Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

what you say suggests that you have a backlog of non-leisure activities that you feel are more important.

i solved this by making leisure activities more important. call it work-life balance if that helps. leisure is part of a healthy day. i started going for a daily walk for exercise. i considered important for my well being. i watch one tv show per day. and only one. i simply decided that is part of a healthy routine. and i made a list of what i want to watch so i don't waste that hour on random stuff. i still do spend more time on random stuff, eg youtube, but that is a different problem. when i run out of time, i stop wasting time on youtube, but i don't stop that one tv episode. i figure i have earned the break after being busy for a day. i should do the same with listening to audiobooks/stories but i haven't been able to re-establish that routine yet.

Although nowadays I read more manuals and research papers.

Or the occasional online xuanhuan novel.

I can tell you the last time I had to write a singly-linked list implementation though. October 17th, Nineteen Ninety Never.

It was a disaster.

For many classes though, 15 minutes/night would be very useful. Language learning, for instance, or music practice. Most kids would benefit from 15 minutes of writing prose for any reason, and I think even high school math topics could provide 15 minutes of worthwhile practice questions each evening. All of these are things that you get better at with repeated practice.

What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.

I feel like the "blue curtains" problem with reading in schools is akin to the "shape -> rectangle -> square" problem that early OOP education has. It might be a very basic and simple attempt to explain a concept (inheritance in the case of OOP, symbolism in the case of books), but its simplicity and inoffensive genericness is so overwhelmingly devoid of any of the usefulness that the concept brings that its more harmful to the students than helpful.

I've long argued that programing courses are broken. They present a concept with a hugely simplified model, and then tell you when you don't understand why you'd want to do it that it will make more sense when you build a "real" program. I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced. A sort of "in medias res" method of teaching.

I think something similar applies to a lot of the way literature concepts are taught in schools. Boring books that don't connect with the readers and students are assigned, and then terrible examples that are either overly contrived (blue curtains) or blindingly obvious (the bad guy kicks the puppy which shows he's bad) that they just turn the students off. There's no excitement or interest nurtured into the concepts because the taught examples are so lifeless and far removed from what is actually possible.

>It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.

My personal opinions on the matter are

1) "too much mandatory study". Yeah when they're adults, they'll need to work 8 hour jobs, but kids need time to be kids and they need time to let the things they're learning sink in and discover real world applicability in their own lives. 6-7 hours of schooling + 1-3 hours of homework + projects + "extra curricular" programs adds up to a lot of time where students don't have any time to find anything interesting in what they've learned before they're shuffled off to the next things. School is stressful enough when you're just learning, but all the other stuff that's piled on and the regimented testing just burns them out. I was turned off of math courses for half of my schooling because 2nd grade math was full of timed tests in which failures were punished by loss of recess time.

2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling. I had friends who were held back from advanced classes where they would have been challenged and engaged because early in elementary school they performed poorly on a handful of standardized tests and were locked forever in the "standard" track. So much of what you want to teach as a skill can be taught via multiple different avenues, and we should offer schooling that takes advantage of that. Literary concepts like foreshadowing, metaphor, symbolism etc can be taught via film, books, poetry, games and even music. Why does every student then need to go through the same literary courses with the same set of books to learn the material? Math concepts can be taught with money, or physics, or chemistry or computer programming or wood working. Why does everyone need to go through the same math textbook?

The most memorable teachers I ever had were the ones that stepped outside the books. The ones that explored teaching a concept from multiple angles, and who understood that often it was necessary to let the students see the deep end of the pool to get them interested in learning to swim at all. Those teachers worked well for me. They didn't work for others. And some teachers that I found staid and boring and that failed to leave me with any love for the subject they were teaching were ones that connected with other classmates. But we were all crammed into the same set of lessons with the same teacher and teaching styles.

Education smothered my love for reading by forcing me to read material that didn't connect with me and analyze and report on that material in a way that was unnatural for me. The ember that was able to be rekindled was only kept alive by the occasional tending of a teacher that would from time to time allow me to step outside the box to engage with books the way that worked for me. I was lucky in that regard. Many students aren't and that's a shame.

If your curriculum puts economically disadvantaged students at an academic disadvantage, and your school has many of such students, then your school ends up with less funding because your students do poorly on tests compared with the well off schools. So if you want to help the students you've got, you come up with curriculum that doesn't penalize them for having jobs, kids, or other outside-of-class reasons that they can't sit down and read at length.

I’m not saying that we completely get rid of public education, just that we stop appending things to it and pretending they’re important.

Nobody remembers most of this alleged common ground anyways. Go ask around what the 5th amendment says, or what a high pH means, I’d be shocked if a quarter of people remembered.

> You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth.

Sure, if we’re talking about something covered in high school, but for any topic I’d be realistically interested in hearing them talk about, no. Why would me or Bill Gates want to discuss symbolism in Catcher in the Rye? I’m certainly not going to talk to Musk about chemistry; I’m doubtful he’s a through and through rocket engineer, but his tangential knowledge likely trumps my very limited recollection of valence bands and I have no idea how that relates to the energy density of rocket fuel.

This is just a veneer of equality we tell ourselves. Sure, we’re all equal in the sense that we’ve largely ignored our high school education and probably haven’t really advanced our biology knowledge.

That doesn’t imply that we’re all going to sit around and suddenly want to talk about that instead of rockets or operating systems or investment strategies; I am not on the same part of the bell curve for the topics that make them interesting.

> If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.

I don’t disagree there are pleasantries, but at what cost? We’re pushing children into working near-slavery workloads, with no recourse to change that, and our means of motivating them is primarily threatening their entire future if they don’t play along.

It’s like the worst job in the world; Amazons warehouses look like a vacation comparatively.

Children can’t switch schools on their own like adults can switch jobs. Children’s records follow them when they do switch, so they can’t escape even if they switch schools. I’ve never had HR records follow me across companies. And any employer that tried to control their employees by threatening to ruin the entire rest of their lives would have the NLRB crawl up their ass and build a branch office.

We’re trading the happiness of children for what? Me and my neighbor having equally shitty recall of the French and Indian war?

I still remember being in high school, and I still remember how miserable it was. I remember kids showing up with huge bags under their eyes because they had to go into “crunch time” and work til midnight because they got a bunch of big assignments at once.

I remember meeting most of my high school classmates and how bright eyed and cheery we were. I also remember senior year, and how many of those smiles had faded into blank, exhausted stares.

I remember the kids who had problems in their family lives whose personalities either disappeared or curdled into sour milk as they tried to cope with 60 hour weeks and just didn’t have the spare time and energy to try to process their parents divorce.

I remember the suicides and addiction the most though. The kids that had bottomed out so hard they would do anything they could to escape the loop of stress, failure, threats about their future, and back to the beginning. The only options we offer them are death or complete desperation, and some kids picked one because they just couldn’t do it anymore.

There were multiple suicides while I was in high school. 3 that I can recall, and one kid that ran away from home and overdosed while sleeping in a public park.

It’s awful for the kids that die, and it’s awful for the kids left behind who now have to figure out how to emotionally process a friend’s suicide while working 60 hour weeks knowing full well that college admissions won’t give 2 shits about why their GPA was low that quarter.

The highschool was ranked in the top 50 public schools in the US when I attended. This wasn’t a backwater dump wrecked by phasing out coal, this was a school held up as an example for other schools.

I don’t find nearly enough value in making a neat bell curve to put kids through that. I wouldn’t put adults through that, and the existence of unions tells me that others feel the same way. Unions would pitch a huge fit over the least egregious of our expectations of children.

This isn't obscure.

> While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of HER private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.

> What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.

> Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.

I actually think it's a really neat passage, it invokes the surreal more than I would expect from 19th century prose. Also, this part just before is very vivid and quite funny:

> Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.

Maybe that’s ok? I read the Outsiders when I was young (25 years ago or so) and although I thought it was a bit weird, it wasn’t bad. My life bears little resemblance to many current contemporary people’s lives the world over, but exploring those differences can be good. I am all for giving the kids a chance to see a different world and get a sense of how things can change.

The whole book was like the allegory of the cave.

Steinbeck is a close second, though. I had to read three of the man's books (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and Grapes of Wrath) and I don't think I enjoyed a single page of it. I remember finding a copy of The Pearl as an adult and being shocked it was less than 100 pages. We somehow extracted 18 weeks of discussion and essays and tests on that book. No wonder I hated it. We tortured every word of it.

2) Part of the point of reading literature is to see things from a different perspective. i.e. to read things that are not necessarily "relatable", and thereby possibly expand your mind about the range of human experience. It's an opportunity to learn about history and learn about cultures other than your own.

The commenter doth protest too much, methinks.

I purchased a Kindle after that trip. I read a lot more than I used to because between my phone and the physical Kindle I always have my current book ready to go. Physical book purchases can now be hardcover-only because I'm buying for a permanent collection, not endless consumption.

you're absolutely right and they even doubled down on that https://www.oxfordhomeschooling.co.uk/blog/the-death-of-the-....

I did not seem to be blessed with the accepted form of creativity for literature analysis, and, with every rebuttal, the pleasure of exploring those texts became less and less..

After many, many, many years, I'm slowly coming back to some of them to read on my own terms, and most books have been a pleasure to re-discover.

At the same time, is it monstrous to put forward the option that you, as an audience member, are not a passive brainless drone, but you are collaborating in creating the meaning of what you experience? That your inner life and meaning and interpretation stemming from being exposed to art are actually interesting and worth talking about?

Why do we have to live in a world where we assume words written on a page or colors dripped on a canvas have a single truly objective interpretation? Why do we have to beat with a stick on the head of someone telling them "no, you're enjoying this work in the wrong way because the author said so"?

Basically a lot of words are “set pieces”. Very important for the general atmosphere but not overflowing with meaning and significance per se.

There is a lot of book banning occurring and the rate seems to be increasing fast (see links below).

There are penalties in some jurisdictions and zero teachers want to face the kind of shit that has gone on with parents and politicians, churches and local body meetings.

So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later, just remove the lot. Teachers do not have time for this crap, and why risk their jobs?

It’s chilling and it’s hard to see how this isn’t the aim. ‘Who ever needed more than a bible?’

https://pen.org/report/narrating-the-crisis/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/book-bans-public-sc...

Teacher unions list book bans as one of the primary reasons for leaving. They have data and testimony backing that up. We see legislation and organizations all over America.

Here is a quick article describing the number of books being banned and the effects it has on teachers [1]. It list numbers. There are numerous articles all over the internet from well respected organizations like the NYT saying the same stuff.

The numbers are already presented by them. We see the teachers leaving. We know education is suffering from systematic national pressures from both political sides. Feel free to look it up. hell on first principles, book banning has a direct effect on libraries teachers can have when they include such classics. Again, what numbers do you have? Or just first principles logic to dismiss them at all?

[1] : https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/educators-fi...

[0]https://apnews.com/article/lgbtq-florida-dont-say-gay-books-...

It says the teachers have to remove or cover up their classroom libraries until their books can be approved by the school. I don't know how you can honestly argue that that doesn't constitute removal, even if it might be temporary.

> In any case, how can this possibly be an important and relevant issue today contributing to an already-observed decline in reading in 9-year olds nationally?

I don't know enough about the subject to comment, which is why I didn't say anything about such a relationship. I only responded to you because you were saying someone else was wrong and I didn't think you were right

i am struggling with this as i keep looking for new books to read. being in a book club helps a lot.

> Not sure what the lesson is there, lol.

Lessons learned:

a) Incentives matter (economy 101)

b) If a market offers possibilities for arbitrage, market participants will attempt to make use of them.

c) By market laws, arbitrage opportunities will close very fast, so in the long term, markets can be assumed to be arbitrage-free.

d) Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

e) Authorities (or those in power) will attempt to cheat you. Don't trust them.

the lesson is that overachievers are often not welcome.

At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.

I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying around.

As adult I used Kindle for a while but got back to sourcing physical books, even though I have no permanent place and books are difficult to travel with.

I specifically remember that when the first Harry Potter (I was a child cut me some slack) came out I bounced off it because I didn't like it, and then one of my friends at school couldn't stop talking about it and got me interested enough to pick it back up.

And don't even get me STARTED on the LotR books. Or Star Trek novelizations (which I still consider books).

If they did, they didn't tell me about it. That might tell you how much the other kids talked to me. Not much of a brag now is it? :-D

However, I have good reason to believe it. I went to the public library every weekend when I was in elementary school. I never, ever ran into anyone from my class there in all those years. If the other kids in my class at age 9 read for pleasure, they weren't anywhere close to me in volume.

It's not a brag, and not a real achievement. The tallest kid in a class at age 14 might only be of average height in a crowd 10 years later. This is the same thing.

Crazy gender stereotype based on just anecdotes (nothing wrong with saying it tho, its always awesome to hear about different experiences)

Most of the books that changed my life, got me into tech, programming, got me into business, entrepreneurship, hustle, etc.

All the books, podcasts, etc were either shared directly to me by my male friends (im male too) who insisted i read those books for my betterment cuz those books were acc. to them : “Awesome” , or books that i discovered while exchange discussions about what books are we reading right now, exchanging reading lists, etc.

There are tons of girls out there who hate reading books, (my mom included, she always has hated books, outside of school homework and exams),

I do not like reading fiction books much, nor do my peers, we’ve exchanged book suggestions since childhood, now even more with more and more internet friends.

Ive had great books on gardening, or agriculture, or history, etc recommended to me either inside books by authors, or by random telegram groups consisting mostly of nerd men.

99% of the books recommended to me were by men, and im a man.

So i dont think its a girl only thing, plenty of people exchanging book, just go to any major reddit forum on reading and booksuggestions (like r/suggestmeabook) and you’ll find tons of men who are more than happy to give you suggestions, if you cannot find classmates or neighbours to share with

The Bear is definitely a good show and kinda about cooking, but it's definitely not a relaxing watch even though it's been winning comedy Emmys :D

As for sports Friday Night Lights is the only one that comes to mind, I watched it because it was good, not because it was about American Football (a sport I couldn't care less).

But the basic premise was that manga and anime allow the authors to go _completely_ bonkers with their ideas with no limitations on what's marketable.

Like One Punch Man shouldn't work, but it does. Or Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon is one. Or Delicious in Dungeon another one.

They're all way too wacky to ever pass the gauntlet of middle management deciding what goes on air in the US.

As I mentioned we moved to Oregon soon after taking our daughter out of public school. Oregon legalized homeschooling in 1985, before my daughter was born. Texas legalized homeschooling in 1994, the same year we made that decision. We didn't see any need to deal with the public school bureaucracy -- that would kind of defeat the point of homeschooling.

I think parents will generally choose to do whatever they think will best protect their child, or help their child succeed. If you don't understand that "focus" I will guess you don't have children.

Hmm that's interesting, I would definitely believe it. (I was one of those kids that didn't get past Prince Caspian until his late 20s. Although I didn't recognise it as preachy when I was younger, just not all that interesting.)

> Tolkien and Lewis disagreed ...

This reminds me of David Eddings vehemently declaring Tolkien far too prissy (his word iirc) for high fantasy - that was my first exposure to the "all art is an evolving conversation" perspective, without realising it.

I wonder if -- as far as books for 9-year-olds go -- the conversation has stalled and therefore lost interest, even from a child's perspective. The publishing/entertainment world has poured enormous amounts of money into the previous generation's teenage years (Harry Potter, Twilight, etc), maybe we forgot/decided not to invest in Good Art for the next round of younger kids while that was happening.

I'm still biased in favour of screen time as a primary issue, but I could also see lower publishing, advertising (etc) investment in that age group as a huge confounding problem.

    These are... not books.
    you don't have to mentally picture the scenes/people/actions

I remember when I was in middle school, my English teacher had a box in the corner of comic book adaptations of about a dozen "classic" stories. Several were stories by Poe, and similar 1800s-era classics. (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, etc.) I devoured them (despite loving reading "regular" books too). I've forgotten most of the plots, but remember having enjoyed reading them. Some of them, I've never read the originals, but for others I had already read (or subsequently read) the more-detailed originals. (Anything Sherlock Holmes, at the time, was something I enjoyed.)

Reading these stories as a manga makes you lose out on a lot of details, but probably makes it a lot easier to digest some things. Pride and Prejudice, for example, has pages of details of peoples' social lives, and the complex interactions of several younger and older women, along with descriptions of gardens and houses, and I know that I definitely had trouble keeping track of who all the ancillary characters were. Having visual representations of these characters might make it easier to track that. You lose out on the richness of Austen's prose, but you keep the core character developments, relationships, and emotional interactions that form the basis of the stories.

I'd posit that anyone whose imagination conjures up mental pictures from a purely written book would be incapable of not doing so with a graphic novel. One's brain could have less to do, true... yet it doesn't choose the easy path. In my personal experience, the scenes of a good story grow and become more detailed in my imagination, regardless of whether they are depicted in prose or picture.

One thing I love about written language is that can be used in so many ways; the vast majority of reading isn't 'purely' reading for me, but associated with other activities - encyclopaedias are reading interspersed with skimming, possibly in order to inform another task such as writing, graphic novels are the appreciation of visual art in a narrative form supported by text, and then there's the entirely practical way in which being able to read "wet paint" helps me from getting myself into a sticky situation.