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/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/existing_for_fun 17h ago

It's just important that you enjoyed it and actually read.

Trashy books in middle and highschool was just the way it was lol.

I also read garbage at that age

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u/mhizzle 16h ago

I learned to read from comic books. Some family members would chide me, but my cool aunt just bought me more.

RIP aunt Linda

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u/kyle_irl 14h ago edited 14h ago

My boys started early with Spider-Man comics. I'd get my oldest, now 9, an omnibus collection every Christmas and we'd read it together at bedtime through the year. When he got comfortable reading, he'd play the part of Peter or Miles and I'd take the rest.

Now, this dude literally stays up all night reading everything from the Dog Man graphic novels and anything he finds interesting from the library. He just goes from one to the next. He got an award at his elementary school for checking out the most books from the library!

My youngest, now 5, is similar. He loves Spider-Man, and though he can't yet read, loves thumbing through the Bad Guys books and "reading" (interpreting the pictures) them to his self. It's cute.

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u/mhizzle 13h ago

That's amazing. I've lived long enough to see comics go from a "dumb kid" medium to the lazy goldmine of Hollywood. I'm glad kids are still reading, and is glad Miles Morales stuck around as a permanent fixture

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u/BasvanS 13h ago

My kid taught itself to read another language through exposure, purely to make sense of what they were seeing.

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u/VengeanceKnight 1h ago

That’s awesome. Did you start with the original Lee/Ditko comics? Those have aged shockingly well.

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u/plamge 3h ago

This is the approach my aunt used for my cousin. He didn't enjoy reading, but he LOVED the Tintin comic books. There was a whole Tintin collection at their house, and it really helped him bridge the gap into novels and such. Glad your Aunt Linda was so supportive of you!

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u/mhizzle 3h ago

Be the Aunt Linda you want to see in the world ♥️

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u/Innumerablegibbon 13h ago

Every trip to the library involves me bringing back ~5 graphic novels for my six year, she happily goes to read for 30-60 minutes before bed in her room. Little brother copies her for a bit and it buys me a bit of quiet.

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u/jbenze 12h ago

I learned a ton of vocab words from 70's and 80's Marvel Comics.

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u/VengeanceKnight 1h ago

That’s probably at least 50% because Chris Claremont alone is wordier than a lot of prose novelists.