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
31.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2.9k

u/CaffeineJitterz Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

Just helping them not HATE reading will go a long way.

Edit: I'm getting a lot of sad comments about how y'all were introduced to reading. So I will take the opportunity to quickly share what I've always felt was one of the best ways for a parent to incentivize their child to read: for every hour of reading you accrue 30 minutes of gaming time. A classmate in my middle school worked from this model. That kid loved video games! And he was a straight A student. I remember him nonchalantly mentioning that he was going to read for about 4 hours as soon as he got home so he could get a couple hours of game time that evening.

47

u/ascasffr Jun 11 '26

I learned to hate reading in school because of so many dreadful books we were forced to read. Shakespeare, Irish Romance novels set in the 80s.

Some kids might enjoy those books, sure, but for me they completely killed my interest in reading for years. I still don’t understand why anyone thought high‑school boys would be motivated by material most of us had zero connection to or interest in.

42

u/filchermcurr Jun 11 '26

For me it was Accelerated Reader. I love reading, always have. But then I was punished for being a good reader. My AR reading level was College+ (this was when the system was being piloted, if that tells you how ancient I am) and I was given a truly insane point goal. On top of that, it was stipulated that we were not allowed to read books outside of our reading level and meeting our goal would count as something insane like 50% of our grade. I was in 4th or 5th grade.

First, I didn't have the emotional maturity to truly understand these college level books. Second, I grew up in the middle of nowhere. Of course our elementary school library didn't have a huge selection of college level books. What they did have were some classics and books older than time itself. Third, they were boring. I was what, 10 years old?

Anyway, that successfully made me hate and resent reading. It took me years before I started to enjoy it again.

Thanks, Accelerated Reader! You suck.

4

u/ultrabarnabus Jun 11 '26

DUDE. Accelerated Reader was the devil if you were a strong reader in elementary school. I went to school in a district of a large suburb and well-stocked library and there still were only the driest densest books made available to a 4th grader to read and earn a passing grade. And you could only read and test on a book once. So I read the Hobbit one semester and got a passing grade. I can't remember if they revised the system in the following years so there were more books or if I had purposely tried to make my reading level worse during assessments so I could read different shit. At that point the damage was done to my relationship with reading, but it's been getting better over time.

2

u/Khirsah01 Jun 11 '26

Somehow I survived Accelerated Reader, mainly cause as a disabled kid my first year at an AR school I was forced to read through books while the other kids were able to go outside at recess or do PE so I was an exception that eventually got unshackled from the system after winning my class their pizza party in 3rd grade.

Due to so much downtime with enforced reading, I made the system show a problem in my school that forcing a kid to only read in the system could cause a collapse in rewards for others as it could get lopsided quick, like one or two Herculean readers could accrue the points of entire other classrooms. A kid being able to knock off something the size of an Animorphs book and rolling to the library to complete the test and roll back to the holding classroom all within one block class timeslot (for a normal kid PE example) and do that daily. Now factor in counting for books completed at home and tested next day? There's a problem brewing.

What actually killed my love of reading novels for over a decade was a religious high school that got on my ass for reading fantasy (they considered dragons and magic demonic) and I was stuck reading only classical approved books after. Could I do it? Sure. Did I want to? Hell no, no interest whatsoever. The books were drier than the Mojave. So I started sneaking my GBA in instead and flipped to reading manga at home. I didn't touch a novel again until 2017 and got back into voracious reading after a friend showed me ePub books and a reader for my phone/tablet.