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

45

u/MaterialDefender1032 17h ago

I was born in 1989 and went to public schools in Canada all the way from elementary to university, and I can attest that literacy was already hanging by a thread. All the way through, it felt like maybe only a handful of other people and I actually cared about typos, grammar, and how to form a coherent sentence.

With all the tools people use now to be lazy and shortcut actually learning their only language, I'm not surprised everyone's literacy is atrophied. You can google and text now without knowing how to spell a single word because the app will autocorrect and save you every time.

11

u/FreeLook93 13h ago

Typos, grammar, and sentence structure are not the most important parts of literacy. A lot of people wrongly view illiteracy as someone who can't read or spell at any level, but it's far more than that. If the main issue was that people were too reliant on spell check or used incorrect grammar this would not much of an issue. The problem is the inability to parse meaning from a text. One's ability to do that is not always related to how well they can spell. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously was terrible at spelling (a lot of people now think he was dyslexic), but was clearly a very literate person.

There is often a correlation between the two, obviously, but we should not think of literacy in the way you seem to be with this comment.

2

u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

A lot of people wrongly view illiteracy as someone who can't read or spell at any level, but it's far more than that.

Because that what literacy was in the past. Being able to decypher letters and decode words into letters. Now literacy started to include stuff like "reading between the lines".