To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.
My wife instilled a strong love of reading in all of our children from a young age. They all ask to go to the library, but my oldest became the most voracious reader. If we didn’t limit screen time, he probably wouldn’t sleep, but with unlimited time with books, he’ll easily finish a novel in a day, and sometimes two.<p>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.<p>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.
They need to give them Opus and unlimited tokens, they'll be reading all day
Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.<p>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).<p>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.
It is pretty obvious that having "a screen which optimizes itself to keep you hooked for hours while you still have a developing brain, and no previous generation had anything similiar" is not very comparable to being able to throw away paper and have scratchpad because paper became cheap.<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002204267800800106" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002204267800800...</a> ("70% abandoned deviance as a way of life" not sure what that exactly means)<p>[1]: <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28008372/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28008372/</a> ("... members with regular cannabis use and persistent dependence experienced downward socioeconomic mobility, more financial difficulties, workplace problems, and relationship conflict in early midlife.")<p>[2]: <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9552770/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9552770/</a> ("long-term cannabis users show accelerated biological ageing in midlife and poorer health preparedness, financial preparedness, and social preparedness for old age.")
In the hippie generation, not everybody was a hippie. And most gave up on that way of life pretty quickly or were never fully immersed to begin with. I had a girlfriend who dressed like a hippie, had many "alternative" friends and loved new age stuff, but otherwise worked full time and was completely part of the system.<p>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".
Greeks and Romans did experience a >99% loss of their literature during the medieval period...
When someone refers to the Greeks and Romans they are refering to a time long before the medieval period. Things got continued to get better after their most well known thinkers died for a century. (well define better... The there is a lot we would hate about their culture, but they would have considered better)
> I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.<p>reading and writing are corrupting your ability to remember everything you need to know!!
the difference is you can have bookshelves full of knowledge to keep. those discord chats will be deleted / inaccessible at someone else's doing. thats different than going into peoples homes and libraries and burning books, which is what you have to do to stop readers from learning and sharing.
> Discord chats, AI and social media videos<p>A.k.a: no trustable source.
i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids.<p>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 <i>more</i> eager.
I'm not sure where you see velocity. The last major innovation in arethmetic was the introduction of zero when the hindu-arabic numeral system was adopted by medieval western societies. Likewise english grammar isn't exactly a hotbed of churn.
Meh educational system probably lacking but parental support is the missing piece. So many parents just send their kids to school expecting them to auto learn - many reasons why parents dont have extra time --> also screen time addiction. Home environment is pretty big component to success.
i think lack of parental support has been around for ages though, which makes it hard to attribute the very recent and sudden drop in reading comprehension, math scores, etc. to it.<p>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.
Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."<p>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."<p>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.
>This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history<p>You've misunderstood the purpose.<p>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 <i>questions</i> about our universe.<p>You need the question before you can find the answer.
Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans in general that it is hard to take any questions it provokes seriously.<p>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.
Animal Farm is interesting partially because its satire is actually extremely poignant and directed; the characters are meant to represent the important actors in the Russian Revolution.<p>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.
> Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans<p>Which parts specifically of Animal Farm are untrue? Greed, hypocrisy, cruelty, avarice? Or the talking animals?
It’s just the context. I grew up in a different culture and we all hated being forced to read at school, just different books.<p>I enjoyed reading Animal Farm but it was something I picked up by myself, and read on my own terms.
Sounds like a problem of unrealistic expectations. I read <i>Animal Farm</i> when I was a kid and enjoyed it. No-one told me that it was going to profoundly change my life, and it didn't. Neither did my chemistry class, or my math textbooks, or most of the other stuff I learned in school. There's value in reading significant works of literature, both inherently and because it increases your ability to engage with long and complex texts. Obviously, reading <i>Vanity Fair</i> is not going to confer some kind of profound knowledge, or enable you to do anything in particular that you couldn't do before.<p>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.
Every human organization degrades into Animal Farm. It is just most obvious in communism.<p>Every software developer above 35 has been in an org run by the pigs. You don't need a study. It is literally a <i>profound lesson about life</i>.
Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
It's also a story, and quite an enjoyable and well written one at that. My 8 year old son enjoyed being read it.
> Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.<p>So, we shouldn't learn about history until we experience it ourselves? Seems like that would eliminate, uh, <i>most</i> of history.<p>I haven't experienced the harsh realities of the Cretaceous period but I still like reading about dinosaurs.
One of the main reasons to encourage kids to read fiction is to expose them to stories outside their current experience. We don't get kids to read Treasure Island because they can inherently relate to a story about 18th century pirates.<p>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.
And sad thing is they will
be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.
How are we to take arguments for teen literacy seriously when they ubiquitously use "screens" as a pejorative?<p>I had a 12 year old nephew ask me why I was reading while on vacation. I sent him a link to this clip: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8</a>
And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.
And AI companies are stealing and destroying all the books. Thanks Silicon Valley!
Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.
> They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics<p>Have you been around kids recently? I think we all know what they're doing on the phone, and it's not <i>The Great Gatsby</i>.
Not even just a category error -- this is blatant malpractice to have this as a headline! The article is talking about reading scores, and this is especially pernicious given the fact that the last couple of years has not been "typical" by any measure; I seem to recall a global pandemic that might have had some influence.<p>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.
If they were addicted to their Kindles then why did their reading score drop?
imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control<p>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
For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.<p>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.<p>1. <a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f923" rel="nofollow">https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...</a>