I don’t know if this matters much. When I was in school it was rare to actually read a book assignment anyways, and I’m sure with LLMs now it’s less.
I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
I don't understand this. If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading? Or are we taking about kids who never read until school forced them to?
From what I understand, if parents read to kids when they are little, they become readers who enjoy it.
Yes, because it amounts to several hours long homework. Kids are more slower then adults at reading, so this can easily amount to 10 hours of additional homework which you do on top of usual homework.
So yes, if you spent 10 hours reading a book you don't care about this week, you don't feel like reading something else. You feel like you spent awful lot of time reading already and feel like reading is something like vacuum cleaning - duty but not something you do for fun.
It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear. What precisely is the purpose of "English" class? What? To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare. So who cares what they do with their time.
These aren't really comparable. Cursive handwriting varies considerably between people. One person's might be very clear, another might be impossible to discern.
This sort of thing is some of the weirdest pseudointellectualism I've seen. Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial. Because now we have Google Maps, ballpoint pens, calculators, and analog clocks.
> Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial.
I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".
... Prepare shorter or lighter materials for them to read, as this article suggests? Why has reading whole books become the holy grail of education system?
The said education system expected this:
> As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
Yeah, sounds like a very great way to filter out perhaps 20% of good readers and make sure the rest 80% will hate reading for the rest of their lives.
Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
> What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
A clear majority of parents that I know actually would have the education system do that. Hence the oftentimes poor results.
A private school I looked at in 2025 required iPads (and nothing else) because their entire management of students was don by an iPad application (that worked on nothing but iPads).
The school admin/marketer/consultant/whatever I spoke to during the sales call literally did not understand what I meant when I said "If your management is so incompetent at decision-making that they got shangaied into buying into this deficient ecosystem when almost any other decision would have worked for both major mobile platforms, why on earth would I think that the other decisions they make would be any good".[1]
------------------------------
[1] Management who make obviously incompetent decisions like "Our study material only works on iPads" are obviously incompetent or otherwise disconnected from reality.
When I was in high-school 20 plus years ago excerpt based reading assignments were fairly common in non-honors/advanced placement classes. Except there were whole textbooks full of excerpt based assignments instead of computer software for this purpose. Anecdotally I took honors and AP English and those classes destroyed my desire to read for years. I only read a few of the assigned books cover to cover because they were either dreadfully boring or the expectations for how quickly we should read them were more than I, a very average student, could manage. Usually some combination of both. Rather than relying on cliffnotes and sparknotes alone I would typically read the first chapter, the last chapter, and then some chapter in the middle so I was prepared for tests and discussions.
At the end of the day the AP exams didn't test you on your knowledge of The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. The exam tested you on your ability to read an excerpt and answer questions about it as well as your ability to write a multi-paragraph essay from a prompt while a proctor wearing the most hideous smelling blackberry perfume bathed you in an olfactory assault every time they walked by. In-classroom writing assignments were the most effective way to prepare and we did them frequently. As a reward for doing well you got to skip a couple of 100 level English credits in college.
Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today, but it feels like the education system never takes a moment to look inward and acknowledge that The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia are dreadfully boring reads. It took me three tries to finish 1984 because the beginning is such a slog. It is strange to say kids aren't interested in reading (from the article) when a lot of the subject matter is objectively dull. Four of the six books in the article header are books I don't even want to think about let alone read.
> Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today
Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Reading thick books requires having some device with no distructions. In my young ages all computers and all smartphones used to have no distructions, but now all computers (except some Linux distros) used to be bombarded with distructions in such a way that I can not read a book on any proprietary OS without getting some notification about anti-virus software or some updates or a need to restart, or just some events happening on the Internets.
My point is not just that distractions distract people, but distructions have become inevitable on almost any modern device able to render PDF with formulas.
Kids are either into reading or not. There's a critical mass when kids read because they like it, to the point where I need to remind them to read less.
While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.
There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.
I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."
Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.
I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.
Plausibly some kids might still be reading entire novels worth of text online on the regular. Think of all the massive fanfic archives (Including original fics) Lots of fanfic authors have fans of their own, and those have got to be coming from somewhere.
It doesn't need to be in dead tree format. It doesn't need to be famous authors. Just so long as they read!
I never understand where these anecdotes come from.
I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
So whatever the problem is, if there even is one, is less to do with school curriculums, english classes, screen time, or the availability of books, and more to do with the culture of many homes not prioritizing reading.
You doubt there's a problem because you don't know of it happening in your rural town? In addition to teaching kids to read books, we apparently need to teach adults research and inference fundamentals.
Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
I will only do things from memory, you can use Google yourself.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
"The suburb crocodiles", which is also how the youth gang in the book is called. Boy wants to be part of the gang, which has idiotic tests of courage. Plot twist is that the guy who refused to do this idiotic tests ends up being the tough guy. I don't remember if this was the main character or not. Ends up saving some other boy in a wheelchair, I think while they play in a collapsing old industrial building.
* Faust I
Maybe the most famous German book from v.Goethe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust,_Part_One Old professor Faust makes a deal with the devil that he can take his soul, if he is able to provide him with true joy. Professor gets young again, parties, seduces a flawless faithful girl, makes her kill her mother, she ends up in prison being pregnant, devil proposes to save here if she ditches god, she refuses. Faust flees, huge cliff hanger until v.Goethe gets to write Faust II at the end of his live.
"The visit of the old Lady" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit_(play) The old (now rich) lady visits her home town, which has seen better times and demands the death of her youth lover for a huge amount of money for the town. In the beginning all swear loyalty to the guy, in the end all demand his death, inviting the international press. In between the slow transition is described being framed by the protagonists as the most ethical thing ever.
Soldier Woyzeck gets exploited by both his superior and his doctor. The doctor puts him on a only beans diet, he becomes crazy. The doctor comments his mental struggles with "Very interesting, very good, should also try this ..." Ends up killing his spouse due to jealousy and later maybe himself. Never got completed by the original author, and the order of the acts is disputed, which makes for a quite different ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck
We have at least a whole generation of kids that were taught to read using "whole language" methods instead of phonetically. None of this really surprises me.
They're axing honors classes in our high schools so they can mix all the kids together for equity. But because some of the students can't read very well (even in 10th grade), they have to read the books aloud during class, since it would be inequitable to require the kids to read on their own at home.
Not surprisingly, when you're rate-limited by read-aloud speed, you can't get through that many books and excerpts are a natural response.
When I started high school in the early '90s, there was a compulsory summer reading list of 10–12 books, each ranging from 300–800 pages. Then we had to write essays about them. This was just our summer homework before the new school year started. I didn't enjoy it at all; at the same time, I read lots of easy fiction, sometimes several hundred pages a day.
My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.
People rarely read whole books anymore. I know very few adults in my life who read books, lots of people are put off by reading in school and never give it a try in their adult life.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
If by summer reading assignments, are you referring to Scholastic summer reading programs? I quite enjoyed those as the available options for reading were very wide and I could always get some new Goosebumps books from the book fairs. But those are parent initiated, not something the school assigns. They can't really assign anything over the summer as they have no authority to do so outside of some IEP designed to get a particular student back on track.
The article seems to be centered around reading assignments. I was reading entire books often when I was in school, yet did my best to avoid reading assignments because they were so dull.
I don't know how they sourced respondents, anecdotally all my kids a reading books as I type that. They read much more than I did at their age; and their friends read as well. They'd probably spend all their time on snapshat or brawlstars, were they to have a say.
Isn't that the characteristic of each generation to feel like education of the next generation is decadent?
I’m in my 30s but the UK English reading choices weren’t very inspiring when I studied and you could pass the exams without ever reading full texts so of course that’s what schools encouraged.
I remember doing sections of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth but we never did the whole thing. We did read Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls but that was it for books/plays. Poetry we had a book called Anthology where we had to read and re-read many poems for analysis.
In the latest "War on the rocks" podcast [1], Ryan Evans asked his guest, Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, what books he has read lately (he often, maybe always, asks that question). The guest answered basically that, as a politician, he does not have time to read books anymore, because he is very busy with other things.
I think most listeners of the podcast are absolutely ok with this. Pål Jonson is an important guy, who has a job to do. That job is to keep Sweden safe, and, as Sweden is now part of NATO, by extension to keep NATO safe as well. If he does his job well, then Sweden and NATO together might be able to deter aggression by Russia. If taking time to read books means he has less time to do his job well, then he should not read books.
But if you replace Pål Jonson with somebody else, who are we to say that their job is less important? And if we take a kid, the way the kid understands their jobs is that they need to get ready for life,for their actual, paid, job when the time will come. And if in doing that, they are more efficient by using ChatGPT, then why should they read entire books?
My main concern here is attention span. I think books are good for improving the muscle of attention span. There are other places that you can improve your attention span but I fear they are not being taught in school either.
The headline should have been ...especially in English Class.
Even in the 90s most people got book summaries to get through the curriculums. I would say, the highest performing language students and teachers pets at school did exactly that.
School unfortunately is largely about reciting of the teachers knowledge, so there is no need to read the source and think for yourself.
Seattle public schools does not read full books in elementary. Just short form publisher slop. Can’t do reading as a group and discussion because not all kids understand and that wouldn’t be inclusive.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 93.2 ms ] threadI’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
From what I understand, if parents read to kids when they are little, they become readers who enjoy it.
Yes. (n=1)
So yes, if you spent 10 hours reading a book you don't care about this week, you don't feel like reading something else. You feel like you spent awful lot of time reading already and feel like reading is something like vacuum cleaning - duty but not something you do for fun.
The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare. So who cares what they do with their time.
Nowadays? Yes. And that’s the problem. It used to not be the case in the past.
I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".
It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
The said education system expected this:
> As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
Yeah, sounds like a very great way to filter out perhaps 20% of good readers and make sure the rest 80% will hate reading for the rest of their lives.
A clear majority of parents that I know actually would have the education system do that. Hence the oftentimes poor results.
A private school I looked at in 2025 required iPads (and nothing else) because their entire management of students was don by an iPad application (that worked on nothing but iPads).
The school admin/marketer/consultant/whatever I spoke to during the sales call literally did not understand what I meant when I said "If your management is so incompetent at decision-making that they got shangaied into buying into this deficient ecosystem when almost any other decision would have worked for both major mobile platforms, why on earth would I think that the other decisions they make would be any good".[1]
------------------------------
[1] Management who make obviously incompetent decisions like "Our study material only works on iPads" are obviously incompetent or otherwise disconnected from reality.
That's pretty on-brand for HN though. This place enforces a very peculiar version of anti-intellectualism centered on empty-headed contrarianism.
They want to play devil's advocate but they aren't smart enough so all you get are dumb hot takes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland
At the end of the day the AP exams didn't test you on your knowledge of The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. The exam tested you on your ability to read an excerpt and answer questions about it as well as your ability to write a multi-paragraph essay from a prompt while a proctor wearing the most hideous smelling blackberry perfume bathed you in an olfactory assault every time they walked by. In-classroom writing assignments were the most effective way to prepare and we did them frequently. As a reward for doing well you got to skip a couple of 100 level English credits in college.
Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today, but it feels like the education system never takes a moment to look inward and acknowledge that The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia are dreadfully boring reads. It took me three tries to finish 1984 because the beginning is such a slog. It is strange to say kids aren't interested in reading (from the article) when a lot of the subject matter is objectively dull. Four of the six books in the article header are books I don't even want to think about let alone read.
Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Reading thick books requires having some device with no distructions. In my young ages all computers and all smartphones used to have no distructions, but now all computers (except some Linux distros) used to be bombarded with distructions in such a way that I can not read a book on any proprietary OS without getting some notification about anti-virus software or some updates or a need to restart, or just some events happening on the Internets.
My point is not just that distractions distract people, but distructions have become inevitable on almost any modern device able to render PDF with formulas.
Even the "troublesome" ones.
More school districts should experiment with contemporary novels that make sense in a modern context.
That's why the 2026 remake of Animal Farm in animated form includes a twerking pig[1]. Education with brainrot is the future!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtjPGXZLW6g
While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.
There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.
I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."
Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.
I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.
It doesn't need to be in dead tree format. It doesn't need to be famous authors. Just so long as they read!
For long form original see eg:
* The last angel https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.24420...
* The wandering inn https://wanderinginn.com/2017/03/03/rw1-00/
* Or eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel) which made its way off the net and into print, possibly to the detriment of both. :-P Original location (afaict) (no longer available there) : https://www.galactanet.com/writing.html
I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
So whatever the problem is, if there even is one, is less to do with school curriculums, english classes, screen time, or the availability of books, and more to do with the culture of many homes not prioritizing reading.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
"The suburb crocodiles", which is also how the youth gang in the book is called. Boy wants to be part of the gang, which has idiotic tests of courage. Plot twist is that the guy who refused to do this idiotic tests ends up being the tough guy. I don't remember if this was the main character or not. Ends up saving some other boy in a wheelchair, I think while they play in a collapsing old industrial building.
* Faust I
Maybe the most famous German book from v.Goethe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust,_Part_One Old professor Faust makes a deal with the devil that he can take his soul, if he is able to provide him with true joy. Professor gets young again, parties, seduces a flawless faithful girl, makes her kill her mother, she ends up in prison being pregnant, devil proposes to save here if she ditches god, she refuses. Faust flees, huge cliff hanger until v.Goethe gets to write Faust II at the end of his live.
* Antigone
Famous greek drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone
* Die Räuber
Famous play from the other famous German poet Schiller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robbers
* Hamlet
Shakespeare, original available in English
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
"The visit of the old Lady" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit_(play) The old (now rich) lady visits her home town, which has seen better times and demands the death of her youth lover for a huge amount of money for the town. In the beginning all swear loyalty to the guy, in the end all demand his death, inviting the international press. In between the slow transition is described being framed by the protagonists as the most ethical thing ever.
* Im Westen nichts Neues
"No news from the West (front)" describes the trauma of soldiers in the first world war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front
* Woyzeck
Soldier Woyzeck gets exploited by both his superior and his doctor. The doctor puts him on a only beans diet, he becomes crazy. The doctor comments his mental struggles with "Very interesting, very good, should also try this ..." Ends up killing his spouse due to jealousy and later maybe himself. Never got completed by the original author, and the order of the acts is disputed, which makes for a quite different ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck
Not surprisingly, when you're rate-limited by read-aloud speed, you can't get through that many books and excerpts are a natural response.
My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
I don't know how they sourced respondents, anecdotally all my kids a reading books as I type that. They read much more than I did at their age; and their friends read as well. They'd probably spend all their time on snapshat or brawlstars, were they to have a say.
Isn't that the characteristic of each generation to feel like education of the next generation is decadent?
I remember doing sections of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth but we never did the whole thing. We did read Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls but that was it for books/plays. Poetry we had a book called Anthology where we had to read and re-read many poems for analysis.
In the latest "War on the rocks" podcast [1], Ryan Evans asked his guest, Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, what books he has read lately (he often, maybe always, asks that question). The guest answered basically that, as a politician, he does not have time to read books anymore, because he is very busy with other things.
I think most listeners of the podcast are absolutely ok with this. Pål Jonson is an important guy, who has a job to do. That job is to keep Sweden safe, and, as Sweden is now part of NATO, by extension to keep NATO safe as well. If he does his job well, then Sweden and NATO together might be able to deter aggression by Russia. If taking time to read books means he has less time to do his job well, then he should not read books.
But if you replace Pål Jonson with somebody else, who are we to say that their job is less important? And if we take a kid, the way the kid understands their jobs is that they need to get ready for life,for their actual, paid, job when the time will come. And if in doing that, they are more efficient by using ChatGPT, then why should they read entire books?
[1] https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/getting-faster-stronger-re...
Even in the 90s most people got book summaries to get through the curriculums. I would say, the highest performing language students and teachers pets at school did exactly that.
School unfortunately is largely about reciting of the teachers knowledge, so there is no need to read the source and think for yourself.