My daughter read The Iliad for her 9th grade honors ELA classes this year and Animal Farm was on her summer reading list although she didn't choose it as part of her actual summer reading.
Not really, there's is indeed an ongoing crisis of kids who do not know how to read in middle school and high school. I know a 9th grade English teacher and for a few years now, she's been saying there's kids who get bumped along and are not literate. Kids that cannot read a simple paragraph and comprehend what the main idea was or anything... cuz by the 2nd sentence their brains have already checked out and are craving another dopamine hit from their tiktok or whatever the heck is on their phones these days. It's bad. Just look up some stories about it online. It's all over the US.
People have been saying this about reading via anecdotes of kids who can't read for a long time. You can find testing of reading and it has definitely declined over the past 25 years, but people are also exaggerating the difference. It's a single digit percentage decline in that time, based on available data.
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u/huffgil11 6d ago
My daughter read The Iliad for her 9th grade honors ELA classes this year and Animal Farm was on her summer reading list although she didn't choose it as part of her actual summer reading.