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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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