I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos?
I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.
Speaking for my own personal experience. I graduated high school in the mid-2000s. I had any passion, joy and desire for reading crushed out of me through my school years. Between forced reading at school of books/topics I had zero interest in, my parents forcing me to read hours a day after school, writing and presenting book reports, Accelerated Reader tests and who knows what else, I haven't causally picked up a book to read in... a very long time. Thanks to a friend, I have just now picked up audiobooks as a way to potentially reintroduce books to my life.
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
Anecdote: waiting for my childs parent-teacher interview in the library of a mid-range highschool in a large city, I casually asked the row of student facilitators how much they used the (pretty substantial) library. They all said, with emphasis, that they'd never used the library once, not even for a single book. Overhearing this a teacher looked at me and shook his head with resignation.
Is libby very popular among young school children? Based on surveys asking how often kids read per week I would figure ebook reading is also down. They don't usually ask about the format.
Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
> Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.
My personal assumption has been that 'pleasure', at least partially, includes expected practical returns. I'd also guess that's at least partially true for kids: "my parents told me if I read a lot, I'll be smart when I grow up", etc.
We generally worry less if we see utility in it, and if we have people to share our hobby with. I think it's reasonable to say there's few hobbies out there without real world utility.
Fair enough :-) Do you have a theory for why we view reading, even in terms of pleasure, as favorable? I imagine it's because we see some utility in it over other activities.
They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
Herd mentality, anti-intellectual culture, poor reading skills, and ADHD are widespread issues. Those mothers sound lame, and ultimately the joke's on them. Reading is awesome, and making fun of someone for it just shows what basic bitches they are.
LotR is an oldie but goodie! I finally dug it out and read it this past month and it was quite enjoyable. I had tried back in high school but was kind of bored with the frilly language and songs and gave up. But this time around in my 40s, having read lots more books since then and developed a stronger vocabulary and reading stamina (e.g. I've read and enjoyed Stormlight Archive twice, which is 4x the length), it was actually pretty quick and easy, and I regret not having done it earlier. I paid a lot of attention to the journey and all the cardinal directions and feel like my sense of direction improved actually. And I'd always liked the movies but the books are so much better! It feels like a book from a strange almost-on-the-spectrum nerd who also spend time on the front lines in World War 1. I think these days the nerdy authors I like and the people who are grunts in the military are almost distinct circles, so maybe unlikely to get quite the same book in terms of the lore but also the realistic emotional punches.
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
Why is reading for pleasure always placed on some sort of pedestal? I would argue that what is being consumed is more important than the medium of consumption.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
I am not reading either for pleasure. I am reading so much during my daily life (Documentation, coding, manuals, logs) that reading for pleasure sounds like a bad joke.
In the olden days you could not stop some children from reading, and parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. For many, school holidays was when a lot of reading happened. Lord of the Rings would need a summer, and much literature was required to be part of the 'in group'. This would start at a young age, much like how eight year old kids need Roblox to be part of the 'in group', there was a time when it would be something such as reading everything by Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien or, more recently, J K Rowling was important, with each age group reading their own thing, not prescribed by adults.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
It's worse than this.
I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos?
I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.
The point is that "doing hard things" is required to be a successful adult. Meanwhile, the bar for what constitutes a "hard thing" is dropping fast.
[dead]
Speaking for my own personal experience. I graduated high school in the mid-2000s. I had any passion, joy and desire for reading crushed out of me through my school years. Between forced reading at school of books/topics I had zero interest in, my parents forcing me to read hours a day after school, writing and presenting book reports, Accelerated Reader tests and who knows what else, I haven't causally picked up a book to read in... a very long time. Thanks to a friend, I have just now picked up audiobooks as a way to potentially reintroduce books to my life.
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
Anecdote: waiting for my childs parent-teacher interview in the library of a mid-range highschool in a large city, I casually asked the row of student facilitators how much they used the (pretty substantial) library. They all said, with emphasis, that they'd never used the library once, not even for a single book. Overhearing this a teacher looked at me and shook his head with resignation.
Did you ask them how much they read as ebooks? Libby is very popular.
That would have been a good follow up question - I'll ask next term.
Is libby very popular among young school children? Based on surveys asking how often kids read per week I would figure ebook reading is also down. They don't usually ask about the format.
Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
> Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.
My personal assumption has been that 'pleasure', at least partially, includes expected practical returns. I'd also guess that's at least partially true for kids: "my parents told me if I read a lot, I'll be smart when I grow up", etc.
We generally worry less if we see utility in it, and if we have people to share our hobby with. I think it's reasonable to say there's few hobbies out there without real world utility.
> I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure"
It looks to me far away over there in the "what's my profit in reading" direction I'm afraid.
Fair enough :-) Do you have a theory for why we view reading, even in terms of pleasure, as favorable? I imagine it's because we see some utility in it over other activities.
Reading causes your brain to hallucinate. Visualization is a muscle: reading is the weights at the gym.
Read good english, speak good english. Read dumb english, speak dumb english.
It is completely off in the opposite direction
They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...
I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
Herd mentality, anti-intellectual culture, poor reading skills, and ADHD are widespread issues. Those mothers sound lame, and ultimately the joke's on them. Reading is awesome, and making fun of someone for it just shows what basic bitches they are.
It's not that there's social pressure specifically against reading. Just that there's social pressure to conform, and most people aren't reading.
Recommendations? What are you reading?
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
LotR is an oldie but goodie! I finally dug it out and read it this past month and it was quite enjoyable. I had tried back in high school but was kind of bored with the frilly language and songs and gave up. But this time around in my 40s, having read lots more books since then and developed a stronger vocabulary and reading stamina (e.g. I've read and enjoyed Stormlight Archive twice, which is 4x the length), it was actually pretty quick and easy, and I regret not having done it earlier. I paid a lot of attention to the journey and all the cardinal directions and feel like my sense of direction improved actually. And I'd always liked the movies but the books are so much better! It feels like a book from a strange almost-on-the-spectrum nerd who also spend time on the front lines in World War 1. I think these days the nerdy authors I like and the people who are grunts in the military are almost distinct circles, so maybe unlikely to get quite the same book in terms of the lore but also the realistic emotional punches.
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
Legacy Fleet Trilogy
Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)
Ubik is one of my faves
Why is reading for pleasure always placed on some sort of pedestal? I would argue that what is being consumed is more important than the medium of consumption.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
2012 is pretty much the year smartphone addiction began approaching critical mass
Possibly (probably?) a coincidence, but it did look like broad changes to how reading was taught started to land in 2010-2012: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/common-standards-dr...
The real culprit is probably more in line with far more alternatives to reading for entertainment.
Not a rigorous response, but Minecraft.
Kids were playing a ton of online games before Minecraft.
Yes and no
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
YouTube.
My guess is smartphones hitting a point of increased adoption. In the "good old days", phone games were honest and not addiction-inducing adware..
you kidding me? they were absolutely addicting. Just not casino style.
Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
we have phones and tables to blame. The less of those, the more of reading.
*proceeds to shake fist at table.
"Damn you four legged abomination; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee"
Amen brother. I don't know how to hear anymore about tables.
/tableflip
I am not reading either for pleasure. I am reading so much during my daily life (Documentation, coding, manuals, logs) that reading for pleasure sounds like a bad joke.
That difference is like comparing taking a piss and having sex. While you use the same body part the experiences are not at all alike.
The thing with analogies, we can make them go either way.
It's like having sex after a whole day of sex work. Exhausting.
Have you never read a good book you can't put down?
Do internet comments count as reading?
I don't know if kids are even reading comments. There's another perfectly good video with just a quick swipe.
Thanks now I'm imagining HN as an endless torrent of TikTok videos, where it's an AI voice reading the comments.
In the olden days you could not stop some children from reading, and parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. For many, school holidays was when a lot of reading happened. Lord of the Rings would need a summer, and much literature was required to be part of the 'in group'. This would start at a young age, much like how eight year old kids need Roblox to be part of the 'in group', there was a time when it would be something such as reading everything by Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien or, more recently, J K Rowling was important, with each age group reading their own thing, not prescribed by adults.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
Many people worry about children not reading enough but when you look at the parents they're all on their phones.
Monkey see monkey do. If you want kids to read habitually then you need to read habitually.
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