illiteracy

Found the thread to revive for this discourse.

1. Large numbers of students are arriving at highly selective universities unprepared to read a book cover-to-cover—because no teacher has ever asked them to before, reports @rosehorowitch https://t.co/uGdkhrCa2J pic.twitter.com/zMdrzWxs6t

— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) October 1, 2024

haha, just read that. not sure what to make of it. also the article just sort of suddenly ends

I'm not a literature scholar or university professor but I am a very enthusiastic reader! And I've worked in both middle and elementary schools in NYC.

Neither school had a functional library. The space was needed for classrooms since every class had too many kids and not enough space or desks. Classes were already sharing rooms and social workers were holding their counseling sessions in a converted locker room shower. Instead, every teacher would have their own classroom library of books, many/most I'm guessing bought at their own expense.

Kids also don't use textbooks anymore (which is good because they also don't have lockers to put their books in and those things were huge and heavy). Gone are the big hardcovers that we had to turn in every year. Now work is either handed out in class or done online. I'm honestly not sure how the curriculum for subjects like math or science gets transmitted. I also didn't see the "classroom sets" where there would be 35 copies of a mandated novel that you had to check out in class and put back.

B the by, Eric Adams famously cut funding to city libraries so they had to close on Sundays for months; halving the amount of access for people on the weekends.

In conclusion I feel like there are a lot of things to think about before "phones are making young people stupid failures."

My take from reading the excerpts is that there were never that many people who feel reading books is a worthwhile thing, who are never going to make the effort when so many ppl go to uni to get a piece of paper for an advantage in the job market.

OTOH I have seen a couple of interesting threads by teachers that seem to line up with what the article is saying, otherwise I would've dismissed it as a moral panic over phones xp

i only know this bc of knowledge i've absorbed from teachers i know but there are also a lot of pedagogical trends in the past decade-plus that are making it harder and harder for kids to like... read sentences, absorb them, relate them to other sentences, really necessary stuff if you're going to read a novel

i dislike the conclusion "a couple of professors" make in that tweet thread that books are like vinyl. fuck that. vinyl wasn't replaced by the absence of music

Here is the thread I was talking about. Written by a medieval scholar who is responding to a dickish tweet.

There's a whole discourse on here about how much reading uni students of literature should be able to do a week. This is one side of it -- 100 pp a day as a normal amount to be expected. /1 https://t.co/uK1oRow6ez

— Irina Dumitrescu (@irinibus) July 20, 2024

there are also a lot of pedagogical trends in the past decade-plus that are making it harder and harder for kids to like... read sentences, absorb them, relate them to other sentences

My mom was an elementary teacher and said at some point they were told that phonics were Out and not allowed, they had to teach some other reading method...and the kids couldn't grasp it. She kept teaching phonics and was asked why her kids were outperforming other classes. I do know that there's a lot of churn in the ed consultant/philosophy field because there's a) never enough funding for what schools (or kids) actually need, and b) always a profit to be made.

i volunteered in my kid's third grade class and part of my duties involved leading reading circles. there were kids who could read well beyond their years, some who were par for the course, but most of them simply couldn't do it. and lots of kids were simply so tired, barely awake, and many of them would be not doing their homework, they'd be up late playing first person shooter games or watching tv (this is based on what they would tell me in these reading circles or when i'd try to help with some work.) i think part of it is w/a lot of parents now it's just simply easy to not spend time reading with kids at a younger age, and to just give them devices or gaming systems to keep them occupied.

We read out loud in class all through my high school English classes, tbh. I don't think we ever had take-home reading assignments even in the Olden Days. That's why I hated English so much--it was murder on my ADD when I already read the whole textbook in Week 2.

Saw a "once the supply chain is fucked" (and phones are done) novels will be read again take.