Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
finance.yahoo.com
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It is 100% true that "you have to model the behavior of X" to your kids, otherwise all bets are off and headlines like this should not be surprising in the least.
Monkey see, monkey do!
I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
reading and writing are corrupting your ability to remember everything you need to know!!
A.k.a: no trustable source.
And the claim that hippies are doing fine isn't well substantiated[0][1][2]. Maybe we shouldn't claim to have answers for what we don't and exercise caution. Alert but not anxious.
[0]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002204267800800... ("70% abandoned deviance as a way of life" not sure what that exactly means)
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28008372/ ("... members with regular cannabis use and persistent dependence experienced downward socioeconomic mobility, more financial difficulties, workplace problems, and relationship conflict in early midlife.")
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9552770/ ("long-term cannabis users show accelerated biological ageing in midlife and poorer health preparedness, financial preparedness, and social preparedness for old age.")
I'm not saying everybody will be fine. I'm saying humanity will be fine because we will figure out how to create a functional world despite the underlying culture like we've always done. Part of my argument is that every generation is full of people saying "this time is different because of XYZ".
My parents and me are terrible readers, to the point where I thought I might have mild dyslexia. Once in a blue moon I find a book I can’t put down, but in the 80s I already had video games to fill my time.
Having a voracious reader at a reading level 10-years or more beyond his age is its own challenge. Most of the HN crowd thinks kids should have access to all books, but I assure you, there are many books inappropriate for various developmental levels, regardless of reading proficiency. There’s also little support from libraries or the industry (rating systems, content warnings, etc.) to make that easy for parents.
Started doing theater at 12 after Buten, started working as after school counselor for 6 to 8 yo kids and help them do their homework after reading 1984, ultimately becoming a youth camp counsellor at 17. Which were terribly outside my comfort zone, but Buten showed me how to improve myself, and Orwell how to improve the world (or at least try my best).
Have you been around kids recently? I think we all know what they're doing on the phone, and it's not The Great Gatsby.
The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
Animal Farm tries to be the last, but the flaws in it mean I can't take it seriously and so it fails. Well maybe it soft of works because nearly everybody has read it, but again, the flaws are so bad I can't take anyone seriously who cites it and so I consider it a failure.
That's a bold and misguided assertion of authorial intent.
Since you're a fan of the scientific method: you can please cite sources in support of your claim?
We know that Orwell was thinking of the Russian Revolution when he wrote the book. Many events in the story have obvious historical parallels to it.
On the other hand, Orwell was also a political journalist who wrote political essays. If his primary aim in writing the book was to make a specific critique of communism, why did he decide to express that critique as a work of fiction with talking animals? He would certainly have been aware that such a work is inherently open to wider interpretation.
Do you really think that a class of reasonably intelligent high school students couldn't find any moral in the story that's not inherently tied to communism? There are clearly all sorts of analogies that can be drawn between the story and historical or current events. And there are all sorts of conclusions you can draw. Maybe the animals should never have had a revolution in the first place; maybe they should have, but they went about it the wrong way, etc. etc.
ideally, yes, enjoyment should be one purpose of school. it's much easier to teach when students are enjoying learning.
learning to engage with something that you don't enjoy is also important, though, and why i think some of "the classics" should still be required reading.
While it's true that the finer political nuances of Animal Farm are likely to be lost on most children, it's a perfectly comprehensible story in its own right, and it needn't be read narrowly as an allegory about Communism per se.
So, we shouldn't learn about history until we experience it ourselves? Seems like that would eliminate, uh, most of history.
I haven't experienced the harsh realities of the Cretaceous period but I still like reading about dinosaurs.
Today, the obvious communist societies are China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba perhaps the lesser-known of the bunch.
You're kind of missing the point of my comment. You said, in essence, that it's impossible to learn about Communism unless you've experienced it personally.
> China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba
Of those countries, how many have you experienced personally, and thus, by your standard, are qualified to comment on?
To what extent is modern China actually Communist, as opposed capitalist-authoritarian?
You've misunderstood the purpose.
Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.
You need the question before you can find the answer.
I can accept the impossible for the fun of it, but when something is impossible I don't take is serious. And it wasn't a good book in general.
Which parts specifically of Animal Farm are untrue? Greed, hypocrisy, cruelty, avarice? Or the talking animals?
Old Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin Snowball is Trotsky, etc. Regardless of ones nationality or politics, the story of Russia in 1917 remains one of the most fascinating in our worlds history. For a lot of people, myself included, Animal Farm served as a nice way of being introduced to the tale without getting bogged down by the specifics.
Animal Farm entered Anglo-American classrooms in the late 1950s, and its adoption was heavily influenced by the Cold War political climate . The book was seen as "useful" for teaching, but its political utility was part of the appeal—it provided "an easy use... as an anti-Communist and anti-revolutionary lesson" . This wasn't just a grassroots phenomenon; it was actively encouraged by intelligence agencies.
Both British and American intelligence services promoted the book as an anti-socialist message and supported its distribution . The CIA even arranged for a 1954 animated film adaptation that altered Orwell's story—emphasizing that animals on neighboring farms were content and changing the ending to have the animals overthrow the pigs . This film was widely shown in US and UK classrooms, embedding a distorted version of the story in the educational system for years
I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
I enjoyed reading Animal Farm but it was something I picked up by myself, and read on my own terms.
But here's my main thesis -- we have a situation where not-reading books is incentivized:
In an information-rich environment, I just learned more about animal farm in 10 minutes by asking AI all of the above questions than I did in 10 hours of reading without proper context back in highschool.
If reading itself (and not shaping the values of youth) is really just the goal, then we could solve this by assigning materials to kids that are likely to match their interests (I don't know slenderman, twilight, harry potter, ender's game, whatever).
Most classmates were competing for the ones with fewer pages, but I remember in one of these I took the thickest book as a personal challenge, and it was a bit more mature in content than I was used to. I was embarrassed when writing the report and purposefully did not mentioned the sex scenes, but it was very educational at my age.
I also read Harry Potter before the first movie was released. Props to the informed teacher that included that one in the reading options before it became well known. Some parents forbid their kids from reading it for religious reasons, so I became immediately very curious.
I think Harry Potter and the likes at school is a great idea, rarely seen in my country because they tried to push the classics on our local language, but that does not work well with the kids.
Every software developer above 35 has been in an org run by the pigs. You don't need a study. It is literally a profound lesson about life.
"Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.");"[1]
Obviously once a work is in the public’s hands , interpretations may supersede even the authors original themes.Leaving it as a matter of interpretation/comprehension and generally accepted consensus. Incidentally a good measure of reading comprehension and analysis for the students studying he text.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm
many of my college students feel like they've already lost at life. between ai, the economy, job prospects, etc. i am sure high schoolers are feeling the same way, which certainly isn't going to make them more eager.
ive had to make pretty significant changes to my courses in the past two years. many teachers aren't, or are making changes slowly, which is causing some difficulty.
if this is a response to "world is moving fast", i didn't mean "arithmetic is moving fast". i meant technology, the economy, geopolitics, etc. which inevitably changes the learning environment, the home environment, motivation, etc.
This, right here, is the most commonly repeated trope in "tech" circles whenever the topic of education comes up. It's infrequently questioned at all, much less challenged outright, despite there being literally no foundational shifts in any of the individual curricula that a basic education is constructed from. So from an academic standpoint the world isn't actually moving much at all. It's this rhetoric that has lead the charge for tech infiltrating the classroom, a shift which has produced measurably poorer educational outcomes.
just for context, i am a teacher. i am speaking from my experience, not repeating a trope.
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
Everything that was considered fancy and high-culture when I was in my formative years is fancy and high-culture now and everything after that is slop and mind-rot.
But it makes no difference: the older generations die and the newer ones take over either way, and what's acceptable or even high culture changes.
So this means that we have decided a priori that life can only improve in all aspects? That’s evidently absurd.
This is called a thought-terminating cliché. It’s as intellectually nuanced as putting your fingers in your ears and singing “la la I’m right”. It’s often used not because it is true, but because to prove otherwise is very hard and inherently subjective.
Concrete issues (e.g. iPads in the classroom result in worse tested recall) retain plenty of space.
It's the vague repetitive "man yells at cloud" gripes that get auto-terminated, e.g. "is our children learning?"
I had a 12 year old nephew ask me why I was reading while on vacation. I sent him a link to this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...