Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

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.

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.

Recommendations? What are you reading?

I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series

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.

we have phones and tables to blame. The less of those, the more of reading.

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.

Do internet comments count as reading?

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.

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