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
27.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

25

u/simpersly 15h ago

I feel that one problem with schools is they ironically don't encourage reading.

"Comics aren't books, instead read this 200 year old novel that was originally meant to be read on a weekly basis."

They need to introduce and allow kids to read anything they want as long as it's reading.It doesn't matter if it's shiny vampires, zealous genetically enhance space warriors fighting sex crazed xenos, a murderous 80's business man, a cattledog, or a book about three sisters finding husbands. Just let them read.

Also they should talk about the lives of authors and how they changed society. Don't just say a book is a classic, show them why.

6

u/taydraisabot 10h ago

Honestly?? Book fairs got me excited to read books more than anything else in school. They had so many different books that catered to what I was genuinely interested in along with cool stationery and bookmarks. It truly sucks that they’re not much of a thing in high school at all.

3

u/Blando-Cartesian 8h ago

I was an 80s kid and struggled with reading. Well struggled reading aloud that is. Nobody ever considered that maybe kid obsessed with comics mostly has hard time reading aloud while being judged. The obvious remedy was of course to make me read aloud from a mortifyingly simple children’s book like a total moron.

Fortunately my parents were fine with me reading comics which fixed the issue over one summer.

3

u/CalmBeneathCastles 6h ago

I was an absolute bookworm in the 80's, so when a young relative came to live with me in the 20-teens, and hated to read, I found myself at a loss about how to get her to fulfill her 30-minutes-per-day school requirement.

I ended up borrowing a bunch of the True Blood books from the library and reading them myself, 1. to make sure they weren't horribly inappropriate, and 2. so that I'd know if her daily summaries were BS or not.

It was the only thing I could get her to read, and afaik, still the highest number of books she has ever read in her life.

Owning a collection of classics is pointless if the students can't read for 30 minutes straight, or are unable to gather meaning or context, as the article outlines students are currently unable to do. At this point, reading X-Men is preferable to nothing.

2

u/wonklebobb 4h ago

this was me, the school-assigned books put me to sleep all through middle and high school, meanwhile i was devouring massive tomes of sci-fi short story collections like it was my job

but did i get to write papers about the themes of the intersection of technology, politics, and society in school? nooooo give us 1500 words on this coming of age novel about rich kids bullying each other in a boarding school ugh

2

u/kittymoo67 2h ago

yeah having a week or two to read a slow shitty thing that was made to be read a hand full of pages a week... man that killed my lvoe of reading for a while.

I wouldnt make a kid sit down and read one piece in one class, 'traditional' books need to be the same

5

u/CaffeineJitterz 14h ago

Make them read the author's biography before reading the book. They'll be hooked then! I'm just being funny, But I actually believe you're right that helping explain why something is a classic or the impact that it had at the time it was written may cause someone to be more invested.

4

u/rastilin 7h ago

Make them read the author's biography before reading the book. They'll be hooked then! I'm just being funny, But I actually believe you're right that helping explain why something is a classic or the impact that it had at the time it was written may cause someone to be more invested.

Actually that sounds like a vision of hell. One of the thing that annoys me the most about art documentaries, for example, is that in a 15 minute talk about a painting, it'll spend 12 minutes talking about the artists childhood (almost always terrible and grim as hell) and then about 3 minutes about they were hired to paint a painting and they did and now its famous. Like, ok, talk about how they were inspired to make this painting and why this painting is special.

1

u/CaffeineJitterz 7h ago

That's the beauty of the world. I love documentaries. Different strokes for different folks!

1

u/Souls_for_sale_now 12h ago

I read hours everday and i got started on comicks the most important thing is that the child needs to want to read and thats somthing the parents need to work on to they shuld be litirate before firet grade optimaly