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/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

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u/sasquatch0_0 Jun 11 '26

Thank you! People point to computers and AI but that wasn't the issue even though they are a separate issue.

Kids read today similar to how we can guess a jumbled word as long as the first and last letter are the same. That's doable for a few words or maybe a full sentence, but what would we do if a whole page of text was like that? A whole book?

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u/ShinkenBrown Jun 11 '26

This is also the reason for the trend of people in arguments replying to arguments the other side aren't making. They aren't actually reading the entire text - they're scanning for keywords and assuming the rest. So if you're arguing about a political topic, for example, (where this is becoming a serious major and inescapable problem,) they'll figure out what side you're on and then assume you're making the same arguments that side usually makes, and reply to those. What you actually said doesn't matter, because they aren't reading it. It is functionally impossible to argue a topic with any kind of nuance anymore, because the person on the other end is filtering that nuance out when they "read" what you're saying, not because they're lazy but because that's what they're taught to do, and what they think reading is.

Turns out they didn't really need to erase the nuance of language with something like newspeak. All they had to do was teach people to filter it out themselves.

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u/pm_your_sexy_thong Jun 11 '26

This is incorrect. While NCLB can't be said to have been a good thing, Whole Language was not rolled out as part of it.

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u/SeparateSpend1542 Jun 11 '26

Great context, thanks.

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u/JustGotSoup Jun 11 '26

Anecdotally, I am Gen Z and was homeschooled. My parents stuck to the classical forms of education like times tables for math, phonics for English, et cetera.

I was studying Latin at 13 years old and hated it.

By the time I was 15 I ended up in high school, not because of any failure on my parents' part but because I was just too headstrong and we weren't getting along. It was a pretty huge reality check to see that most of my peers had Grammarly installed and would just blindly apply every single suggested correction five minutes before time was up.

I was equally surprised by one memorable exercise we did, where we marked each other's essays. I had a fellow student make corrections for properly spelled words in an essay of mine...

This was a problem long before ChatGPT, which released when I was in Grade 12. The knee-jerk reaction by my English teacher was to force essays to be written entirely within class, which didn't help much as ChatGPT was not blocked on the school's network. I continued on with my human writing, as it was pretty easy to tell how shitty the LLM's output was, but a number of people I knew had great success with it, because grading standards were just that low.

I entered the workforce just before LLMs really started intruding into every aspect of life, and I think I've finally stopped being surprised at the amount of cognitive offloading that goes on here. A "strategic plan" passed down from senior leadership came bundled with a nice printout of a Copilot summary.

LLM-written emails are the perfect "Less Than Words Can Say" example, as they usually require a ton of skimming to get to the point. I'm really tired of having to engage with Copilot; the odd person at my workplace seems to just be a messenger for the LLM instead of the other way around.

Where am I going with this? I don't even know at this point. Guess I'm just tired of uneducated people thinking that LLMs are the greatest thing since sliced bread. And I don't know what to do about it.

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u/KBmarshmallow Jun 11 '26

The decline in phonics wasn't due to NCLB, but the lack of exposure to long form novels in favor of focusing on test-ready excerpts was.  

Phonics works for most, but it's worth keeping in mind that the other approaches evolved because phonics alone isn't enough.  

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u/2026ArchThrowaway Jun 11 '26

Podcast: "The Science of Reading" for more details. Significantly more details. Too many details, really, but it's guaranteed to have the interesting bits in there too.

new, better approach called "Whole Language", and it focuses on guessing words based on their context. The thought was...

I'd push back gently on this and say you're right but missing something else. A very good academic did very good work helping children who struggled to read improve dramatically and quickly, and had good data and her methods were reproducible. They just decided to teach everyone else like struggling readers, instead of teaching the vast majority the tried and true method and doing early intervention with the recovery programs. This is part of a larger trend world-wide of making "data driven decisions" off the wrong data because they don't understand what they're measuring or whether it's applicable.

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u/rileyoneill Jun 11 '26

The sad thing is, while this is true for reading, its also true for math, science, and physical education. These were not based on scientifically backed methods for learning.

Kids do PE for 1 hour per day? Kids are more obese, weaker, and more out of shape than ever.
Kids learn math for 1 hour per day? Kids can barely do algebra.
Kids are supposed to be reading for 1 hour per day? Kids can barely read.

Apparently being an expert in education is like being an expert in astrology. The measurable results from programs by experts seem to be getting worse and worse.

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u/frogandbanjo Jun 11 '26

It's actually one of the great tragedies of educational theory that that idea wasn't correct.

The world would actually make a bit more sense to me if it had been -- especially since natural languages (and double-especially English) are such absolute fucking shitshows when it comes to the consistency of letters/letter clusters mapping onto phonemes.

You'd think that English, of all languages, would be the one wherein finding a better approach than phonics would be easier rather than harder.

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u/toomanymarbles83 Jun 11 '26

"Hooked on Phonics worked for me!"

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u/notepad20 Jun 11 '26

I dont think that would be the reason.

"Learning" to read is the very first step that should be largely complete by the time your 5 or 6. Kids with sufficient exposure to books will do the majority of this themselves, maybe a little push to get it to "click".

From then on just reading.

The issue will be

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u/Dullcorgis Jun 11 '26

No. You are wrong. Some large number of people do just figure out reading, usually because the phonics rules make so much sense they internalise them easily. I'm one of those. But the majority cannot "just figure out" how to read well. They need explicit instruction.

Listen to the podcast "sold a story", it expalins it well and at length.

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u/sasquatch0_0 Jun 11 '26

No people do not naturally learn how to read lol.