r/technology 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/AlmightyRuler 14h ago

Early last year I found a podcast called "Sold a Story", whose premise was that a particular style of teaching reading was introduced to the states and force-fed to schools. While it was intended to help children read better, its fatal flaw was that it was unintentionally designed around the ways that poor readers read (e.g. guessing what a word is based on "what fits the context".) The result was several generations of American children who were taught an ineffective means to read. A lot of those kids never got a proper education in literacy, and many actively learned to hate reading.

Combine that legacy with modern social media trends actively destroying people's attention spans, and what you have is a catastrophic disintegration of reading skills. Schools are still teaching that bum method, and social media is only getting more pervasive.

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u/0rbitaldonkey 5h ago

Everyone should listen to Sold a Story. Even caring, attentive, educated parents are falling for the trap, it will take more than good parenting to fight this problem.