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Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

> I’m willing to bet almost anything home reading is down.

Your implication is that children, famous for their love of texting rather than calling, are reading less than a generation of tv watching phone callers?

Don’t discount the idea that children are simply better at reading digital content and these tests are testing analogue reading skills.

Keep in mind we just invented the machine that takes complex abstract writing and makes it easy to digest (and takes simple thoughts and expands them into rich texts).

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I think it's pretty clear that the critical reading skills required to handle the information density in a tiktok caption or the average message between 15 year olds is a little different than what we're aiming for in an educational setting.

Language informs thought, in a very concrete way. If I can't write it, or read it, I can't think it (to some degree). We abandon formal reading and writing educational standards at the risk of handicapping a generation of young people with poor cognitive scaffolding.

When was the last time you read anything in Latin/Greek because people in 1750 would agree with you, except they would be talking about the classics.

All the Covid explanation folks should try this: take away phones and computer for six months and have your kids read (old!) fiction books and good (challenging) non-fiction. Limit TV to a few approved shows/movies as a rare treat. I bet you ‘ll be surprised.

Which book should I use to read hacker news?

Texting with your peers (people at roughly the same reading level as you) won't teach you much compared to reading increasingly challenging books written by adults who actually know what they're doing with words.

I’m sorry, but is your implication that the point of books is to make information hard to digest for the sake of some vain appearance of intelligence?

Not efficiently communicating ideas?

It's not about the informational "nonfiction" content of the books, we're talking about teaching kids how to use language. Expanding people's vocabulary and awareness of all the language has to offer so that more cultural and informative works might become accessible to them. If you're not challenging yourself, you're not learning.

Sure, but keep in mind, we just invented the machine that takes hard-to-digest content and transforms it into something easy to understand.

It's challenging to read the original classics in Greek (and for a while, doing so was considered the epitome of linguistic education), but we have all agreed that it's not worth it given the realities of the modern world.

Take agape for example. Understanding the various ways in which that was used to express 'love' is a masterclass in the history of human emotional development, but I can also read Shakespeare (which is at least in English, sort of), or watch Her (which is a beautiful and compelling film) and arguable have a better understanding of how love is expressed in modernity.

I'm not sure that's an applicable data point.

I think "reading" is usually shorthand for reading material that is intellectually and/or grammatically/vocabularily challenging. In short, something that can expand your ability to understand and communicate ideas.

I don't think it hurts or kids should stop doing it but I don't think reading text messages from your peers is going to do that.

Nobody became a genius from only reading cartoons and text messages between adolescents is of much lower academic and literary quality.

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