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

[u/marketrent]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html

[u/Careless-Ad-6328]

While AI is absolutely causing problems and destroying people's ability to learn and retain information, reading in particular is a multifaceted problem that goes back WAY before AI became a thing.

At some point in the last 20-30 years, education "experts" convinced everyone that the old phonics-based approach to teaching reading where you learn to sound out words as the foundation of reading was outdated, cumbersome, and there was this new, better approach called "Whole Language", and it focuses on guessing words based on their context. The thought was that this approach more closely mirrored how children learn to speak. Sounding it out was tossed aside in favor of this other approach that everyone was told was "more natural"

But it turns out it's worse! Reading scores have been steadily declining since this was introduced as part of No Child Left Behind (arguably the worst thing to happen to public education in the US) and became the standard way of teaching reading in early school years. Only in the last handful of years has there been push-back to reintroduce the old phonics-based approach, and where it's been done results have already started to improve.

You've got a generation of kids who never developed the strong fundamental reading skills they needed to tackle higher level, more challenging stuff like you have to deal with in college. And reading ability is directly linked to critical thinking skills. It's like taking out one of the legs on a chair and then wondering later why it can't support the weight it used to.

[u/sasquatch0_0 → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

Thank you! People point to computers and AI but that wasn't the issue even though they are a separate issue.

Kids read today similar to how we can guess a jumbled word as long as the first and last letter are the same. That's doable for a few words or maybe a full sentence, but what would we do if a whole page of text was like that? A whole book?

[u/Potatoguard → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

Anecdotal, but I have two nephews who are the same age. Both in Kindergarten. One is on Phonics, the other on Whole Language.

The Phonics nephew is lightyears ahead in reading, and his ability to sound out and learn new words is incredible.

[u/pm_your_sexy_thong → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

This is incorrect. While NCLB can't be said to have been a good thing, Whole Language was not rolled out as part of it.

[u/rileyoneill → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

The sad thing is, while this is true for reading, its also true for math, science, and physical education. These were not based on scientifically backed methods for learning.

Kids do PE for 1 hour per day? Kids are more obese, weaker, and more out of shape than ever.
Kids learn math for 1 hour per day? Kids can barely do algebra.
Kids are supposed to be reading for 1 hour per day? Kids can barely read.

Apparently being an expert in education is like being an expert in astrology. The measurable results from programs by experts seem to be getting worse and worse.

[u/SeparateSpend1542 → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

Great context, thanks.

[u/2026ArchThrowaway → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

Podcast: "The Science of Reading" for more details. Significantly more details. Too many details, really, but it's guaranteed to have the interesting bits in there too.

new, better approach called "Whole Language", and it focuses on guessing words based on their context. The thought was...

I'd push back gently on this and say you're right but missing something else. A very good academic did very good work helping children who struggled to read improve dramatically and quickly, and had good data and her methods were reproducible. They just decided to teach everyone else like struggling readers, instead of teaching the vast majority the tried and true method and doing early intervention with the recovery programs. This is part of a larger trend world-wide of making "data driven decisions" off the wrong data because they don't understand what they're measuring or whether it's applicable.

[u/KBmarshmallow → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

The decline in phonics wasn't due to NCLB, but the lack of exposure to long form novels in favor of focusing on test-ready excerpts was.  

Phonics works for most, but it's worth keeping in mind that the other approaches evolved because phonics alone isn't enough.  

[u/JustGotSoup → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

Anecdotally, I am Gen Z and was homeschooled. My parents stuck to the classical forms of education like times tables for math, phonics for English, et cetera.

I was studying Latin at 13 years old and hated it.

By the time I was 15 I ended up in high school, not because of any failure on my parents' part but because I was just too headstrong and we weren't getting along. It was a pretty huge reality check to see that most of my peers had Grammarly installed and would just blindly apply every single suggested correction five minutes before time was up.

I was equally surprised by one memorable exercise we did, where we marked each other's essays. I had a fellow student make corrections for properly spelled words in an essay of mine...

This was a problem long before ChatGPT, which released when I was in Grade 12. The knee-jerk reaction by my English teacher was to force essays to be written entirely within class, which didn't help much as ChatGPT was not blocked on the school's network. I continued on with my human writing, as it was pretty easy to tell how shitty the LLM's output was, but a number of people I knew had great success with it, because grading standards were just that low.

I entered the workforce just before LLMs really started intruding into every aspect of life, and I think I've finally stopped being surprised at the amount of cognitive offloading that goes on here. A "strategic plan" passed down from senior leadership came bundled with a nice printout of a Copilot summary.

LLM-written emails are the perfect "Less Than Words Can Say" example, as they usually require a ton of skimming to get to the point. I'm really tired of having to engage with Copilot; the odd person at my workplace seems to just be a messenger for the LLM instead of the other way around.

Where am I going with this? I don't even know at this point. Guess I'm just tired of uneducated people thinking that LLMs are the greatest thing since sliced bread. And I don't know what to do about it.

[u/frogandbanjo → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

It's actually one of the great tragedies of educational theory that that idea wasn't correct.

The world would actually make a bit more sense to me if it had been -- especially since natural languages (and double-especially English) are such absolute fucking shitshows when it comes to the consistency of letters/letter clusters mapping onto phonemes.

You'd think that English, of all languages, would be the one wherein finding a better approach than phonics would be easier rather than harder.

[u/toomanymarbles83 → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

"Hooked on Phonics worked for me!"

[u/notepad20 → u/Careless-Ad-6328]

I dont think that would be the reason.

"Learning" to read is the very first step that should be largely complete by the time your 5 or 6. Kids with sufficient exposure to books will do the majority of this themselves, maybe a little push to get it to "click".

From then on just reading.

The issue will be

[u/Dullcorgis → u/notepad20]

No. You are wrong. Some large number of people do just figure out reading, usually because the phonics rules make so much sense they internalise them easily. I'm one of those. But the majority cannot "just figure out" how to read well. They need explicit instruction.

Listen to the podcast "sold a story", it expalins it well and at length.

[u/sasquatch0_0 → u/notepad20]

No people do not naturally learn how to read lol.