instead referencing young adult books&quot;.<p>My favorite books were Terry Pratchett books and &quot;The Witcher&quot; when I was young. I would probably respond with some literature if professor asked, to look smarter. That the few remaining people who actually read respond more openly to that question is a good thing.<p>That being said, contemporary adults read less books then adults used to too. There is no such thing as a discussion of books in the workplace, there is no expectation that anyone reads books. However, you do find discussions about series and movies.

&gt; Has any policy ever looked more politically dunderheaded in immediate hindsight than the Democratic Party&#x27;s obsession with student loan forgiveness?<p>Friendly reminder that Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) exist [0], and that both the loan forgiveness program and lifting the bankruptcy bans directly threaten this market.<p>&gt; Even before the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, student loan debt—totaling over $1.64 trillion—was a cause for concern, as it is the second largest source of consumer debt in the United States, trailing only mortgage debt. And like collateralized mortgage debt, there is a market for collateralized student debt. Student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS) are the securitized form of student loan debt, repackaged as a marketable financial instrument. As with any investment vehicle, asset-backed securities like SLABS come with risk, particularly when borrowers default on their loans or have their debt discharged through bankruptcy proceedings. However, historically, SLABS have been a relatively sure bet—yielding consistent returns on investment—given that many student loans are guaranteed by the government and that student loan debt obligations are difficult for borrowers to escape. This is because there has been a long-standing and near-total prohibition on student loan discharge via bankruptcy proceedings. A spate of recent decisions rendered in the United States Bankruptcy Courts and two federal circuit courts of appeal could eliminate that prohibition. In turn, this decision could negatively impact the SLABS market, and in a broader sense, the United States economy.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=3631953" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=3631953</a>

- Starts off with partisan political ramblings. - Blames everything on &quot;kids these days&quot; and social media.<p>What kind of boomer garbage is this? Did my grandpa write this article?<p>I read this article for free (thank you adblock) yet somehow still feel like I want money back as compensation.

A few notes:<p>- There was a massive change in the NAEP Reading Achievement Levels in 2007. Reading levels were much more hand-wavey before then. See for yourself here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;nationsreportcard&#x2F;reading&#x2F;achieve.aspx#2009ald" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;nationsreportcard&#x2F;reading&#x2F;achieve.aspx#2...</a>. Consequently, reading levels &quot;dropped&quot; quite a lot without dropping much at all. This is presented in the NAEP Reading Performance statistics; in fact, more people have achieved NAEP Advanced reading performance in 2022 than before across all grade levels except grade 8: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;coe&#x2F;indicator&#x2F;cnb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;coe&#x2F;indicator&#x2F;cnb</a><p>- Average time spent reading has been low since well before the smartphone. According to the BLS, the same data source that the author was pulling from by proxy, in 2003, men and women spent an average of ~32m&#x2F;day and ~41m&#x2F;day reading, respectively. Meanwhile, both groups spent &gt;2hrs&#x2F;day on TV. In fact, average reading time went way down once the TV became mainstream, as the bottom graphic of this article demonstrates: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clickamericana.com&#x2F;topics&#x2F;family-parenting&#x2F;people-spend-free-time-back-1970s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clickamericana.com&#x2F;topics&#x2F;family-parenting&#x2F;people-sp...</a>. People have gravitated to the most entertaining platform to kill time since time immemorial; books beat out nothing, cheap theater beat out books, TV beat out the theater, modern smartphones + fast, cheap Internet is beating out everything; who knows what&#x27;s next.<p>- Anecdotally, I&#x27;ve been traveling a lot for work for many years. &quot;Fast&quot; Wi-Fi in air travel didn&#x27;t become ubiquitous until 2021 or so. When I started traveling weekly back in 2016, _if_ an aircraft had Wi-Fi on board, it was Gogo&#x27;s (now Intelsat&#x27;s) cellular solution that was horribly slow, hardly worked and cost somewhere between $16-32 _per flight segment_. Today, almost all mainline aircraft have satellite internet that is actually usable (with high latency) that is somewhere between free (if you&#x27;re a T-Mobile subscriber) and $19 (for international flights) per segment. Given this, it&#x27;s much easier to scroll through your socials to pass the time on a flying tin can that you didn&#x27;t really want to be inside of in the first place.<p>- The &quot;flying tin can&quot; bit is important. Most people HATE flying. The security scans, the noise, the walking (OH MY FUCKING GOD THE WALKING), the bag check, the TSA going through your shit because god forbid you left a water bottle in your luggage and forgot to remove it...it is a really shitty experience for many people. On top of that, you&#x27;re crammed in row 27A inside of a brand new 737 MAX 9 (that you&#x27;ve heard has issue with exit doors blowing out randomly or falling from the sky for no damn reason) where deli snacks that would normally cost $5 cost $12 because fuck you, which particularly sucks because your flight was an hour delayed and you haven&#x27;t eaten anything in hours because it took 18.75 years to actually get to the gate. Reading is supposed to be relaxing. For many people, air travel is the least relaxing environment possible.<p>- I don&#x27;t have a lot of experience with composition and reading education, but I do have some from hearing my wife talk about teaching math for 11 years. TL;DR: It is very likely that teachers want to incorporate more modern pedagogy in their curriculums, but in a world in which educators have almost zero input in curriculum planning, taxpayers reliably vote for less public school funding (because &quot;teachers are overpaid and don&#x27;t work&quot; or &quot;i was a student once and teachers don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing&quot; or $INSANELY_UNINFORMED_TAKE), and politicians encourage book bans to prevent children from reading the &quot;wrong&quot; books, doing so isn&#x27;t realistic.<p>My take: This is a submarine right-wing plant that, once again, blames educators and social media for existing while conveniently skipping over historical context and political climate.

I’d like to defend the opposite perspective. Kids today are connected to a firehose of information-dense content distributed over the web and through cell phones. They’re consuming more information than any generation in the past, both garbage and high-value content.<p>There is an undeniable “holier than thou” attitude pushed by avid book readers. Frankly, there are a lot of books and long-form content which could be summarized without losing value into a single internet blog post. People have changed the way they consume information and books are on the decline but I reject the idea this is a crisis.

All the kids that are forced to read as a family and finish the Bible every year, wholly, are so unfairly advantaged compared to their peers it’s not even funny anymore.

&gt; With attempting to bestow a half-trillion-dollar benefit on people who attended – and often graduated from – college when a majority of Americans – and an overwhelming majority of voters who needed to be convinced that Democrats aren’t a bunch of elitist twits – did not?<p>The fact that this is the most common argument against student loan forgiveness that I see doesn&#x27;t do a good job of convincing me. The argument that we are somehow obliged to keep conditions bad to be fair to those who came before just seems petty.<p>Rather what are some actual arguments against this policy? I&#x27;m no expert, but it seems logical that we should want to help out those who are disproportionally less financially mobile. It is after all very key for innovation.