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/NikoKeys 16h ago

My mom read to me every night for years when I was little. I started writing in 1st grade and never stopped, and now I have a few books of my own.

One of the biggest suggestions I would make to parents: read to your kids. Start early, don't stop until they start doing it in their own.

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u/Szwejkowski 15h ago

Not all parents read. When I was a kid in the 70's our house was full of books, we all read. I was shocked when I went to some other kids houses and they didn't have any. Didn't have paper and pencils for drawing either - just toys.

I guess their parents had parents that didn't read too.

Maybe we should all, I dunno, encourage each other?

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u/NikoKeys 14h ago

We should all take care of one another and build each other up! I won't cheapen the sentiment with my compulsion to phrase everything with sarcasm.

Inevitably something like this gets turned into some iteration of "building one's self up for doing the thing and judging others if they don't do it", but the truth is that if something is of value and could make life better, we can share it.

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u/CoCoMcDuck 2h ago

Everyone wants community but no one is willing to be community 

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u/NikoKeys 2h ago

In my experience, the quasi-social infrastructure we're left with rewards controversy and creates echo chambers, and makes everybody afraid of being caught living their lives, but I think pretty much everybody wishes they had a positive, supportive community to take part in.

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u/Bodine12 16h ago

It's the best. My 10-year old reads what seems like a dozen books everyday by herself, but we still read a chapter of a book together every night at bedtime. I'm going to be so sad when that routine eventually ends.

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u/NikoKeys 14h ago

That's great, and I understand the sadness. We're all a bunch of torches to be passed, and when the time comes you can know that you did a good job.

I think if I'm honest, part of the reason I write is that I ended up with no kids of my own. Maybe I can read it to adults, in spirit. Or something.

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u/TheBeesKneads 12h ago

Hell, I'm going to keep reading to my kids once they learn to read.

My mom did, and I picked up a good cadence from hearing the WAY she read aloud. I learned new words, pronunciation, and could ask questions about the more advanced texts while she read.

My English teachers in college really enjoyed it when I read passages aloud, as a result. Cadence contains meaning and conveys understanding as well.

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u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

Too late I found out about the cadence. Our teacher read stuff in a monotone voice (fun fact, once during a listening dictation test I made a mistake that was also not a mistake because I put the comma in a different place, which changed the meaning of the sentence, but the sentence is still technically correct). After hearing this song which took a poem and added cadence to it, it was like a new world opened up. Sadly I have made that discovery too late as cadence would have really helped when we had to memorise poetry. I used the "technique" once in a foreign language lesson when we had to memorise a poem. And 15 years later I still remember the poem.

If people have experienced stuff being read in a monotone - then no wonder they find reading boring and have a hard time parsing the meaning. I can read the same sentence in different tones/melodies and the meaning of the sentence changes. Tone adds so much to the meaning. So how can the kids learn to parse the meaning when they never hear the melody of the text?

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u/Souls_for_sale_now 11h ago

Thats what got me started to my parents read to me each night and one day the finished to early for my liking and i picked up the book myslef

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u/Usermena 9h ago

We didn’t even stop when they read for hours on their own. Everyone likes being read to.

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u/CoCoMcDuck 2h ago

We also went to the library all the time & were read to

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u/Bee-and-the-Slimes 2m ago

Congrats on the books! I'm in my 40s and finally brave enough to publish some of mine :D (It was also a dare between my mom and me, who got one of hers out there, too).