Kids Today Can't Read – Even College Kids: The Bite-Sizing of Books | Hacker News Reader

Kids Today Can't Read – Even College Kids: The Bite-Sizing of Books

litverse.substack.com

23 pointsjseliger20 comments

If this is true it's an outlier.

I just asked my kids, and yes, they are reading full novels in middle school English class. Just a plain old not-noteworthy suburban school district.

Like so many other things, I see this often in the op-ed-osphere and r/teachers, but have a hard time determining how much is doomerism/alarmism, and how much is quantifiable/credible worsening. There are few topics where one can't find a slurry of opeds lamenting the erosion of the youth, the commons, and the world at large, complete with questionably narrow and nuanceless visualizations.

I am torn between two reactions: 1. This seems like a real trend but damn, so much dramatization derived mostly from anecdotes. 2. But holy crap, there sure are a lottttt of anecdotes, and they're consistent in direction and outlook.

So who are some trustworthy authorities on this topic? Where's a good place to get a neutral take (both politically and emotionally) on these trends? Who's the 538-circa-2015 of educational stats?

For HN users in the education world, is there broad consensus among your peers that this is a catastrophe? Is it recoverable? Is it reversing or improving in any areas? How's the latest cohort (eg 2nd graders) doing compared to genz at the same stage?

In other words, can someone with more context suggest how much, if at all, to be existentially worried about this?

Times change and the world keeps turning.

I don't claim to have much more context.

But in my college days, I decided that there was an effect, which I thought of as foreshortening. Professors remembering their own college days naturally remember their peer group, which is to say people similar to those who would go on to be professors. Professors evaluate the present by their students, who are from a much wider range of interests and ability.

Having said that, I have heard and read credible claims made against my generation (in college in the mid-1970s). You could look at John Lukacs's memoir Confessions of an Original Sinner, chapter "Teaching", on the need he found to reduce reading lists over the years.

I suspect that the high school class of 2017 will arrive at college better prepared than my class was, at least in the areas of math, science, and foreign languages.

As a younger millennial my take is that it’s simply incentives not mixing. There was no benefit to reading the books in high school. A very poor skim was sufficient. English tests were just intelligence tests. I got 5s on both AP tests for lit and lang without taking the courses.

Generally speaking I think average kids reading and writing skills are poor, but I don’t believe that’s novel.

This likely isn’t true for the genuine, bonafide, geniuses. Everyone I knew in that category gladly plowed through even the most abstruse textbooks.

There may be a chicken and egg problem here, as those who weren’t already a genius beforehand probably couldn’t figure out which parts of the textbook to ignore and which parts to remember for the course, and which parts to actually remember.

e.g. Even a poorly written chemistry textbook, edited by hacks and so on, still contained many pages worth of valuable information.

Don’t think we are talking about textbooks. I’m seeing it as novels and literature.

I’m talking about it, you might talking about novels and literature. “College Kids” is what the post mentions and judging the other comments underneath, on the balance ‘we’, perhaps not including you, are talking about textbooks to some noticeable extent.

The post is about literature. And those folks didn’t read the article. So whatever. Go away.

Well ‘we’ have decided to stay and ignore the opinion.

Yeah, I think the education system's expectations for reading comprehension went down the drain a while ago. When I was in middle school I scored well enough on the reading comprehension section of my state's standardized test that my guidance counselor scheduled a meeting with my parents to talk about it. All I had to do for the test was read a very simple recipe and pick out basic information (e.g. how many eggs are listed in the ingredients), so I was pretty surprised when the school thought it was a big deal.

I did read a lot as a kid just because I enjoyed it, so I was definitely reading above my grade level, but that performance really shouldn't have put me so far above everyone else on the test.

I can’t take an article that starts with a SBF quote seriously.

Anecdotally, all 3 of my nephews (ages 8-13) are bookworms. The youngest is reading at a 6th or 7th grade level, last I heard. The oldest always has his head in a thick book.

British books were always more succinct. Which made me always ask my parents for their British literature when I needed to study for exams in junior high school.

Not sure we need to be alarmed just yet.

Things to reflect on before judging.

How many books (physical or ebooks) have I read in the last year. Exclude audiobooks and obviously podcasts.

What's my screen time on the phone.

I usually get an audiobook first. If the story is good I will get the ebook since I can read it much faster and want to dedicate the time and concentration to it.

If it's mediocre why bother reading it when I can get its contents while I cook or do laundry.

Maybe notifications have something to do with this underlying problem:

pg just reposted this tweet:

https://twitter.com/philmcrae/status/1771175996605276232

I've read 35 on my Kindle in the last year. A few aren't finished yet. I don't have history enabled for my library account, but at least a dozen from there. A few more from the bookstore. So somewhere around 50 or 60. Around one a week.

I don't typically look at my phone screen unless someone texts me. Once in a while if I'm in a long line at the grocery store or something.

> A generation who spends nine hours a day on their phones has no time for books.

Incorrect. The linked source only claims Gen Z averages "around 9 hours of screen time per day", not phones specifically.

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The article presents a graph of "books finished per year" by generation as evidence that reading is declining. It doesn't address whether or not books read increases with age within a cohort. An obvious possibility is that GenZ and Millennials are busy with school and work, while GenX and especially retired boomers have more time to read. Note this also excludes audiobooks, which anecdotally seem popular with Millennials because you can listen to them while commuting to work.

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I'm unconvinced by the argument the blog makes.

Things like this terrify me. I am only 28 so its not like I'm much older than the college kids they mention in these articles. But still, its like...is this actually a thing that I need to be worried about? Are kids really not learning how to read? Hope that this is just fear mongering and it doesn't become a serious problem down the line.

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