Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

Maybe literature is just a terrible medium for culture except for the relatively brief period in human history when they were extraordinarily cheap to produce and disseminate compared to other cultural products.

Edit: but insofar as media criticism in education is bound to the book rather than the dominant forms of the day, I think children are being done a disservice.

Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.

We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.

You can say it’s like childcare, sure. But learning has to come from somewhere. Parents seem to be doing less and less out of the classroom. Does that mean we’re just giving up then?

It’s odd, I read ravenously as a kid/teen, as did my siblings. You need to read what you enjoy, and for it to not be forced. (For example, summer reading at the library gave out prizes kids cared about for reading books.) Plus, we didn’t have access to much digital media like TV/video games (though it was the early 2010s) because my parents were strict, so books were a solid source of entertainment.

> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives

The problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.

> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.

It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.

I think school ruined fiction books for me. I had to read long boring books about stories that didn't interest me, with useless sentences describing what the scene looked like or what someone had for dinner. Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases.

Maybe if I wasn't forced to read a book in an outdated language about some Christian farmer 300 years ago while I was not in school, and if I could access a succinct version 1/10th of the length of the book, I'd read it.

Maybe if I wasn't asked to describe minor details to prove I read the book, I'd actually focus on the story and not on every irrelevant detail.

Maybe if my teacher didn't force their religious holier-than-thou attitude and allowed us to form our own opinions, I'd be more engaged.

What school taught me was how to get away with not reading the books. I skimmed books by skipping tens of pages at a time or asked friends for the TL;DR or just got an F.

Now I have a feeling of uneasiness and dread when I try to read fiction for fun. So I don't.

Most 300 page fiction books I had to read could've easily been condensed to 30 pages without any loss of information.

Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit. A lot of people won't care about poetry no matter how hard you try to force them to like it. And half of it was propaganda - how $nation survived $struggle, how $nation is so great or beautiful or how $hero did $ethical_thing.

You have to have money to read it but first you need to be able to read to earn money. It is a crazy circular problem.

I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.

Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation (what is the number system for each hand), spatial reasoning (where is each hand) and categorization (what is each hand).

There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.

Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.

Aside from signatures, which don't need to be read, I don't remember the last time I've seen cursive outside of an elementary school.

The way things are headed, you'll just point your phone at it and have it translated to plaintext in 3-5 years anyhow.

It's about practicing how to read and write. Skills that you'll benefit from in every form of knowledge work that you'll ever do.

I would cut almost every other class from the curriculum before cutting English.

> Why can't people test against that?

Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.

> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.

Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.

The purpose of school is a mix between providing childcare, and making sure most of society have a largely overlapping common upbringing experience. We hear that we encourage diversity - but only of superficial stuff like sexual orientation or skin color. We don't want people that think too differently.

This is why I, despite my deep appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge and having spent a significant chunk of my life in the academia after graduating, want my kids to spend as little time as strictly necessary in primary or secondary schools. And the need comes from the fact that I need some of that childcare, not that I need someone else to teach my children anything.

> To read and speak English?

And how are you, right now, communicating? You're writing in English. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, all written down, is its own subject that people aren't born knowing or can acquire like they can speak.

In addition, it's English Literature and Language in the same, so yes, about knowing partly a canon, but how how to interpret texts, both nonfictional and fictional and poetic.

> It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear.

I don't know how to explain to you why it's important to educate humanity.

In the USA, you can test out of it: the GED.

> Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time

Because they can't read or write, and neither can most adults, including developers.

> 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?

Because people VASTLY overestimate their ability with their native language or their command of native language literature.

The SAT English Achievement tests used to absolutely obliterate even students who got good AP English scores. This isn't limited to English--even native Japanese speakers struggle with the advanced JLPT levels, for example. Grammar is hard, yo.

If you don't actively study your native language, your working vocabulary is quite small and your grammatical constructs are excessively simple.

As for shared literature, we were in front of what was claimed to be the house of Jonathan Swift with a bus full of tourists from various English-speaking countries, and the tour guide cracked a joke about "A Modest Proposal". I snickered a bit but didn't think much else. The tour guide pulled me aside later that I was the first person to get the joke and it was almost the end of the year--we're talking hundreds to thousands of people from the US, Australia, India, etc.

I mean, just ask someone to name three main characters and what they did in the last book they read. Most people will struggle. You need to spend some discussion time in order to affix a book into your memory.