Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
>This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history
You've misunderstood the purpose.
Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.
You need the question before you can find the answer.
Sounds like a problem of unrealistic expectations. I read Animal Farm when I was a kid and enjoyed it. No-one told me that it was going to profoundly change my life, and it didn't. Neither did my chemistry class, or my math textbooks, or most of the other stuff I learned in school. There's value in reading significant works of literature, both inherently and because it increases your ability to engage with long and complex texts. Obviously, reading Vanity Fair is not going to confer some kind of profound knowledge, or enable you to do anything in particular that you couldn't do before.
I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids.
Meh educational system probably lacking but parental support is the missing piece. So many parents just send their kids to school expecting them to auto learn - many reasons why parents dont have extra time --> also screen time addiction. Home environment is pretty big component to success.
Every generation is worried that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but that gets ignored).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
the difference is you can have bookshelves full of knowledge to keep. those discord chats will be deleted / inaccessible at someone else's doing. thats different than going into peoples homes and libraries and burning books, which is what you have to do to stop readers from learning and sharing.
Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.
Not even just a category error -- this is blatant malpractice to have this as a headline! The article is talking about reading scores, and this is especially pernicious given the fact that the last couple of years has not been "typical" by any measure; I seem to recall a global pandemic that might have had some influence.
The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.
I was about to downvote you because I read your username as reply to OP’s comment.
To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
>This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history
You've misunderstood the purpose.
Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.
You need the question before you can find the answer.
Sounds like a problem of unrealistic expectations. I read Animal Farm when I was a kid and enjoyed it. No-one told me that it was going to profoundly change my life, and it didn't. Neither did my chemistry class, or my math textbooks, or most of the other stuff I learned in school. There's value in reading significant works of literature, both inherently and because it increases your ability to engage with long and complex texts. Obviously, reading Vanity Fair is not going to confer some kind of profound knowledge, or enable you to do anything in particular that you couldn't do before.
I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids.
Meh educational system probably lacking but parental support is the missing piece. So many parents just send their kids to school expecting them to auto learn - many reasons why parents dont have extra time --> also screen time addiction. Home environment is pretty big component to success.
Every generation is worried that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but that gets ignored).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
Greeks and Romans did experience a >99% loss of their literature during the medieval period...
> Discord chats, AI and social media videos
A.k.a: no trustable source.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
reading and writing are corrupting your ability to remember everything you need to know!!
the difference is you can have bookshelves full of knowledge to keep. those discord chats will be deleted / inaccessible at someone else's doing. thats different than going into peoples homes and libraries and burning books, which is what you have to do to stop readers from learning and sharing.
Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.
> They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics
Have you been around kids recently? I think we all know what they're doing on the phone, and it's not The Great Gatsby.
Not even just a category error -- this is blatant malpractice to have this as a headline! The article is talking about reading scores, and this is especially pernicious given the fact that the last couple of years has not been "typical" by any measure; I seem to recall a global pandemic that might have had some influence.
The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.
If they were addicted to their Kindles then why did their reading score drop?
And AI companies are stealing and destroying all the books. Thanks Silicon Valley!
More like, thanks judges and copyright laws
And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.
a fine way to point to the real issue. a loss of critical thinking.
I was about to downvote you because I read your username as reply to OP’s comment.
To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...
I’m guessing that passing the tokens through the visual cortex doesn’t matter as much as how you engage with the content.