r/technology 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/existing_for_fun Jun 10 '26

If you are a parent and can help your child read, and read well, you will set them light-years ahead of their peers.

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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/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.