All the kids that are forced to read as a family and finish the Bible every year, wholly, are so unfairly advantaged compared to their peers it’s not even funny anymore.
Uhhh why does this have to be the Bible? I have a just turned 4 year old and we read multiple kids books per day. We’re starting exercises on word recognition/spelling now.
New favorite activity - the Pokémon video games require reading for the entire story, we can play together while reading the story.
Ignoring the implied tone of rallying against atheists, I always was impressed by Jewish culture with this and Talmud. Culturally you're taught to engage on it with historical basic, law one, being encouraged to read it with deep understanding.
Meanwhile for Evangelicals it feels like you're supposed to read the Bible in chunks, memorising what your preacher tells you to, and if you have any doubts, you're punished culturally for bringing that up.
This. It used to be not that uncommon for kids to arrive in Kindergarten already capable of reading and writing. Now it's not that uncommon to see kids graduating high school unable to read and write. Our education system is a disgrace.
It'd be interesting to hear what happens when these "no attention span" kids enter professions where at-length focused reading is mandatory. Say, some parts of law, where the documentation for a case is often >1k pages, and the deadlines are real.
They'll have been broken in by university, studying for the LSAT, and doing mountains of research as an intern by then. The gulf between highschool and university is growing ever wider though, that's for sure.
Next gen will probably leverage AI summarization extensively and effectively. They’ll have better tools to efficiently consume information than lawyers in the past.
> Has any policy ever looked more politically dunderheaded in immediate hindsight than the Democratic Party's obsession with student loan forgiveness?
Friendly reminder that Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) exist [0], and that both the loan forgiveness program and lifting the bankruptcy bans directly threaten this market.
> Even before the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, student loan debt—totaling over $1.64 trillion—was a cause for concern, as it is the second largest source of consumer debt in the United States, trailing only mortgage debt. And like collateralized mortgage debt, there is a market for collateralized student debt. Student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS) are the securitized form of student loan debt, repackaged as a marketable financial instrument. As with any investment vehicle, asset-backed securities like SLABS come with risk, particularly when borrowers default on their loans or have their debt discharged through bankruptcy proceedings. However, historically, SLABS have been a relatively sure bet—yielding consistent returns on investment—given that many student loans are guaranteed by the government and that student loan debt obligations are difficult for borrowers to escape. This is because there has been a long-standing and near-total prohibition on student loan discharge via bankruptcy proceedings. A spate of recent decisions rendered in the United States Bankruptcy Courts and two federal circuit courts of appeal could eliminate that prohibition. In turn, this decision could negatively impact the SLABS market, and in a broader sense, the United States economy.
I’m on mobile so I’m unable to copy a quote from the paper but on page 839 the paper explains that SLABS only apply to privately issued or privately refinanced loans.
I don’t know the numbers but my best guess is that the US govt holds a large number of these loans so the SLABS market is much smaller than other ABS products.
The paper itself reports about 10% of the outstanding amount (p.840) are private. However the data is pretty hard to come by that doesn't aggregate everything.
> The majority of student loans — more than $1.4 trillion — are guaranteed by the federal government — up to 97% of the principal on the loan plus interest payments — in the event that the student loan borrower defaults. This guarantee ensures that most, if not all, of the underlying collateral will be returned to the lender in the event of a borrower’s default. That said, private loans do not come with the same guarantee, but these loans represent a small proportion — around 10% — of the student loan sector. The underlying presumption that student loans are federally guaranteed—because the overwhelming majority of loans are federally guaranteed—gives rise to the misconception that most loans included in SLABS come with federal backing; however, the reality is that they do not.
- I don't watch movies nor hear music from the in-flight-entertainment system, because I find mainstream American movies less engaging than the flight map :-) (the non-mainstream ones are sometimes quite good). In my mind, or in my laptop, I complete stories that I'm writing or want to write. Or I consume an audiobook in my own phone+headphones, if I'm lucky enough to have something interesting to read.
- One of the things that motivates me to write is that every time I board a train, I find a bunch of people reading a thick volume or another, from all ages. Once, I traveled with a fellow writer from my town, who, luck had it, sat in the seat next to mine.
But, full disclaimer, I live in northern Europe. When I travel to USA, it surprises me how many people use tablets in airplanes to watch movies and series...
Doing longform writing on a laptop is something that, at least in my experience, has become much harder on a plane: economy seats are now so close together, there is no room to properly extend one's arms to type, and the tray table might be so small and flimsy it barely accommodates even an ultrabook.
And for some people - like me - it's a stressful environment that's not really conducive to the sort of thinking that writing requires. When I travel solo, I always bring a laptop so I can do some hacking on a side project... and it almost never happens on a plane.
The author of this pro-books piece is an MD at Achieve Partners which pumps e-learning (chromebooks, iPads, ar/vr in classrooms). Is the author speaking candidly out the side of his mouth here? Maybe he quit recently in disgust and just hasn’t updated his CV.
I’d like to defend the opposite perspective. Kids today are connected to a firehose of information-dense content distributed over the web and through cell phones. They’re consuming more information than any generation in the past, both garbage and high-value content.
There is an undeniable “holier than thou” attitude pushed by avid book readers. Frankly, there are a lot of books and long-form content which could be summarized without losing value into a single internet blog post. People have changed the way they consume information and books are on the decline but I reject the idea this is a crisis.
Most kids are addicted to social media, and algorithms there are optimized to feed attention-grabbing garbage. At least in my country there's a clear link between smartphone use in classroom and worsening educational outcomes. We're also enjoying a surge in ADHD diagnosis of small children, as well as mental healt crisis among teenagers, which I suspect have a lot to do with excessive smartphone and social media usage.
I agree that lots of books are garbage too, but they still require some amount of focus and attention, which makes them much, much less bad for brain development than watching TikTok videos all day.
Do you really think it's "both garbage and high-value content"?
From what I've seen it's either or. It seems the exception that a kid or teenager will watch a healthy mix of both.
I agree that lots of books and long-form content could be summarised, but if you ever read a book than watched the movie adaptation, you can understand that even though there's not necessarily a lot of value being lost, there can be.
Also, I think book reading helps a lot with your attention span and capacity to engage with content for a long time. I think the problem is not assigning books to read to those kids, its assigning the wrong ones. Any kid can get absorbed by a book where they can relate to the characters.
The fragmentary nature of online content is what makes it harmful. A book is a narrative that builds upon some basic terms and contexts. A LinkedIn post with some condensed life wisdom avoids any context and many of the “ifs”. Consuming thousands of these won’t allow you to come up with cohesive explanatory models, either. More likely, you will get confused, overwhelmed and possibly angry.
I can't fathom what kind of mental gymnastics one must go through to tout the widespread loss of functional literacy to be a good thing. I suppose you also believe we were all better off as cavemen and that humanity was a mistake?
Plenty of hypothesizing recently that literacy as we know it might have been a merely an intermediate phase in human civilization, between total lack of literacy and future human–human communication or human–computer interfacing through emoji-rich shortform text and voice. And even well before the rise of the smartphone, one might have occasionally heard in nerd circles that boring prose literature is superseded by manga: “look at what Japanese people are reading on the train, and their society is doing fine”.
> With attempting to bestow a half-trillion-dollar benefit on people who attended – and often graduated from – college when a majority of Americans – and an overwhelming majority of voters who needed to be convinced that Democrats aren’t a bunch of elitist twits – did not?
The fact that this is the most common argument against student loan forgiveness that I see doesn't do a good job of convincing me. The argument that we are somehow obliged to keep conditions bad to be fair to those who came before just seems petty.
Rather what are some actual arguments against this policy? I'm no expert, but it seems logical that we should want to help out those who are disproportionally less financially mobile. It is after all very key for innovation.
> Rather what are some actual arguments against this policy?
Is it not obvious? This policy essentially rewarded a creditor to have doled out bad loans worth hundreds of billions, and colleges to have charged maliciously insane fees. It did nothing to actually cure the system - instead they just strapped a bandage on a massive festering tumor and declared the patient OK like the world's worst quack doctor.
Had they actually been interested in lightening the burden on students they would have worked on capping fees, or funding more scholarships, or at least restricting federal credit to employable degrees. Instead they voluntarily chose to take functionally the worst but also the most populist option to buy the loyalty of a bunch of "educated" fools, majority of whom will never contribute back nearly as much to society as was spent on them (because if they couldn't even handle low-interest loans they themselves voluntarily took out, what else can you expect?).
I would think student loan forgiveness is bad in the way bailing out banks is bad. It solves a specific problem now, but if you don't figure out a way to change the way things work it will simply happen again. It can make sense if it brings existing obligations in line with whatever new plan is offered (assuming that makes sense given the plan), but by itself it sounds like a way of sneaking in free tuition instead of making (and debating the merits of) free tuition.
The article completely misses the most likely cause: educators have massively screwed up reading education!
Instead of teaching kids phonics ("what sounds do those letters make?"), they are being taught alternative forms which boil down to whole-word recognition and guessing. Don't recognize a word? Just make up something which feels right in this context. The result is that kids have incredibly poor reading skills, so they don't read books because they simply can't read.
It's made even worse by the "students are less likely to identify works of literature as favorite books, instead referencing young adult books like the Percy Jackson series" elitism going around. If you want kids to read, stop force-feeding them boring and outdated "classics". Those books aren't fun, they don't align with their day-to-day life, and kids just don't care about them. Would you rather have a kid who ends up with the idea that reading is horrible because they were forced to go through Ulysses and who is never going to read a book again, or do you want a kid who thinks reading is fun because they read a dozen Percy Jackson novels and who is going to branch out beyond YA later in life?
It's easy to blame social media and TikTok, but we've heard those same lazy arguments blaming "modern innovation" for decades. First with radio, then with television, then with internet, then with games, and now finally with social media. It's wasn't true then, and it's not true now.
And stop trying to drag "the left" and student lone forgiveness into this: it has absolutely nothing to do with kids' reading skills and only undermines whatever argument you're trying to make.
The fact that teachers would rather chase fads that obviously do not work rather than practice time-tested and proven teaching methods is probably not a problem that can be solved with "great videos on YouTube".
I'm not familiar with 3-cueing but according to the last public school teacher I spoke with "whole word literacy" seems to be the method of the day today, and I am at best skeptical of its efficacy.
3-cueing is still being used in some places, although there's been strong pushback in the last couple of years.
3-cueing isn't the main problem though these days IMHO. It's "balanced literacy" reading instruction strategies that try to find a middle ground with phonics and either cueing or whole word reading. My daughter's school for example did a lot of phonics to start, but then inexplicably transitioned to teaching a weird strategy where you look at the shape of the word and the first letter and guess, using pictures to help if available, and then only as a last resort, sound it out. It baffles the mind.
(If it worked, I wouldn't object, but too often it ended up with attempts to utter "decoded" words that were quite far off from the actual text of the word.)
Jeez that's crazy. I wonder if teachers at your daughter's school are in conflict over the strategy to use so they decided to use a hybrid approach to make both sides equally unhappy.
I really hope that everything other than phonics continues to get enough pushback to completely wipe them out. Because otherwise children are just being set up for failure :(
I have complicated feelings about time tested/proven teaching methods. I wouldn't give such weight to a teaching method merely because it has been in practice for a while. Beating children was also a time tested and proven teaching method once upon a time, and now further research has proven that physically harming children is bad for them even when practiced by otherwise safe adults in controlled settings.
This may just be a formatting thing: I didn't mean to say that Phonics is good because it is both time tested and time proven, rather that it is time tested (stop) and proven (stop). I edited my above comment to try and reflect that intention better.
Something that both works for multiple generations (time tested) and has been observed to be particularly effective (proven) should require any alternative method to provide significant amounts of proof to be unseated from standard curriculum. Having survived as a teaching method for a while is necessary but not sufficient.
Ah this makes more sense, thanks, and I agree that it looks like there wasn't enough evidence/research to warrant changing the way reading is taught here :/
> And stop trying to drag "the left" and student lone forgiveness into this: it has absolutely nothing to do with kids' reading skills and only undermines whatever argument you're trying to make.
The post was very difficult to read because it started with an entirely unrelated rant and then kept veering off into other crap about things he doesn't like about the "the left" with weak links at best back to why people aren't reading anymore.
A copy-paste of your comment would make a better blog post.
Technically it's not just teachers, it's the people who ultimately dictate the curriculum... but otherwise yes, we absolutely should blame educators for failing kids in this way.
>Would you rather have a kid who ends up with the idea that reading is horrible because they were forced to go through Ulysses and who is never going to read a book again, or do you want a kid who thinks reading is fun because they read a dozen Percy Jackson novels and who is going to branch out beyond YA later in life?
Boomers already tried that approach with Millennials by promoting Harry Potter as a gateway to lifelong reading and the results suggest that it doesn't work. Instead of branching out into more complex literature, the overwhelming majority of Millennials (still!) remain fixated on the same YA series that they read as kids and teenagers (not to mention films and video games).
The assumption that light, enjoyable reading will naturally evolve into more sophisticated tastes in the future due to positive associations in childhood is like saying kids allowed to eat chicken nuggies and french fries for every meal mature into healthy adults with varied diets. No, the majority just eat the same thing, end up stunted, and still hate broccoli as adults.
>First with radio, then with television, then with internet, then with games, and now finally with social media. It's wasn't true then, and it's not true now.
It was true then and is true now. The reality is that these technologies did, in fact, erode vital skills, habits, and cultural practices essential to maintaining a healthy society. The damage is difficult to notice because each new generation lacks a reference point for what was lost—not just in their own lives but also in their parents' lives. Over time, these losses compound, but no one sees them as losses because they have already been lost.
Even focusing solely on literacy, the decline in the complexity of written language over the last century is undeniable. Sentence structures have simplified, vocabulary has shrunk, and the demand for nuanced, layered prose has diminished. You can argue that this isn't inherently negative—perhaps prioritizing accessibility over complexity serves broader audiences—but of course, you'd say that. It's easier to justify a loss when you're acclimated to the diminished standard and lack a frame of reference for what was left behind.
Past generations read a lot of junk. By a lot I mean very huge amount of pure junk. And people of my age are still rereading and celebrating sci-fi and fantasy books they discovered when young.
The most popular books were simple romance, detective stories and such.
And kids used to read ... kids books. Harry Potter is fairly complicated compared to other books for that age category.
I cant help but roll the eyes over "incoming college students are less likely to identify works of literature as favorite books, instead referencing young adult books".
My favorite books were Terry Pratchett books and "The Witcher" when I was young. I would probably respond with some literature if professor asked, to look smarter. That the few remaining people who actually read respond more openly to that question is a good thing.
That being said, contemporary adults read less books then adults used to too. There is no such thing as a discussion of books in the workplace, there is no expectation that anyone reads books. However, you do find discussions about series and movies.
So seems like the future expressed in Neil Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” where the underclass can’t read and instead uses “mediaglyphics” interact with computers is becoming true
The article author is not reading attentively. He is referencing a story about "Illinois high school teacher who themed her English course around decision making and, instead of having students read The Odyssey, assigned excerpts along with articles, music, and other media"
I clicked on it and it is story teacher who assigned parts of Odyssey as a part of "unit about leadership". There is no mention of students having to read whole Odyssey previously (or at all). Just that it used to be more books focused and now it is mix of text and other media. I would even argue that having to read 560 pages of Fagles Oddyssey translation would be quite excessive and offtopic to the "unit about leadership". Only small parts of the Odyssey have to do with leadership.
- There was a massive change in the NAEP Reading Achievement Levels in 2007. Reading levels were much more hand-wavey before then. See for yourself here: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieve.aspx#2.... Consequently, reading levels "dropped" quite a lot without dropping much at all. This is presented in the NAEP Reading Performance statistics; in fact, more people have achieved NAEP Advanced reading performance in 2022 than before across all grade levels except grade 8: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cnb
- Average time spent reading has been low since well before the smartphone. According to the BLS, the same data source that the author was pulling from by proxy, in 2003, men and women spent an average of ~32m/day and ~41m/day reading, respectively. Meanwhile, both groups spent >2hrs/day on TV. In fact, average reading time went way down once the TV became mainstream, as the bottom graphic of this article demonstrates: https://clickamericana.com/topics/family-parenting/people-sp.... People have gravitated to the most entertaining platform to kill time since time immemorial; books beat out nothing, cheap theater beat out books, TV beat out the theater, modern smartphones + fast, cheap Internet is beating out everything; who knows what's next.
- Anecdotally, I've been traveling a lot for work for many years. "Fast" Wi-Fi in air travel didn't become ubiquitous until 2021 or so. When I started traveling weekly back in 2016, _if_ an aircraft had Wi-Fi on board, it was Gogo's (now Intelsat's) cellular solution that was horribly slow, hardly worked and cost somewhere between $16-32 _per flight segment_. Today, almost all mainline aircraft have satellite internet that is actually usable (with high latency) that is somewhere between free (if you're a T-Mobile subscriber) and $19 (for international flights) per segment. Given this, it's much easier to scroll through your socials to pass the time on a flying tin can that you didn't really want to be inside of in the first place.
- The "flying tin can" bit is important. Most people HATE flying. The security scans, the noise, the walking (OH MY FUCKING GOD THE WALKING), the bag check, the TSA going through your shit because god forbid you left a water bottle in your luggage and forgot to remove it...it is a really shitty experience for many people. On top of that, you're crammed in row 27A inside of a brand new 737 MAX 9 (that you've heard has issue with exit doors blowing out randomly or falling from the sky for no damn reason) where deli snacks that would normally cost $5 cost $12 because fuck you, which particularly sucks because your flight was an hour delayed and you haven't eaten anything in hours because it took 18.75 years to actually get to the gate. Reading is supposed to be relaxing. For many people, air travel is the least relaxing environment possible.
- I don't have a lot of experience with composition and reading education, but I do have some from hearing my wife talk about teaching math for 11 years. TL;DR: It is very likely that teachers want to incorporate more modern pedagogy in their curriculums, but in a world in which educators have almost zero input in curriculum planning, taxpayers reliably vote for less public school funding (because "teachers are overpaid and don't work" or "i was a student once and teachers don't know what they're doing" or $INSANELY_UNINFORMED_TAKE), and politicians encourage book bans to prevent children fro...
50 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 34.8 ms ] threadNew favorite activity - the Pokémon video games require reading for the entire story, we can play together while reading the story.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Meanwhile for Evangelicals it feels like you're supposed to read the Bible in chunks, memorising what your preacher tells you to, and if you have any doubts, you're punished culturally for bringing that up.
Have LSAT Prep Courses really taken up the burden?
(And obviously - if the AI's are really competent on the hard parts of legal stuff, wouldn't firing 99% of the lawyers be the reasonable strategy?)
Friendly reminder that Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) exist [0], and that both the loan forgiveness program and lifting the bankruptcy bans directly threaten this market.
> Even before the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, student loan debt—totaling over $1.64 trillion—was a cause for concern, as it is the second largest source of consumer debt in the United States, trailing only mortgage debt. And like collateralized mortgage debt, there is a market for collateralized student debt. Student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS) are the securitized form of student loan debt, repackaged as a marketable financial instrument. As with any investment vehicle, asset-backed securities like SLABS come with risk, particularly when borrowers default on their loans or have their debt discharged through bankruptcy proceedings. However, historically, SLABS have been a relatively sure bet—yielding consistent returns on investment—given that many student loans are guaranteed by the government and that student loan debt obligations are difficult for borrowers to escape. This is because there has been a long-standing and near-total prohibition on student loan discharge via bankruptcy proceedings. A spate of recent decisions rendered in the United States Bankruptcy Courts and two federal circuit courts of appeal could eliminate that prohibition. In turn, this decision could negatively impact the SLABS market, and in a broader sense, the United States economy.
[0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3631953
I don’t know the numbers but my best guess is that the US govt holds a large number of these loans so the SLABS market is much smaller than other ABS products.
Still pretty wild stuff
> The majority of student loans — more than $1.4 trillion — are guaranteed by the federal government — up to 97% of the principal on the loan plus interest payments — in the event that the student loan borrower defaults. This guarantee ensures that most, if not all, of the underlying collateral will be returned to the lender in the event of a borrower’s default. That said, private loans do not come with the same guarantee, but these loans represent a small proportion — around 10% — of the student loan sector. The underlying presumption that student loans are federally guaranteed—because the overwhelming majority of loans are federally guaranteed—gives rise to the misconception that most loans included in SLABS come with federal backing; however, the reality is that they do not.
- I don't watch movies nor hear music from the in-flight-entertainment system, because I find mainstream American movies less engaging than the flight map :-) (the non-mainstream ones are sometimes quite good). In my mind, or in my laptop, I complete stories that I'm writing or want to write. Or I consume an audiobook in my own phone+headphones, if I'm lucky enough to have something interesting to read.
- One of the things that motivates me to write is that every time I board a train, I find a bunch of people reading a thick volume or another, from all ages. Once, I traveled with a fellow writer from my town, who, luck had it, sat in the seat next to mine.
But, full disclaimer, I live in northern Europe. When I travel to USA, it surprises me how many people use tablets in airplanes to watch movies and series...
There is an undeniable “holier than thou” attitude pushed by avid book readers. Frankly, there are a lot of books and long-form content which could be summarized without losing value into a single internet blog post. People have changed the way they consume information and books are on the decline but I reject the idea this is a crisis.
I agree that lots of books are garbage too, but they still require some amount of focus and attention, which makes them much, much less bad for brain development than watching TikTok videos all day.
From what I've seen it's either or. It seems the exception that a kid or teenager will watch a healthy mix of both.
I agree that lots of books and long-form content could be summarised, but if you ever read a book than watched the movie adaptation, you can understand that even though there's not necessarily a lot of value being lost, there can be.
Also, I think book reading helps a lot with your attention span and capacity to engage with content for a long time. I think the problem is not assigning books to read to those kids, its assigning the wrong ones. Any kid can get absorbed by a book where they can relate to the characters.
The fact that this is the most common argument against student loan forgiveness that I see doesn't do a good job of convincing me. The argument that we are somehow obliged to keep conditions bad to be fair to those who came before just seems petty.
Rather what are some actual arguments against this policy? I'm no expert, but it seems logical that we should want to help out those who are disproportionally less financially mobile. It is after all very key for innovation.
Is it not obvious? This policy essentially rewarded a creditor to have doled out bad loans worth hundreds of billions, and colleges to have charged maliciously insane fees. It did nothing to actually cure the system - instead they just strapped a bandage on a massive festering tumor and declared the patient OK like the world's worst quack doctor.
Had they actually been interested in lightening the burden on students they would have worked on capping fees, or funding more scholarships, or at least restricting federal credit to employable degrees. Instead they voluntarily chose to take functionally the worst but also the most populist option to buy the loyalty of a bunch of "educated" fools, majority of whom will never contribute back nearly as much to society as was spent on them (because if they couldn't even handle low-interest loans they themselves voluntarily took out, what else can you expect?).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
Instead of teaching kids phonics ("what sounds do those letters make?"), they are being taught alternative forms which boil down to whole-word recognition and guessing. Don't recognize a word? Just make up something which feels right in this context. The result is that kids have incredibly poor reading skills, so they don't read books because they simply can't read.
It's made even worse by the "students are less likely to identify works of literature as favorite books, instead referencing young adult books like the Percy Jackson series" elitism going around. If you want kids to read, stop force-feeding them boring and outdated "classics". Those books aren't fun, they don't align with their day-to-day life, and kids just don't care about them. Would you rather have a kid who ends up with the idea that reading is horrible because they were forced to go through Ulysses and who is never going to read a book again, or do you want a kid who thinks reading is fun because they read a dozen Percy Jackson novels and who is going to branch out beyond YA later in life?
It's easy to blame social media and TikTok, but we've heard those same lazy arguments blaming "modern innovation" for decades. First with radio, then with television, then with internet, then with games, and now finally with social media. It's wasn't true then, and it's not true now.
And stop trying to drag "the left" and student lone forgiveness into this: it has absolutely nothing to do with kids' reading skills and only undermines whatever argument you're trying to make.
3-cueing isn't the main problem though these days IMHO. It's "balanced literacy" reading instruction strategies that try to find a middle ground with phonics and either cueing or whole word reading. My daughter's school for example did a lot of phonics to start, but then inexplicably transitioned to teaching a weird strategy where you look at the shape of the word and the first letter and guess, using pictures to help if available, and then only as a last resort, sound it out. It baffles the mind.
(If it worked, I wouldn't object, but too often it ended up with attempts to utter "decoded" words that were quite far off from the actual text of the word.)
I really hope that everything other than phonics continues to get enough pushback to completely wipe them out. Because otherwise children are just being set up for failure :(
Something that both works for multiple generations (time tested) and has been observed to be particularly effective (proven) should require any alternative method to provide significant amounts of proof to be unseated from standard curriculum. Having survived as a teaching method for a while is necessary but not sufficient.
The post was very difficult to read because it started with an entirely unrelated rant and then kept veering off into other crap about things he doesn't like about the "the left" with weak links at best back to why people aren't reading anymore.
A copy-paste of your comment would make a better blog post.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...
Boomers already tried that approach with Millennials by promoting Harry Potter as a gateway to lifelong reading and the results suggest that it doesn't work. Instead of branching out into more complex literature, the overwhelming majority of Millennials (still!) remain fixated on the same YA series that they read as kids and teenagers (not to mention films and video games).
The assumption that light, enjoyable reading will naturally evolve into more sophisticated tastes in the future due to positive associations in childhood is like saying kids allowed to eat chicken nuggies and french fries for every meal mature into healthy adults with varied diets. No, the majority just eat the same thing, end up stunted, and still hate broccoli as adults.
>First with radio, then with television, then with internet, then with games, and now finally with social media. It's wasn't true then, and it's not true now.
It was true then and is true now. The reality is that these technologies did, in fact, erode vital skills, habits, and cultural practices essential to maintaining a healthy society. The damage is difficult to notice because each new generation lacks a reference point for what was lost—not just in their own lives but also in their parents' lives. Over time, these losses compound, but no one sees them as losses because they have already been lost.
Even focusing solely on literacy, the decline in the complexity of written language over the last century is undeniable. Sentence structures have simplified, vocabulary has shrunk, and the demand for nuanced, layered prose has diminished. You can argue that this isn't inherently negative—perhaps prioritizing accessibility over complexity serves broader audiences—but of course, you'd say that. It's easier to justify a loss when you're acclimated to the diminished standard and lack a frame of reference for what was left behind.
The most popular books were simple romance, detective stories and such.
And kids used to read ... kids books. Harry Potter is fairly complicated compared to other books for that age category.
My favorite books were Terry Pratchett books and "The Witcher" when I was young. I would probably respond with some literature if professor asked, to look smarter. That the few remaining people who actually read respond more openly to that question is a good thing.
That being said, contemporary adults read less books then adults used to too. There is no such thing as a discussion of books in the workplace, there is no expectation that anyone reads books. However, you do find discussions about series and movies.
I clicked on it and it is story teacher who assigned parts of Odyssey as a part of "unit about leadership". There is no mention of students having to read whole Odyssey previously (or at all). Just that it used to be more books focused and now it is mix of text and other media. I would even argue that having to read 560 pages of Fagles Oddyssey translation would be quite excessive and offtopic to the "unit about leadership". Only small parts of the Odyssey have to do with leadership.
- There was a massive change in the NAEP Reading Achievement Levels in 2007. Reading levels were much more hand-wavey before then. See for yourself here: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieve.aspx#2.... Consequently, reading levels "dropped" quite a lot without dropping much at all. This is presented in the NAEP Reading Performance statistics; in fact, more people have achieved NAEP Advanced reading performance in 2022 than before across all grade levels except grade 8: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cnb
- Average time spent reading has been low since well before the smartphone. According to the BLS, the same data source that the author was pulling from by proxy, in 2003, men and women spent an average of ~32m/day and ~41m/day reading, respectively. Meanwhile, both groups spent >2hrs/day on TV. In fact, average reading time went way down once the TV became mainstream, as the bottom graphic of this article demonstrates: https://clickamericana.com/topics/family-parenting/people-sp.... People have gravitated to the most entertaining platform to kill time since time immemorial; books beat out nothing, cheap theater beat out books, TV beat out the theater, modern smartphones + fast, cheap Internet is beating out everything; who knows what's next.
- Anecdotally, I've been traveling a lot for work for many years. "Fast" Wi-Fi in air travel didn't become ubiquitous until 2021 or so. When I started traveling weekly back in 2016, _if_ an aircraft had Wi-Fi on board, it was Gogo's (now Intelsat's) cellular solution that was horribly slow, hardly worked and cost somewhere between $16-32 _per flight segment_. Today, almost all mainline aircraft have satellite internet that is actually usable (with high latency) that is somewhere between free (if you're a T-Mobile subscriber) and $19 (for international flights) per segment. Given this, it's much easier to scroll through your socials to pass the time on a flying tin can that you didn't really want to be inside of in the first place.
- The "flying tin can" bit is important. Most people HATE flying. The security scans, the noise, the walking (OH MY FUCKING GOD THE WALKING), the bag check, the TSA going through your shit because god forbid you left a water bottle in your luggage and forgot to remove it...it is a really shitty experience for many people. On top of that, you're crammed in row 27A inside of a brand new 737 MAX 9 (that you've heard has issue with exit doors blowing out randomly or falling from the sky for no damn reason) where deli snacks that would normally cost $5 cost $12 because fuck you, which particularly sucks because your flight was an hour delayed and you haven't eaten anything in hours because it took 18.75 years to actually get to the gate. Reading is supposed to be relaxing. For many people, air travel is the least relaxing environment possible.
- I don't have a lot of experience with composition and reading education, but I do have some from hearing my wife talk about teaching math for 11 years. TL;DR: It is very likely that teachers want to incorporate more modern pedagogy in their curriculums, but in a world in which educators have almost zero input in curriculum planning, taxpayers reliably vote for less public school funding (because "teachers are overpaid and don't work" or "i was a student once and teachers don't know what they're doing" or $INSANELY_UNINFORMED_TAKE), and politicians encourage book bans to prevent children fro...
What kind of boomer garbage is this? Did my grandpa write this article?
I read this article for free (thank you adblock) yet somehow still feel like I want money back as compensation.