My personal theory is main reason is that we don't practice reading as much in this era. Some claim it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at skill. Dumping that many hours alone doesn't get you there though. Just like a weight lifter you need to keep pushing your limit by adding a bit of weight to the bar from time to time to gain muscle rather the just retain what you currently have.
Between Steam, Netflix, and your pick of social media there are no end of ways to keep yourself busy in more immediately gratifying ways. Getting in the hours and stretching that mental muscle a bit in book form no longer happens naturally. To be as literate as the generation before you you almost have to consciously choose to put in an equal effort since boredom is not as plentiful as it once was.
That said there are is no lack of other contributing factors as well, but reduced experience as the reason in my opinion seems to best explain why the average dips without the the whole curve dipping.
Reading a book doesnt necessarily exercise the mind. The vast majority of books are total junk. And, unlike weights, it is possible to become dumber by reading the wrong books. Spend four hours a day reading vanity press tripe and you would be better off spending those hours with netflix.
I have had students ask me how to improve thier english, how to sound smart. I tell them to stop watching american TV. Watch blackadder or upstart crow. Listen to people who are masters of the spoken word. Want to improve your writing? Stick to the classics. Dont touch JK Rowling until you are done with plato and shakespeare.
(Ive been watching a zew zealand series lately, learning all sorts of slang i didnt know.)
This resonates but I think there's a framing issue. From building educational coding tools for kids, what I've observed is that the volume of textual engagement hasn't necessarily dropped — it's migrated to different forms.
An 11-year-old debugging a Python script is doing intense, sustained reading. Parsing error messages, reading documentation, tracing logic through nested conditionals. A kid building in Roblox Studio is reading and writing Lua. These are literacy acts — just not the kind that show up on NAEP scores or novel-reading surveys.
The real gap isn't hours logged. It's transfer. The kid who can read 200 lines of GDScript to debug why their character won't jump doesn't automatically transfer that stamina to reading a history textbook. The cognitive muscles are being built, but they're specialized.
From what I've seen, when you meet kids where they are — letting them read and write code to solve problems they care about — they'll happily put in hours of focused textual work. The appetite is there. We're measuring the wrong meal.
When it comes to undergrads I doubt people (let's say from the 1980s onwards) were ever doing all the reading assigned in the syllabus anyway. Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof
I don’t think they were arguing it was a bad or boring book — I think they were arguing that most students don’t have time/energy to do all that reading for all 5 or whatever classes they are taking every semester. I certainly didn’t.
I didn't read a good chunk of what we were assigned in high school because I was stuck there for almost 8 hours every day and had jobs and extracurriculars afterwards. In college I only had to go to five classes a few times a week so even with a part-time job I had more free time.
I also quickly discovered that English papers are surprisingly easy to write if I actually read the material and write random thoughts down along the way. I'd spend an evening making each bullet point a paragraph of analytical fluff buttressed by a few quotes (typically with the aid of a searchable PDF copy), edit the next day for flow and structure, divine some sort of rhetorical through-line to the whole thing, then turn it in. This seemed like less of a headache than trying to fabricate something passable out of secondhand internet summaries or Cliff's Notes.
> Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof
I think this comment says more about you than actual students who care. I did all the readings, even the extra ones. So did all the people in my study group for the class. Maybe select for more studious friends.
It's not an isolated incident, he is describing an increasingly common attitude which is utilitarian/"realist" at best and a grotesque materialist corruption of the liberal arts education ideal at worst. Education is generally no longer seen as an end in and of itself, but as a means to more money; insofar as one accepts that view, learning the material is aside the point; getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.
I‘m not super versed in sociology of education but I was always under the impression that over assigning was a real problem in undergraduate and collage setting (even in high school to an extent I heard last).
My post-modern mind went straight to thinking this was the system working as desired. We over-assign to weed out students of from lower classes such that they are more stressed and less likely to graduate, therefor maintaining a status quo of higher classes being more educated and more deserving of the fruits of the labor of the less educated working classes.
Lower socioeconomic status students are getting most of their stress from elsewhere. Compromising the syllabus doesn't work. All these debates have been tried before.
Classism has a way to go for the overkill. I don‘t think the post-modern interpretation is 100% correct... I think this is more complex and nuanced, but your rebuttal is not very good.
Higher classes have both the time and the space to read everything on the list. They also have the training to know where to pay attention, and what they can skim through. If you over-assign you do weed out more students, and the students you do weed out are biased against the working classes.
When I took my BSc in psychology at the University of Iceland in 2011, some of my teachers admitted to this practice (but not the purpose). They told us that the reading list was too long for any one person and that we just had to go through the abstracts and find out which papers to read carefully and which to skim over.
Yes, but why does someone need to be of a different socioeconomic class to have prioritization skills? I'm just saying they have the extra burden of consequences for prioritizing school.
I think it's a realistic skill to need in the real world regardless. What's stopping someone wealthy from developing a toxic relationship or addiction? You can say that's trashy, and I'd agree, but that only proves my point that "class" is not that significant.
I’m more worried about the lack of writing . Far too much time is spent reading other people’s ideas. And very little of what has been published in the past 15 years has been worthwhile.
Better to encourage more people to solidify & advocate for their own ideas, opinions, beliefs rather than regurgitating someone else’s.
Between Steam, Netflix, and your pick of social media there are no end of ways to keep yourself busy in more immediately gratifying ways. Getting in the hours and stretching that mental muscle a bit in book form no longer happens naturally. To be as literate as the generation before you you almost have to consciously choose to put in an equal effort since boredom is not as plentiful as it once was.
That said there are is no lack of other contributing factors as well, but reduced experience as the reason in my opinion seems to best explain why the average dips without the the whole curve dipping.
I have had students ask me how to improve thier english, how to sound smart. I tell them to stop watching american TV. Watch blackadder or upstart crow. Listen to people who are masters of the spoken word. Want to improve your writing? Stick to the classics. Dont touch JK Rowling until you are done with plato and shakespeare.
(Ive been watching a zew zealand series lately, learning all sorts of slang i didnt know.)
An 11-year-old debugging a Python script is doing intense, sustained reading. Parsing error messages, reading documentation, tracing logic through nested conditionals. A kid building in Roblox Studio is reading and writing Lua. These are literacy acts — just not the kind that show up on NAEP scores or novel-reading surveys.
The real gap isn't hours logged. It's transfer. The kid who can read 200 lines of GDScript to debug why their character won't jump doesn't automatically transfer that stamina to reading a history textbook. The cognitive muscles are being built, but they're specialized.
From what I've seen, when you meet kids where they are — letting them read and write code to solve problems they care about — they'll happily put in hours of focused textual work. The appetite is there. We're measuring the wrong meal.
It is written like a play where characters with real personalities have fierce and witty debates. It is rather fun!
I also quickly discovered that English papers are surprisingly easy to write if I actually read the material and write random thoughts down along the way. I'd spend an evening making each bullet point a paragraph of analytical fluff buttressed by a few quotes (typically with the aid of a searchable PDF copy), edit the next day for flow and structure, divine some sort of rhetorical through-line to the whole thing, then turn it in. This seemed like less of a headache than trying to fabricate something passable out of secondhand internet summaries or Cliff's Notes.
I think this comment says more about you than actual students who care. I did all the readings, even the extra ones. So did all the people in my study group for the class. Maybe select for more studious friends.
But then there still is a lever, I suppose, including for reading.
My post-modern mind went straight to thinking this was the system working as desired. We over-assign to weed out students of from lower classes such that they are more stressed and less likely to graduate, therefor maintaining a status quo of higher classes being more educated and more deserving of the fruits of the labor of the less educated working classes.
Higher classes have both the time and the space to read everything on the list. They also have the training to know where to pay attention, and what they can skim through. If you over-assign you do weed out more students, and the students you do weed out are biased against the working classes.
When I took my BSc in psychology at the University of Iceland in 2011, some of my teachers admitted to this practice (but not the purpose). They told us that the reading list was too long for any one person and that we just had to go through the abstracts and find out which papers to read carefully and which to skim over.
I think it's a realistic skill to need in the real world regardless. What's stopping someone wealthy from developing a toxic relationship or addiction? You can say that's trashy, and I'd agree, but that only proves my point that "class" is not that significant.
Perhaps, soon, it will be necessary to phrase it "Zoolander" style. Maybe something like "Top 3 Shocking Reasons Why You Can't Read Good No More!"
The answer might (genuinely) surprise you, judging by your joke.
Better to encourage more people to solidify & advocate for their own ideas, opinions, beliefs rather than regurgitating someone else’s.