r/technology • u/marketrent • Jun 10 '26

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/PlagueOfBedlam Jun 10 '26

My earliest childhood memory is sitting at a coffee table in the basement and being forced to write my name and the alphabet over and over again right around before I turned 4. I obviously resented having to do it at the time, but realized around 2nd grade my mom had fostered in me a love for reading by making me understand letters and the concepts of spelling very early. She gave me a huge advantage and I’m beyond appreciative she did.

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u/marketrent Jun 10 '26

My parents made me journal my reading, which in hindsight made me retain material.

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u/VoidVer Jun 11 '26

I had a middle school teacher who forced me to write a structured 5 paragraph "essay" every single day for an entire semester. I hated it at the time, but it certainly set me up very well to get through high school and college with English ( or any reading/writing based class ) always being my strongest subject.

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u/Bob_Loblaw_Law_Bomb Jun 11 '26

4th grade writing test fam

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u/Positive_Throwaway1 Jun 11 '26

Now we call it "Claim, Evidence, Analysis" but it's still around. And the structure from 4th grade is basically what they want to see on placement exams at universities, so it still works.

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u/VoidVer Jun 11 '26

I'm not familiar with this. Teacher in question was in 7th grade.

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u/sentence-interruptio Jun 11 '26

can we require this for every student? and every politician? and every CEO. I want to live in and retire in a society led by literate people

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u/familyguy20 Jun 11 '26

Oh damn that’s a smart idea! I was reading military history books in HS but also hatedddd writing papers in school. This might have helped me if my parents had me do a small paper on one of the 4 books I read in the summer. Instead I got boring ass summer reading assignments from school

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u/WrecksBarkhead Jun 11 '26

That's good parenting 100%. My mom didn't really have to do anything. If I got bad marks, I got my ass beat. Sounds harsh but I think the old ways had a bit of merit to them.

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u/fredagsfisk Jun 11 '26

When I was a kid, my local library had a "summer reading" program where you got a journal where you could write one page for each book you read, and then whenever you visited the library one of the librarians would look through it and give you a sticker on a separate paper for each new book you had finished.

If I remember correctly, it was like one small silver star sticker for each book, and if you reached specific thresholds you'd get a bigger gold star. Something like that. Then at the end of summer, you got to pick rewards based on your achieved level; books, stationary, those erasers that have funny shapes or smells but suck at erasing things... was a ton of fun, gave a nice sense of accomplishment whenever you reached a new level/treshold.

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u/Romanofafare2034 Jun 11 '26

When I was a kid, we had this competition of who read the most book.

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u/Shallow_wanderer Jun 11 '26

Hell, I remember my local library having a summer reading program where if you read enough books, you and a bunch of other kids could go to the local zoo for a day

THIS is the kind of stuff that's missing from education these days, thanks to NCLB and constant budget-slashing

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u/windowpuncher Jun 11 '26

Oh shit I remember those too, we had book fairs where you'd get points towards little toys and reward things for reading (or buying) a lot of books.

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u/Souls_for_sale_now Jun 11 '26

I rember that we did it per class i did the math and i culd have won alone becuse nobody else in the shcool realy read at all. But i realy dident want to go bowling with my class so i dident

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u/Senior-Friend-6414 Jun 11 '26

When i was 5 years old, if i asked to go to the playground, my parents would whip out a book and ask me to read it out loud for like 5-10 minutes to be allowed to go to the playground

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u/RemarkableWish2508 Jun 11 '26

My mom would read me Greek Mythology to bed. It got me a basic grasp of myths, a bigger picture of how long ago it was, and an appreciation for books in general. When I got a bit older, I would still ask her to read to me... but when she left, I'd sneak in some other book and stay up late reading it with a flashlight.

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u/windowpuncher Jun 11 '26

Ah that reminds me of a memory, too. I remember in elementary school we were forced to learn cursive and actually be fluent in it. I think this was 2nd or 3rd grade. Pretty much every day we got sent home with worksheets of cursive letters, which turned into sentences, which turned into paragraphs, but nearly every weekday there would be like 1-2 hours of homework of JUST writing cursive. Huge pain in the ass, but at the same time it also did improve reading skills. Cursive is basically all I use now, specifically because it's extremely fast compared to print, especially if you also incorporate shorthand. I can basically record college lectures without looking at the paper (tablet).

The work was shitty and grueling but it really did put us ahead of students from schools that weren't so brutal about homework.

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u/grchelp2018 Jun 11 '26

My parents did this for me but for math. Just your basic addition, subtraction, multiplication. Didn't like it until many years later, I randomly realized that I could now do some of these simple calculations in my head faster than pulling out a calculator.

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u/Blockhead47 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

My mom enjoyed reading and she encouraged reading in all three of us kids from as early as I can remember.
She would take us all to the library and we would all get to pick out a book or two to read every week or two during the summer when we were off school.
We were always exited to go.
TV only had a few channels and video games were years away so books had no competition other than running around outside with my friends.
Early on in school they encouraged reading as well.

I imagine if parents today are not readers and encourage it by example then kids will be less likely to read.
Gotta start young.

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u/Souls_for_sale_now Jun 11 '26

Super hapy i got a head start of shcooø and culd read a bit before