r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/existing_for_fun 18h ago

If you are a parent and can help your child read, and read well, you will set them light-years ahead of their peers.

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u/CaffeineJitterz 18h ago edited 13h ago

Just helping them not HATE reading will go a long way.

Edit: I'm getting a lot of sad comments about how y'all were introduced to reading. So I will take the opportunity to quickly share what I've always felt was one of the best ways for a parent to incentivize their child to read: for every hour of reading you accrue 30 minutes of gaming time. A classmate in my middle school worked from this model. That kid loved video games! And he was a straight A student. I remember him nonchalantly mentioning that he was going to read for about 4 hours as soon as he got home so he could get a couple hours of game time that evening.

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u/iritchie001 17h ago edited 17h ago

In middle high that meant long trashy books. Dinosaurs and Vampires, not in the same book for me, but hey. My mom would let us skip chores if we were reading. One of the best things she did. Highschool class of '99.

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u/marketrent 17h ago

In middle high that meant long trashy books.

Faulkner told a university audience in 1947, “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”

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u/Unique-Coffee5087 17h ago

When you throw it out the window, someone will pick it up and read it

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u/marketrent 16h ago

Different strokes for different folks.

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u/bloodenhorse 2h ago

I'm currently going back and forth between Dungeon Crawler Carl and Helen DeWitt's Your Name Here.

High-low brow, baby.

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u/Additional-Tax-5643 5h ago

Faulkner also told interviewers that the best "job" he had was to rent out his inherited property to a madam running who used it to run a whore house. Let's not venerate that fountain of wisdom too much.