I remember the first time I read His Dark Materials trilogy as a kid and how much I loved it. I was able to escape to a completely different world, and it was the first love story I really enjoyed. I loved it so much I reread the books immediately, and begged my parents for the cassettes for the audiobooks. Makes me kind of sad that we seem to not value reading as a form of entertainment anymore because getting immersed in a book is a completely unique feeling I rarely get from any visual media.
HN has logged 1300 comments in the past decade on a couple of apmreports posts about how a U.S. experimental reading methodology has destroyed reading capability: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=apmreports+teaching
Educational fads come and go. My brother is five (school) years younger than I am, which was time enough for our school to move from phonics to shape recognition. (His first-grade year will have been 60 years ago in September.) He survived and reads a lot. It didn't hurt that we grew up in a house with lots of books.
I had New Math somewhere around middle school. Probably the time could have been better used, but it didn't cripple me.
That has nothing to with anything. Books are less fun then youtube/netflix/tiktok/video games.
And unlike youtube and tiktok, they cost money and you have to go to bookstore or library to get them. There are no equivalets of kids journals/channels that would promote fun books to kids either.
Schools cant change that. When my generation read, a lot of it was cheap junk with formulaic plot. That was replaced by tiktok. And once that does not exist, the books are not perceived as potential fun for kids. They are just another homework
> In Texas, she said, “There’s no way we would have been able to read the entire thing. It’s [Enemies: A Love Story] a beautiful book, but there is an affair in it.”
Wow. Wait'll they encounter Genesis, Samuel, Kings, etc.
> Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video...
In no world would I consider a person who says "it's okay if the next generation is illiterate" an education expert.
And the guy selling excerpts software says there's no data suggesting a deep, unsolvable flaw in his product. Cool.
> Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels.
... If anyone is working on reversing this I'd love to hear where you're starting.
My suggestion is get kids into audiobooks first and then get them reading, also don’t let kids watch tv or have a smart phone I wasn’t allowed to watch tv during the week as a kid, and I have neck problems because I read so much. Now I’m lucky if I get through a book a year.
Reversing it? We're on the cusp of the LLM era. You're on a site full of people trying to sell one kind of summarization or another as so thoroughly a replacement for reading full original texts that it can't be questioned without raising hackneyed accusations of objecting to the invention of the calculator. Before long people who read full novels will be seen the way we now see people who listen to music on vinyl.
I remember the first time I read His Dark Materials trilogy as a kid and how much I loved it. I was able to escape to a completely different world, and it was the first love story I really enjoyed. I loved it so much I reread the books immediately, and begged my parents for the cassettes for the audiobooks. Makes me kind of sad that we seem to not value reading as a form of entertainment anymore because getting immersed in a book is a completely unique feeling I rarely get from any visual media.
HN has logged 1300 comments in the past decade on a couple of apmreports posts about how a U.S. experimental reading methodology has destroyed reading capability: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=apmreports+teaching
Educational fads come and go. My brother is five (school) years younger than I am, which was time enough for our school to move from phonics to shape recognition. (His first-grade year will have been 60 years ago in September.) He survived and reads a lot. It didn't hurt that we grew up in a house with lots of books.
I had New Math somewhere around middle school. Probably the time could have been better used, but it didn't cripple me.
That has nothing to with anything. Books are less fun then youtube/netflix/tiktok/video games.
And unlike youtube and tiktok, they cost money and you have to go to bookstore or library to get them. There are no equivalets of kids journals/channels that would promote fun books to kids either.
Schools cant change that. When my generation read, a lot of it was cheap junk with formulaic plot. That was replaced by tiktok. And once that does not exist, the books are not perceived as potential fun for kids. They are just another homework
> In Texas, she said, “There’s no way we would have been able to read the entire thing. It’s [Enemies: A Love Story] a beautiful book, but there is an affair in it.”
Wow. Wait'll they encounter Genesis, Samuel, Kings, etc.
> Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video...
In no world would I consider a person who says "it's okay if the next generation is illiterate" an education expert.
And the guy selling excerpts software says there's no data suggesting a deep, unsolvable flaw in his product. Cool.
> Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels.
... If anyone is working on reversing this I'd love to hear where you're starting.
My suggestion is get kids into audiobooks first and then get them reading, also don’t let kids watch tv or have a smart phone I wasn’t allowed to watch tv during the week as a kid, and I have neck problems because I read so much. Now I’m lucky if I get through a book a year.
Reversing it? We're on the cusp of the LLM era. You're on a site full of people trying to sell one kind of summarization or another as so thoroughly a replacement for reading full original texts that it can't be questioned without raising hackneyed accusations of objecting to the invention of the calculator. Before long people who read full novels will be seen the way we now see people who listen to music on vinyl.