I never understand where these anecdotes come from.
I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
So whatever the problem is, if there even is one, is less to do with school curriculums, english classes, screen time, or the availability of books, and more to do with the culture of many homes not prioritizing reading.
You doubt there's a problem because you don't know of it happening in your rural town? In addition to teaching kids to read books, we apparently need to teach adults research and inference fundamentals.
Would be funny if it was...
I would have thought making an anonymous throwaway account after posting from a 'real' account would be a 'too late' situation, but the plausible deniability here shows otherwise where the original content was not imbued with objectionable etiquette.
Yeah, reading scores are about how well you teach reading. In terms of NAEP 8th grade reading scores, New York, Georgia, Utah, Illinois, Rhode Island, and California cluster together in the top half, in that order: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/blog_na...
The linked chart says it's for "white students". How does it look when all students are included? ChatGPT shows different results (though these could of course be incorrect).
Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates. Same with crime. Kind of goes hand in hand. Education in blue cities needs to be fixed.
> Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates.
Not true; in both red and blue states, its rural (usually relatively redder for the state) areas that have the highest illiteracy rates.
> Same with crime.
OTOH, with crime its true that higher population density areas (which also tend to be bluer) tend to have higher aggregate crime rates (though some important categories of crime, notably firearms homicides, reverse this.) But the fact that general crime rates do that has been recognized not merely longer than the current ideological divide between the US major parties, but longer than the existence of electoral democracy; the driving factor being density => opportunity => crime. Opportunity scales with dyadic interactions which scale asymptotically with n² (n=density). It's also worth noting that areas within states don't have the kind of Constitutional sovereignty against states that states do against the federal government; with no equivalent of the 10th Amendment protection that states have against federal encroachment. They don't generally have the power define serious crimes, or define punishment for serious crimes (they may have the power to define and punish infractions and misdemeanors), define correctional and rehabilitation policies that apply to serious offenders, etc. All those things are done at the state level. They also have very limited (because of state law) control of public health (mental and physical) policy, taxation levels and distribution, etc. So even if it was policy and not population density driving the difference in crime rates, the local areas aren't the ones in control of most of the potentially-relevant polices, the states are.
The parent repeats precisely the disinformation of a political party. That shows reading comprehension and some communication skills. If this was an English class, it might get a B if the assignment was about disinformation techniques.
But this is social science and we need to apply other cognitive skills, such as understanding empirical evidence, controls, and causal inference. Using those we could generate other hypotheses from factors more strongly correlated than the leading political party, such as funding, generations of systemic discrimination, government violence, or other causes.
Regarding political party, generally the better educated someone is, the more likely they are to be in the Blue party. The most highly educated institutions, including those of science, education, arts, etc., tend to be overwhelmingly Blue.
> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
> The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
Reading the expected books for school is very different from reading a lot privately at home.
I know quite many fellow pupils who read a lot privately, but detested reading the required books for school (they at best got some summaries somewhere, which in my opinion actually prepared you better for the tests since the people who write summaries typically know quite well which parts/topics of the books teachers consider to be important, and thus do quite some explanations on these).
On the other hand, I know fellow pupils who barely read anything in their free time (they had different interests), but for some reason actually liked (and liked reading) the books that you had to read for some classes.
I do not live in the US, but this was my experience as well. Actually having read the book made my grades worse, because I now disagreed with the claims the teacher wanted to hear. I was always like: no, I have also read the book and no the author doesn't say that.
There is no real way for teacher to check whether I read the book or not. People who read books regularly fail trivia tests and people who did not read them can quick read "about the book" analysis off web and call it a day.
And crutially, my inclination to finish assigned book and my willingness to read books in general are unrelated. A kid that reads a lot wont neceasary enjoy and finish assigned books - I know I skipped quite a lot of them.
If your premise is that there is no way to test knowledge, then I can see how you might not want to assign books to be read, but I think there are ways to test knowledge and that reading a book should result in knowledge of the book.
something still changed; i've been in classes where the bulk of the students got bad grades and that never stopped the instructor from handing them out.
if we use grades as a yardstick for elementary progress and efficacy then you'd think it would be a bigger deal if a single cog in the system decided to systematically add inaccuracy to the measure simply because a failing student irks them.
You have the principal actors reversed. Teachers would generally love to fail more students. It is the administration that prevents or disincentivizes it.
Grades are a yardstick merely for which district gets more prestige and funding. There is absolutely no incentive for anyone with authority to fail bad students. Reprimands or terminations result from a teacher giving consistently below average grades.
Those quizzes are part of the problem. It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket.
> It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket.
Maybe things have really changed a lot since I was in school, but that was certainly not the type of questions that were asked of set works.
The questions were asked such that, the more the student got into the book, the higher the mark they were able to get.
Easy questions (everyone gets this correct if they read the book): Did his friends and family consider $protagonist to be miserly or generous.
Hard questions (only those slightly interested got these correct): Examine the tone of the conversation between $A and $B in $chapter, first from the PoV of $A and then from the PoV of $B. List the differences, if any, in the tone that $A intended his instructions to be received and the tone that $B actually understood it as.
Very hard questions (for those who got +90% on their English grades): In the story arc for $A it can be claimed that the author intended to mirror the arc for Cordelia from King Lear. Make an argument for or against this claim.
That last one is the real deal; answerable only by students who like to read and have read a lot - it involves having read similar characters from similar stories, then knowing about the role of Cordelia, and at least a basic analysis of her character/integrity, maybe having read more works by this same author (they'll know if the mirroring is accidental or intentional), etc.
We were never asked "what color shirt did $A wear to the outing" types of questions (unless, of course, that was integral to the plot - $A was a double-agent, and a red shirt meant one thing to his handler while a blue shirt meant something else).
Did I like the set works? Mostly not, but I had enough fiction under my belt in my final two years of high-school that I could sail through the very difficult questions, pulling in analogies and character arcs, tone, etc from a multitude of Shakespeare plays, social issue fictional books ("Cry, The Beloved Country", "To Kill a Man's Pride", "To Kill a Mockingbird", etc), thrillers (Frederick Forsythe, et al), SciFi (Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick), Horror-ish (Stephen Kind, Dean R Koontz) and more.
With my teenager now, second-final year of high-school, I keep repeating the mantra of "To get high English marks, you need to demonstrate critical thinking, not usage of fancy words", but alas, he never reads anything that can be considered a book, so his marks never get anywhere near the 90% grade that I regularly averaged :-(
The only books he's ever read are those he's been forced to read in school.
> Hard questions (only those slightly interested got these correct): Examine the tone of the conversation between $A and $B in $chapter, first from the PoV of $A and then from the PoV of $B. List the differences, if any, in the tone that $A intended his instructions to be received and the tone that $B actually understood it as.
I always got As on these ... but the primary reason was that I was good at bullshitting. They are super easy when you are good at bullshitting. The trick is not to care that your answer sounds royally stupid. Then you will get A.
And all you need is to check those dialogs when writing the test. If you are expecting me to remember those dialogs, then we are back to the expectation that I basically memorized the book.
> Very hard questions (for those who got +90% on their English grades): In the story arc for $A it can be claimed that the author intended to mirror the arc for Cordelia from King Lear. Make an argument for or against this claim.
Again, I got As ... but they were solidly in the "kind of test that convinces you literature is stupid class" kind of questions. Unless there is some kind of actual interesting insight to be had, this question just shows how empty the whole exercise is.
I never understood people who say their English writing is "bullshitting". Oh you read the book and offered a plausible interpretation? That sounds to me like learning and creating.
> I never understood people who say their English writing is "bullshitting". Oh you read the book and offered a plausible interpretation? That sounds to me like learning and creating.
It was bullshitting, because it was not even an attempt at a good analysis of what the author actually wrote or meant to write. I know for a fact that I was not trying to analyze the book. When I am actually trying to analyze a text, I think about it differently and treat it differently.
The thought process was closer to what I do when I am joking around, it is just that result was put into formal language.
It was a bit like a debate club - you know you are having sleazy untrue argument, but it is being rewarded, so.
> That sounds to me like learning and creating.
I dont think I learned much or anything about literature. I did created something. I learned something that, imo, schools should teach less - generate BS on command.
> I never understood people who say their English writing is "bullshitting". Oh you read the book and offered a plausible interpretation? That sounds to me like learning and creating.
I'm skeptical that watwut was as good in HS English lit as he claims to be: see his other response to me - he basically believes that recycling plot points is both meaningless (correct) and a path to high marks in literature (incorrect) :-/
I mean, it's possible but unlikely that plot examination will lead to good marks.
> Again, I got As ... but they were solidly in the "kind of test that convinces you literature is stupid class" kind of questions. Unless there is some kind of actual interesting insight to be had, this question just shows how empty the whole exercise is.
You are not making much sense.
You got As in the type of question that required demonstration of a broad swath of literature ... but that just shows you how empty the question is?
> You got As in the type of question that required demonstration of a broad swath of literature ... but that just shows you how empty the question is?
Yeah. I think that the key to achieving A is that you must not care and just let the creativity in your brain go. Thinking back, basically I did what LLM do today. You have to be able to vaguely associate plot points you vaguely remember from books you did not liked. You have to be able to write argument sounding constructions without care for how much they are true. Without feeling ashamed that you wrote something meaningless.
It is the kind of question that does not provide any meaningful insight to anything. The answer does not matter except for the grade. It wont give you any insight to literature. It does not demonstrate you understood something about the book either. That is why it is empty question - its only purpose is to prove you vaguely remember plot points.
Kids dont read for fun, but they have vague idea that books are something educational that is generally good to do. These sort of exercises will only convince them that reading books is both unfun drag and meaningless thing to do.
We certainly had questions like that as part of bigger assessments and they were pretty reasonable.
However, some of the teachers at my school also had short pop-quizzes meant to ensure that everyone kept up with the reading. These were usually just some details from the assigned chapters and, IMO, often veered into minutia. One really was about the color of something and I don’t remember it being particularly plot-relevant or symbolic, even if it was mentioned a few times.
It wasn’t a huge part of one’s grade, but I distinctly remember being frustrated that these quizzes effectively penalized me for “getting into” the book and reading ahead.
Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.
We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.
I’m a nerd, but we were never a nation of nerds and things turned out pretty well. The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise.
Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.” I went to the Iowa Caucuses back in 2019. These were democrats, but not highly educated ones. Mostly farm and farm adjacent people. But watching them ask questions and deliberate, there was a degree of level-headedness, practicality, prudence, skepticism, and caution that was just remarkable to watch. These are folks who don’t have much book learning but come from generations of people who managed to plan and organize their lives well enough to survive Iowa’s brutally harsh winters and short planting window (about 14 days—either side of that and you and your whole family die). You need smart people to do smart people things, but those conscientious normies are the backbone of a healthy society.
> The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise.
Outliers.
You cannot come to conclusions based on examining outliers only. The better conclusion is from taking a sample of the population, and checking the correlation between test scores and success.
> Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.”
There's plenty of studies that determine the correlation between academic performance and success. Have you possibly even considered that the basic "gut-feeling" only gets better (i.e. more predictive successes) with better academic scores?
IOW, the more you know, the more you learn, the better your heuristic is when making snap conclusions.
> I’m not talking about individual success i’m talking about societal success.
I don't know what that means.
Social mobility? Academic success corresponds quite strongly to that too.
Collective success? Groups who are academically successful also correlate quite well to various measures of success.
I mean, unless we reduce the scope of our samples to the outliers, and look at a non-representative sample, it's really quite hard to support the claim that "gut-feel" is at all valuable without high academic performance.
> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.
Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted.
For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations.
Others could probably come up with additional examples.
My daughter, at her very expensive deep-blue private school, learned that the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois—who didn’t have written language—but didn’t learn about the English civil war where the ideas behind the constitution actually had their genesis.
In terms of being a citizen in America, it’s far more important to understand the English civil war, British history, etc. Those are the instruction manual for the actual society we have inherited. Even in my deep red state public school system, we spent way more time than was warranted on native Americans and other things that people feel guilty about. If you’re born in a multi-generational colony ship, you need to know how the CO2 scrubbers work. It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.
> It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.
It does, because for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers. The politics and institutions turn out to be much harder than the scrubbers - few societies produce the latter, and it's generally the ones with much stronger human rights.
But the world’s most technologically advanced civilization was built by politics and institutions that killed and displaced the native Americans then glorified that effort in movies and television. The guys who built the moon rocket and silicon valley grew up playing cowboys and indians.
Nothing is pure. You are ignoring quite a lot, and quite a lot that distinguishes that society and its peers different from than the others, far less accomplished.
The question is not purity, but facing our own faults, personal and societal, do we give up and indulge them or do we keep our vision and confidence and keep improving?
You're moving the goalposts. You made a good point earlier: "for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers."
We know what "politics and institutions" created the CO2 scrubbers (i.e. our present technologically advanced and prosperous society). It was the ones that displaced and killed the native americans and celebrated it in movies. By your own logic, we should be teaching how to maintain those politics and institutions, so we maintain our prosperity. Insofar as there is any point in learning about history, surely it is learning about what has worked?
This is silly. The 'society' has done very, very many things over the centuries (including other awful ones - slavery, Japanese-American internment, segregation, oppression in Latin America and elsewhere, climate change, etc etc). To pick one and say it's necessary to CO2 scrubbers is just a rhetorical/philosophical game.
That can be fun - we're on HN after all - and even informative to explore, but is not tied to reality.
The point I’m trying to get at is that you seem to be trying to smuggle “liberty and justice” in under the cover of CO2 scrubbers. But the same “politics and institutions” that created our technologically advanced, prosperous society, also did those other things. Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?
Thanks for clarifying - I didn't know what you were after.
> Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?
To say taking away people's freedoms and lives "isn't broken" is obviously part of the philosophical game.
If you mean to posit the old Faustian choice: If doing such things is required for power, should we do them? Do the ends justify the means? It's a challenging hypothetical, of course, but these days it's extremely overdone, widely used by bad people as a propaganda assault in order to seize power, and now some fools take them seriously. I'm bored with it, and taking them seriously is obviously ridiculous and dangerous.
The interesting part gets little discussion, and is far more interesting because it applies to reality: How do we take care of all of people's needs: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for all? Cutting the specs down to 'my needs' or 'many people's needs but destroy the rest' is just the corruption of power.
Some of the answer is low-hanging fruit, provided by generations before us, especially in our free democracy. Some needs to be discussed. Shall we start?
I'd imagine the same; skipping evolution entirely is hard. Dismissing it however, is not that uncommon.
> Between 2007 and 2019, there definitely was progress: from 51 percent of high school biology teachers reporting emphasizing evolution and not creationism in 2007 to 67 percent in 2019. It was matched by a drop from 23 to 12 percent of teachers who offer mixed messages by endorsing both evolution and creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, from 18 to 15 percent of teachers who endorse neither evolution nor creationism, and from 8.6 to 5.6 percent of teachers who endorse creationism while not endorsing evolution.
> What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
A clear majority of parents that I know actually would have the education system do that. Hence the oftentimes poor results.
A private school I looked at in 2025 required iPads (and nothing else) because their entire management of students was don by an iPad application (that worked on nothing but iPads).
The school admin/marketer/consultant/whatever I spoke to during the sales call literally did not understand what I meant when I said "If your management is so incompetent at decision-making that they got shangaied into buying into this deficient ecosystem when almost any other decision would have worked for both major mobile platforms, why on earth would I think that the other decisions they make would be any good".[1]
------------------------------
[1] Management who make obviously incompetent decisions like "Our study material only works on iPads" are obviously incompetent or otherwise disconnected from reality.
With "obvious" ideas like reading being good, you tend not to have people chiming in to say so. That creates a filter where you only get the contrarianism.
... Prepare shorter or lighter materials for them to read, as this article suggests? Why has reading whole books become the holy grail of education system?
The said education system expected this:
> As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
Yeah, sounds like a very great way to filter out perhaps 20% of good readers and make sure the rest 80% will hate reading for the rest of their lives.
You can say it’s like childcare, sure. But learning has to come from somewhere. Parents seem to be doing less and less out of the classroom. Does that mean we’re just giving up then?
Maybe literature is just a terrible medium for culture except for the relatively brief period in human history when they were extraordinarily cheap to produce and disseminate compared to other cultural products.
Edit: but insofar as media criticism in education is bound to the book rather than the dominant forms of the day, I think children are being done a disservice.
It's still by far the best medium that requires you to be active and imaginative while packing the best information density and usability. Plus it works offline, without power, you can carry it around, &c.
Books forge you in a way short "content" we consume all day long today will never be able to, there are a few long form podcasts here and there that could be comparable but that's not the bulk of the media kids "consume"
Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
Slight problem with that if you would like to live in a functioning, thriving democracy: democracy in the sense of "one person, one vote" requires or at least greatly benefits from a broadly educated population. It's not sufficient, but very likely necessary.
>Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
I don't pretend to speak for anyone else, but I am more than my economic inputs and outputs, and while it was in a somewhat different context, Heinlein's prose applies in spades WRT your assertion:
“I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal…but a man.”
― Robert A. Heinlein[0][1]
The market has never solved anything in ways that are beneifical for humanity. (Just commenting on the first part of your comment, given that your last sentence implies you're just saying what market evangelists would say.)
I don’t know if this matters much. When I was in school it was rare to actually read a book assignment anyways, and I’m sure with LLMs now it’s less.
I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
It’s odd, I read ravenously as a kid/teen, as did my siblings. You need to read what you enjoy, and for it to not be forced. (For example, summer reading at the library gave out prizes kids cared about for reading books.) Plus, we didn’t have access to much digital media like TV/video games (though it was the early 2010s) because my parents were strict, so books were a solid source of entertainment.
That was my problem too. Not in the US but in Europe. The stuff we had to read was all by 'highly acclaimed: authors who have carved out this niche of 'literature art ' between them.
However their books were dusty, tough, whiny and horrible to get through. Yuck. I never read fiction in my own language ever again just in spite.
I'm older than you (graduated high school in 1975). I read tons of sci-fi as a kid. I also don't remember reading any whole novels for English class. Maybe we did, but if so I have successfully blocked them out.
I have been amazed at the number of houses I've been in over the years which didn't appear to contain a single book.
I graduated high school in '92 (S.F. Bay Area) and can recall several assigned books we read for class in either junior high or high school. I think there were more, but these are the ones I can recall easily today.
Pride and Prejudice. Last of the Mohicans. A Separate Peace. Tom Jones. Beowulf. Grendel. Crime and Punishment. Waiting for Godot. Tale of Two Cities.
Also, several Shakespeare plays, though I am no longer sure which were read when.
We also had other reading assignments where we chose our own books. The above were assigned to everyone.
interesting. Assuming you're talking about high school I had a totally different experience, we were assigned maybe 6 books/semester for the year I spent in mainstream classes (and about double that when I did the IB program but I expected that to be uncommon)
It doesn’t happen anymore because of phones and the internet. Most people in the past read because they had nothing to do and they were willing to invest the time into a good book. You sacrifice a lot of energy in order to get enjoyment from a book.
Now with the internet there’s an unlimited stream of zero investment snippets of entertainment. People naturally dive into that because it’s more rational in the short term to do that.
Schools stopped reading but it’s as a result of the way students behave. The causal driver is student behavior.
The kids don't hate classroom reading because of the reading; they hate it because of the associated curriculum. “Why were the curtains blue?” is a skill wasted on children. I only gained an appreciation for such meta-reading during a weeks-long TV Tropes bender during a spat of unemployment after getting fired from my first big-boy job.
Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.
If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.
> 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant
The blue curtains has become an almost deranged meme at this point, completely disconnected from either curricula or evaluation. Students are not asked why singular descriptive details are chosen as such.
Being able to perform critical analysis of text is an essential skill today. It might be more essential now than any other moment in history. Understanding how narrative writing uses symbols translates cleanly into understanding how political messaging or any persuasive writing uses symbols.
Yes and literature is a pretty bad way to teach critical analysis. My high school did political speeches from
history and that segment was infinitely more enjoyable than The Scarlet Letter.
Sure, and there are plenty of classes that use different written forms for their pedagogy. An advantage of novels is that their length often allows for different thematic depth and complexity and their narrative can make it easier to hold a reader's attention through that length.
The problems with teaching symbolism using novels are:
1. Novels considered “curriculum-approved literature” often have symbolism that is irrelevant to a student’s life. It was placed there intentionally by the author, and was blatant to all readers when it was published, but it is indistinguishable to a student from the teacher making things up.
2. Teachers who aren't the best end up teaching from a “it's true because it's true” mindset, which may as well be “because I made it up and said so.” These are quite common.
3. Or the teacher draws from a pool of stock symbolic and thematic answers for all novels. Astute students will spot that immediately and treat it as a game of guessing the teacher’s answer rather than engaging with the text.
If the purpose is reading then we let kids read books that they like.
I can read a 1000 page history book but after 50 pages of Dutch literature I want to throw it in the garbage bin.
High school KILLS reading. Few survive.
My experience was a self-admitted outlier but it started by being read to frequently as a small child, before school started. I could technically read for as long as I could remember but reading by myself was boring compared to being read to due to having a very short attention span then.
Start literacy young and the discovery of reading for fun will be easy and natural.
You could force kids to read books without forcing which books to read. The issue as always is to find a balance between giving kids agency and making sure they do what's right.
Now that creating written works is trivial, the new skill to have would be figuring out if what you are reading has an ulterior motive, such as advertising.
Or even figuring out if it was created with the intent to have any utility at all for the reader.
Other than avoiding any written works made after 2020, I am not sure what to tell my kids. Even trusting the claim that something was written after 2020 seems difficult, unless you have a physical print showing its age.
> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.
I don't understand this. If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading? Or are we taking about kids who never read until school forced them to?
From what I understand, if parents read to kids when they are little, they become readers who enjoy it.
> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading?
I nearly did to me, or atleast the continual assignments did. It took a long time for me to pick up a fiction book again. School never assigned me technical writing and encyclopedias, so I continued to enjoy those, thankfully.
Yes, because it amounts to several hours long homework. Kids are more slower then adults at reading, so this can easily amount to 10 hours of additional homework which you do on top of usual homework.
So yes, if you spent 10 hours reading a book you don't care about this week, you don't feel like reading something else. You feel like you spent awful lot of time reading already and feel like reading is something like vacuum cleaning - duty but not something you do for fun.
I think school ruined fiction books for me. I had to read long boring books about stories that didn't interest me, with useless sentences describing what the scene looked like or what someone had for dinner. Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases.
Maybe if I wasn't forced to read a book in an outdated language about some Christian farmer 300 years ago while I was not in school, and if I could access a succinct version 1/10th of the length of the book, I'd read it.
Maybe if I wasn't asked to describe minor details to prove I read the book, I'd actually focus on the story and not on every irrelevant detail.
Maybe if my teacher didn't force their religious holier-than-thou attitude and allowed us to form our own opinions, I'd be more engaged.
What school taught me was how to get away with not reading the books. I skimmed books by skipping tens of pages at a time or asked friends for the TL;DR or just got an F.
Now I have a feeling of uneasiness and dread when I try to read fiction for fun. So I don't.
Most 300 page fiction books I had to read could've easily been condensed to 30 pages without any loss of information.
Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit. A lot of people won't care about poetry no matter how hard you try to force them to like it. And half of it was propaganda - how $nation survived $struggle, how $nation is so great or beautiful or how $hero did $ethical_thing.
As a native US English speaker, I enjoyed Shakespeare and even when we read Beowulf and some Chaucer in mildly transcribed and annotated Middle English. More than any history lesson, it developed in me a feeling for how, in spite of lots of technological and other societal change, the basic human condition is the same.
I imagine it would be interesting to read early texts in other proto languages too. Sadly, I'm not a polyglot and can't really access that experience first-hand.
I graduated from public school a long time ago. I hated Shakespeare. The phrasing and Englishness of it was a complete turn off. And I read a lot. I believe I read almost a fourth of the books in my little public library in my rural town in Texas. As far as writing, I admire the writing in the King James Bible more than Shakespeare although I am Catholic. I would say most of the books I read were crap and written poorly.
> Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases.
I should've used "archaic" instead of "outdated". As in, "incomprehensible to someone speaking proper modern $language". Without a dictionary, a normal student couldn't understand what was being said in many sentences throughout the book. Some books actually had a dictionary in the end, but not for all the archaic words and phrases.
I was intrigued by the idea that it might be unreasonable for a book to include a glossary or dictionary to explain usages for made up or unfamiliar terms. I like that this list [1] exists because I was struggling to think of such a book. But then I thought about The Lord of the Rings, and it even includes an index of terms among its appendices, which is something I remember using to revisit parts of the story when I first read it. Another book with a glossary of terms is Dune, which I found fun and reasonable to avoid trying to explain hierarchy where doing so would break the narrative flow. But maybe that just means it's not as cleverly constructed or organized as it could have been--but the trade-off has to be how to engage a wide selection of readers...
Is the complaint about the dictionary at the end because it wasn't comprehensive? I'm unreasonably curious about the book and which phrases were included and which were not.
I think all written works occur in a context that should be taken into account when thinking critically about them. That context is temporal and linguistic and is more apparent when you consider something like Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Understanding it requires either a modern reinterpretation or consideration given to the sociolinguistic context in which it was written.
I think you are missing the broader point: why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with? It's not as if there is a dearth of more modern works. It seems like the main function of selecting older works is to make it artificially harder for students to read.
> why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with?
I think there's a trivial answer which is that all things you encounter are fundamentally from an alien context. The degree of alien and intention of the action are the things to consider before proceeding.
For example, why would one choose to read the account of a survivor of tragedy? To develop some amount of (emotional or cognitive) empathy? To learn a broader way of thinking that could apply to a future situation? Most simply: to learn from the past.
If the goal is entertainment, evaluate your participation such that you maximize your utility. If the goal is learning, one should be wary of premature rejection without sufficient context to avoid missing the lesson. And there is an annoying reality in which most situations can teach something.
I'm using "context" in the sense of GP as to why it is hard to read e.g. Beowulf. Certainly one could find a modern account of a survivor of tragedy that would be more approachable? But in any case, accounts of tragedies of survivors are not the sort of material one finds in an English class, which is what's being criticized here (and indeed reading such accounts would probably be an improvement for the reasons you give).
God forbid we learn new words or learn words form the past... Why even bother with history right? It's just old stuff anyways let's focus on new stuff, what could these old things teach us anyways
Meanwhile my grandma still knew how to speak Latin at 70+, which she learned in school as a teenager
I sometimes take pleasure at reading old language ... and still think that giving it to kids as introduction to reading is absurd.
If they read 10 interesting books a year adding one like that to the mix or offer them the option is great. If they did not encountered interesting bool after agw of 7 when parents stopped reading them, no.
And interesting books for kids are there. Plenty of them of all kind, including pure action/adventure stuff. Including those related to movies or games they play. It is not lack of resources.
> But that is not what is happening. Introduction to reading happens pre-school to class two, historic books come from say class 6 onwards.
That is exactly what is happening. The pre-schooler do not really read books, that is an absurd claim. They puzzle out words and sentences. It takes so much effort, they loose attention one paragraph in and dont really recall what happened on the last page.
Giving historic books to grade 6 is exactly the absurd thing that will convince them books cant be fun. It will become totality of their reading and the idea that reading books could be fun will be lost on them entirely.
And unless the parents really went out of their way to introduce them to interesting books, to try again and again with different books, you are loosing them with that entirely. Because this will be the only book they read last 4 months which is "forever" at that age.
> The pre-schooler do not really read books, that is an absurd claim.
And a claim I haven't made.
> They puzzle out words and sentences.
Exactly, which is introduction to reading. They essentially perceive whole words as glyph until some adult points them to the concept of letters (or if they are very smart, they figure it out themselves). When they enter school they start to learn that systematically. After half a year they can typically read short stories. (Here school starts in August/September, and at my family, reading the Christmas story was always the responsibility of the first-grader. Later that year there had been reading competitions and book talks in class.) By the end of class two, you have read tons of books. (Likely still below 100, but still quite some.)
> 4 months which is "forever" at that age.
Exactly and think of what they learn in 6 years. They doubled their age in that time.
> Giving historic books to grade 6 is exactly the absurd thing that will convince them books cant be fun.
I think that really depends on what you mean by historic books. Colloquial books from a century ago are indistinguishable from contemporary books, 200 years ago, they start to have some older words, but are still readable by a young child. 500 years ago is still intelligible, but for a child becomes more something to laugh at, rather then something they read, do to all those words, which are now considered to be improper. Your child likely won't read that on its own motivation, although it can be fun for a few minutes. 1000 years ago, the book will be in Latin, so your child won't even try.
The issue with books in the "native language" classes is much less their raw age, but that they are mostly plays or the new literature genre from that time. To me the play from 50 years ago, was really boring, but the fairy tales from 200 years ago was what I read at night below the blanket, when my parents wanted me to sleep. Yes school lead to me loosing interest in books, but that was not because the book was boring per se, but because we dissected the books until it was like a dead corpse.
> And unless the parents really went out of their way to introduce them to interesting books, to try again and again with different books, you are loosing them with that entirely.
Not really. The issue at that age is more the book supply then the demand. Reading is maybe 35-45% [0] of their wake time at that age. Try reading that much as an adult. At some point I needed to resort to reading the bible (the boring parts), because there was no book in my bookcase I haven't read, after I have already read all the history books in my parents bookcase, that sounded fun.
[0] To do the math:
A child sleeps >10h at night and has 1-1.5h after-lunch nap. So say 14 wake hours, Of this they spend 6 hours in school, which is mostly math or english, so say 40% reading. They take the school bus to and from school, which is mostly talking and reading. After school they also read, so maybe 2h. Then they likely stay on the playground for 3 hours or something, so no reading during that time. Before or after they do homework, most of which involves reading. English anyway and in math you also need to read the exercise descriptions. Then in the late afternoon and before going to bed they still read a bit of their own books, so maybe again 2h.
First grade kids are still learning letters and are not reading books yet. Your family is an exception. Second grade kids are NOT reading tons of books yet. That is just untrue.
> Exactly and think of what they learn in 6 years. They doubled their age in that time.
I do know what they learn in 6 grade. You seem to start with some imaginary learning.
> Colloquial books from a century ago are indistinguishable from contemporary books
They are 100% distinguishable. By words, by sentence construction, by topics, by the way plot develops. Oh, and mostly by how characters act.
> Not really. The issue at that age is more the book supply then the demand.
Literally the only source of interesting books are parents. And no, english and math textbook does not count as fun reading. Neither does Shakespeare assigned in school. There is no infinite supply of fun books coming to kids.
> They take the school bus to and from school, which is mostly talking and reading
No one reads books on their way to school these days. They just dont.
> After school they also read, so maybe 2h
Kids dont read after school except for homework.
> English anyway and in math you also need to read the exercise descriptions.
This is ridiculous.
> Then in the late afternoon and before going to bed they still read a bit of their own books, so maybe again 2h.
They dont. Because, unless their parents tried again and again and radncomly hit something fun, they dont even know fun books exist.
You clearly have had different experiences than me, most of which I disagree with, but it boils down to the stuff I already wrote. So I cite some parts from the current curriculum from my German state. I translate some parts, but if you want to read it all, use a translator.
Classes 1 and 2 are grouped together, so the actual split is at the distinction of the teacher, which is generally the same.
Summary:
written language acquisition 90 lesson hours
listening and speaking 50 lesson hours
writing for yourself and others 40 lesson hours
writing correctly 40 lesson hours
reading/properly using media 60 lesson hours
inspecting language 45 lesson hours
properly using digital media 13 lesson hours
optional compulsory:
at the trace of letters
from the world of fairy tails
playing and designing with words
favorite poems
A single year has about ~200 lesson hours and I think these are mostly done in order.
Goals (I only translated the paragraph about reading):
Students develop joy in reading, in an exiting reading environment and through diverse reading offerings. They learn the conditions for their individual reading culture and develop an interest in independently handling of texts. The Students know texts from different genres and select from various text offerings. They exercise in "reading for the purpose of comprehension". The students read texts silently according to simple instructions, develop an understanding of the content in a reasonable amount of time and are able to reproduce it in their own words. They use different approaches for "reading for the purpose of comprehension" (this is a term of art in German, I do not know the proper term in English). The students know and use various media formats for learning, news acquirement and entertainment.
written language acquisition 90 lesson hours
insights into the meaning of reading and writing:
- writing as a communication tool
- writing as a system of glyphs
- free (meaning on their own and fluently) reading and writing
mastering the structure of written language
- developing a sophisticated sensing ability (audio, video, rhythm, melody, kinesthetic, tactile)
- sounds and complexes of sounds
- letters and sets of letters
- sound-letter-relation
- words
mastering reading techniques
- analysis and synthesis
- reading of words, sentences and texts
- recognizing the shape of words as a whole
- constructing words from left to right
- reading across words and lines simultaneously
- skimming through word groups
- sentence limits and intonation
- reading out to people
knowing techniques for "reading for the purpose of comprehension" of words, sentences and texts
- repeating the text content with own words
- checking the read for internal consistence
- conversing with others about a text
- reading aloud, quite and silent
developing a printed writing as a initial writing
- printed writing as a form of written communication
- writing self-made small texts for others
- writing with computers and mobile devices
application of "cursive" (called Schulausgansschrift = final school writing [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift])
- differentiation of macro and micro motoric skills
- testing of different types of pens/pencils
- understanding of different letter shapes and connections (in different font sizes)
- writing of words, sentences and texts
- recognizing and overcoming individual writing difficulties on your own
- developing an acceptable writing speed
getting insights into the design of written works (same word as for scientific papers in German, but of course it is not about that here)
This is done in the first 90 lessons, which at 5 lessons per week, 4 weeks per month means 4-5 months, which fits my claim that they are generally able to read somewhat fluently after half a year. This is the minimum required by the state for every child, talented children will of course be faster.
I do not feel like translating the second part about reading right now, tell me if you actually care about it, I don't feel like being a translator for nothing. It is called "reading/properly using media" and boils down to introduction of literary and basic grammar analysis. It is obviously part of class 2.
> They are 100% distinguishable. By words, by sentence construction, by topics, by the way plot develops. Oh, and mostly by how characters act.
As a child my favorite book was "Emil und die Detektive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_and_the_Detectives) from 1929, I did not perceive anything to be odd, and it was indistinguishable from modern works for me. I did not think of it as being nearly a century old, that is just a normal child book. Maybe a linguist can tell you how this work obviously must be from that specific era, but a child very much can't tell you. What was also very popular in my class/school at that age was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Investigators#German..., of which the German version is from 1968 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Famous_Five, which is from 1942.
> Literally the only source of interesting books are parents.
And the shelf in the class room and the school library and the local library and random book exchanges on the street and books from friends (might count as from parents for you).
> And no, english and math textbook does not count as fun reading.
No, but they count as reading exercise, which is needed before you read fast enough that you enjoy reading yourself over getting read to and to be able to read in secret below the blanket.
> Neither does Shakespeare assigned in school.
In class 1 or 2?? These kinds of things only came maybe in class 9+.
> There is no infinite supply of fun books coming to kids.
Well, when they gain access to a computer (which is not a good idea, but they are children, so they will), they literally have.
> No one reads books on their way to school these days. They just dont.
Well, five years ago when I used the tram to go to school they definitely did. And my younger brother still carries books in his backpack he is not supposed to have.
> Kids dont read after school except for homework.
Common speak for yourself. In the primary school I still see people sitting reading on the floor.
> This is ridiculous.
Ok, how so?
> Because, unless their parents tried again and again and radncomly hit something fun, they dont even know fun books exist.
How would it be possible to keep it secret from them that child books exist? I don't understand your reasoning.
> Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.
That's the thing, though - in English literature class, there is nothing stopping the teacher from using popular media to introduce things like tone, ambiance, character motivations, arcs, etc, and then ask for parallels to the set works.
They don't do it though, the system is not set up to produce a bunch of critical thinkers from English Lit.
Yes! Art that's taught in school and that is "required" to know if you want to appear intelligent or fancy is just what GP posted.
But art is also:
* electronic music (if you're not aware, it's not just repetitive dum-dum-dum for 8 minutes, although I enjoy that style, as well);
* rap (it's not just guns, drugs and mysoginy);
* all the other music genres, of course, but I gave electronic music and rap as examples because they're usually treated badly by people who're not familiar with them;
* games (I've been emotionally moved by many flash games, let alone new immersive games);
* movies, series - live action or western animation or anime.
Yet, in school we either learned about classical composers, or about regional composers. Only once, around 10th grade, we had a cool music teacher who played other genres for us - Fat Boy Slim, random metal groups, even a few pretty out-there experimental things. Much better than learning about some composer who lived 50 years ago just because he is from the same country as you.
Same for paintings and similar art. What good does it do a 7th grader to look at Picasso? The context matters, but for people who don't care about such art, it's useless. I won't feel better if I can "intelligently" discuss the art scene in $nation in $year. I have, later in life, read interesting articles that actually mix politics and life in general with the art that was "allowed" to flourish. Like art in Soviet Russia. But that context, if it was given at all, didn't mean anything to a 7th grader, especially if they didn't learn about Soviet Russia in history before the art class. In my experience my education was all over the place.
Agreed. Not to mention the techniques and technical knowhow to create this “lesser” art is far more advanced and requires far more effort then the snobbish art they teach in school.
> Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit.
Yes and no. I used to start reading at 4 years old, but I forcedly used to memorize some rhymes at 3 years old. Most folk don't believe it is possible to read so early (though Eliezer Yudkowsky has reported about similar age). But my point is - how would I learn reading so early without that poetry?
I don't really like poetry exactly as rest of the fiction genre. And I am still sure it is not shit even for those who are struggling of doing that. I consider poetry exercises as sport exercises: today you claim that some specific muscle is not important for you, but tomorrow you get some injury which happened because of some weak muscle.
But you have also said one important word - propaganda. This is what really shitting any education and propaganda seems like the monster from the Nitzsche's quote "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster".
I also learned to read at 3. I actually remember the switch from illiterate to literate, as I remember realizing that just by looking at road signs I would automatically read them. I told my sister, who couldn't read yet, that there was a downside, as you could never look at language without reading it ever again!
I read non-fiction all the time. HN and reddit comments, news articles, Wikipedia articles, books, research papers. My ADHD doesn't help, but doesn't prevent me from finishing 300-page books that are actually interesting. I have yet to find a fiction book that's not full of fluff.
I've read a couple of scripts for movies and TV, and they're, by far, much better than fiction books for me. Just more condensed, more to-the-point.
That's not to say that I admit I can't finish (or even start) a fiction book now. They're ruined for me. But I don't care.
They're axing honors classes in our high schools so they can mix all the kids together for equity. But because some of the students can't read very well (even in 10th grade), they have to read the books aloud during class, since it would be inequitable to require the kids to read on their own at home.
Not surprisingly, when you're rate-limited by read-aloud speed, you can't get through that many books and excerpts are a natural response.
Probably has to do with the method for teaching reading being terrible for several years, depending on if the school dropped phonics.
I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules. This did not have good outcomes, and last I checked, there was a movement of schools going back to phonics.
> I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules.
I've read a lot on this; it's "phonetics" vs "look-see".
For a really depressing read, read "Why Johnny can't read", then the sequel "Why Johnny still can't read", and then look at the dates of those two essays.
We already knew decades ago that some methods never worked in the past, and don't work now, but we still hope that they will work in the future, so we keep them around because there are powerful and mostly invisible (to the parents) interests in keeping these discredited methods around.
Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
I graduated high school less than a decade ago and I had to read about 90% of those books. And those are just the German ones, there were at least half as many English and French ones too. I have younger cousins who are in the school system now and I am fairly certain that it is still the same. Actually I think it is probably mandated by the curriculum.
There's still plenty of mandatory reading. It's not unusual for high schoolers to have to read at least two books per semester.
Here's the problem though: It's just too easy to... you know... not do it. Teachers have no way of reliably telling the difference between those students who complete their reading assignments honestly and those who make due with summaries and AI assistance. Don't ask me how I know ;-)
I will only do things from memory, you can use Google yourself.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
"The suburb crocodiles", which is also how the youth gang in the book is called. Boy wants to be part of the gang, which has idiotic tests of courage. Plot twist is that the guy who refused to do this idiotic tests ends up being the tough guy. I don't remember if this was the main character or not. Ends up saving some other boy in a wheelchair, I think while they play in a collapsing old industrial building.
* Faust I
Maybe the most famous German book from v.Goethe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust,_Part_One Old professor Faust makes a deal with the devil that he can take his soul, if he is able to provide him with true joy. Professor gets young again, parties, seduces a flawless faithful girl, makes her kill her mother, she ends up in prison being pregnant, devil proposes to save here if she ditches god, she refuses. Faust flees, huge cliff hanger until v.Goethe gets to write Faust II at the end of his live.
"The visit of the old Lady" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit_(play) The old (now rich) lady visits her home town, which has seen better times and demands the death of her youth lover for a huge amount of money for the town. In the beginning all swear loyalty to the guy, in the end all demand his death, inviting the international press. In between the slow transition is described being framed by the protagonists as the most ethical thing ever.
Soldier Woyzeck gets exploited by both his superior and his doctor. The doctor puts him on a only beans diet, he becomes crazy. The doctor comments his mental struggles with "Very interesting, very good, should also try this ..." Ends up killing his spouse due to jealousy and later maybe himself. Never got completed by the original author, and the order of the acts is disputed, which makes for a quite different ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck
I lost the post I meant to reply to, but here is the reply:
I tend to see literature, especially fiction, as a way to practice empathy. A lot of people mentally stagnate later in life, and books help break that. Empathy isn't some magical trait, it's something you can actually train. Think Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep even if the animal is fake, the act of caring still has meaning. Practicing empathy like that helps you understand other people's worldviews. You don't have to agree with them, but if you want to function in life, you at least need to understand why people think the way they do. You can also take Paul Schrader's view that art is a vessel for emotion. It's a place to purge or process uncomfortable feelings. Watching Taxi Driver, for example, gives you a space to confront isolation, violence, and male nihilism. Instead of becoming Travis Bickle, the film lets you observe him and put those thoughts into words. That's Schrader's defense when people say the movie glorifies Bickle; the art itself is the safe space, not the man.
Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation (what is the number system for each hand), spatial reasoning (where is each hand) and categorization (what is each hand).
There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.
Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.
All good points, particularly the control group piece. Scrutinizing control groups makes it easy to invalidate most studies about treatments in this space because control groups are so difficult to assemble. You should see the variance in autism spectrum.
It still worked for my son and my friend’s two children.
I have no affiliation with the program at all. I talk about it because it worked for us.
I latched onto it because I know the type of things that I have struggled with my entire life, but just learned a lot of coping mechanisms. I’m also very self aware. I pay a lot of attention to how my own brain works because of the need to develop those coping mechanisms. When I saw the full program, everything made perfect sense to me and I absolutely believe that it would have helped me when I was younger.
Had I been able to tolerate working half days for 7 weeks, I would have participated in the program myself.
That is the program, yes. I’m not trying to sell you on it, just sharing our experience.
I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.
I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
If you threatened me with 3+ hours a day of speed reading clocks instead of a normal summer I'd probably double down on effort too. And probably not in a way that's healthy long term.
Well, it wasn't a threat. He knew exactly what he'd been struggling with from 1st grade on (officially minor ADHD) and we were trying really hard to keep him off of medication. Since the program has finished he's asked to do it again several times (but we haven't because it's expensive). I've thought about teaching him programming by having him build his own clock trainer.
It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.
- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.
- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.
- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.
- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.
It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.
He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.
Well that is interesting and if you had results then that's all that matters for your family of course.
But sorry to clarify I'm still hung up on the "8 handed clock" thing - what does that mean? What information is displayed on the clocks other than hours, minutes, and seconds?
I didn’t sit in on it so I can’t say for sure. My son got up to the 2nd version of the 6 handed clock. You have to have perfect accuracy within a certain amount of time to advance to the next tier.
Even with the 6 handed I don’t remember exactly what each was though. I asked Grok and this is what it said.
> In the Arrowsmith Program’s Cognitive Intensive Program (CIP), the primary exercise is the Symbol Relations exercise, commonly known as “Clocks.” This involves reading analog clock faces that progress from 2 hands to up to 8 (or sometimes more) hands.
Each hand on the clock represents a separate time (an independent position pointing to a specific hour/minute on the clock face). Participants must interpret the positions of all hands simultaneously, understand the relationships between them (e.g., angles, relative positions, and sequences), and record the times accurately under time pressure.
The multiple hands do not represent different concepts symbolically (like hours, minutes, seconds); instead, they increase cognitive load to train the brain’s ability to process and relate multiple pieces of information at once. This strengthens the Symbol Relations cognitive function, which supports logical reasoning, comprehension, seeing connections between ideas, cause-and-effect understanding, and abstract thinking.
Progression adds more hands as mastery is achieved, making the task more complex to build capacity in handling interrelated symbols and concepts. The CIP focuses intensively on this exercise to accelerate improvements in reasoning, processing speed, and related skills.
> Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation
Interesting, for me it is the opposite. With a digital clock I need to do a division/comparison to know how much part of the day/hour has already passed. With an analog clock I can read a proportion directly.
Hours, minutes, seconds, degrees, arcminutes, arcseconds... I could try to read 6, but honestly I doubt I'd even be able to see the arcseconds hand, it would be moving so quickly.
I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.
I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.
To me time is somehow both, but more so an analog thing. It is a multimodular linear scale, that turns logarithmic, the moment I focus on any specific point.
The only reason we have analog clocks is because digital ones were much harder to build. That time is of course over for good. It was a compromise imposed by limited technology.
Tell that to my glasses. At any sort of distance where this could be an advantage, the clock is just going to be a blur anyway.
Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?
Interesting, I also have glasses and am short-sighted, but for me light-emitting objects blur much faster than solid objects. It depends very much on the light type, frequency and brightness, but most LEDs, which most digital clocks use, tend to have an overgleaming effect, which makes them unreadable due to being a block of light.
> Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?
All the time? Being in a train station, sitting in a (class)room (during exam), in the kitchen, walking on the street, etc.
Sure, but why would I look down, when there is a clock in every direction I look at. I wristwatch would also be analog again.
> My last 7+ exams were all done on a computer. That clock was a lot closer than any that happen to be on a wall.
I have no clue how your university does prevent cheating, but ok. Here any kind of network-connected(/connectable) device is forbidden. And then there is math, where the only thing you are allowed to have is a pen and the formulary (and maybe a ruler).
> when there is a clock in every direction I look at.
This does not reflect my life. Clocks are out there, but not to the point of there being one a just turn of the head away no matter where I am. My phone is the closest device with an accurate sense of time the vast majority of the time.
> wristwatch would also be analog again.
Smart watches exist. Digital wrist watches also exist, but seem to have gone out of fashion.
> I have no clue how your university does prevent cheating,
By not having shit exams. Most (all?) of mine were open-book. I didn't take maths in uni, but they're also done digitally, although I don't think they're open-book. There you probably only get the formulary.
> This does not reflect my life. Clocks are out there, but not to the point of there being one a just turn of the head away no matter where I am.
That part was specifically about train stations and classrooms.
> By not having shit exams. Most (all?) of mine were open-book.
We also now have mostly open-book exams, the rule to be allowed to use everything, that does not do network calls is the rule for open-book exams. Personally I don't like when exams need to be done on a computer, there is always something that breaks and now you are personally responsible for it. With pen and paper you have peace of mind, the only thing is that you need to have a working pen and even that can be borrowed in an emergency.
> That part was specifically about train stations and classrooms.
Depending on where I'm standing inside a train station, I'll be much more likely to see a digital sign saying when the next one arrived in minutes rather than a clock (a fair amount do have clocks, but they all have digital signs that give you what you actually want more quickly anyway, while being a whole lot more visible). If I'm at a tram or a metro stop, I'll definitely have the sign, but probably no clock.
I've had a computer and thus a digital clock in front of me in class since high school.
If it's something I want people to read, I'd never dare write it in cursive, because if I did, I wouldn't count on them being able to read it.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
I grew up in a world where everyone knew cursive, and until this sort of discussion became popular in recent years, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me that there were many people who didn't know. But I guess they had to cut some things out of the curriculum and it's not as useful as it used to be.
> Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.
For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.
> Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
Probably yes to both counts.
However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.
Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.
I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.
I don't get your point of not writing cursive. It is literally the same as what you are already doing, but just stopping raising the hand between letters. It is also not like you have that specific cursive, and then it is unreadable. It is a continuous tradeoff of faster vs. readable, so you can just slow down for some letters and not for others.
The thing that needs effort is learning to write, why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
> why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
As someone who learned cursive by learning a new script first, you're making a big assumption here. Nobody learns to not connect their letters.
I didn't learn to not connect my letters. I learned to write without connecting letters, and never properly learned to connect them (until much later in life), because that was never required (and never emphasised while I was in school anyway). If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess. So I didn't. Not until I learned to write in a new script and could transfer that back to my original handwriting. I still don't write a cursive lowercase F, because Cyrillic doesn't have that glyph, and the one that I'm supposed to use never looks right. Not that it matters, since I only write in cursive for myself.
> If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess.
Oh, okay. They did not tell you in which order and direction you should write letters in print? They focused on that here, but maybe that was actually part for the preparation of learning cursive.
A part of me wants to learn it as well. It looks so alien that it seems interesting to learn.
Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.
I'm a person who mostly types, writes tons of code, but also is a graphic designer, and I also have pitiful penmanship. I can write regular sans-serif (all caps or properly capitalized), as well as cursive, but ultimately the concept of fonts make more sense to me than anything else in terms of an expression of letters and typography.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.
Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.
Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025, and paper is not usually the target medium for longer texts. A desire to write without access to some sort of machine is a bit quaint.
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
>>Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025
Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?
>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
It's an impression from my own social circle. I looked for data briefly because of this comment, but didn't find anything conclusive.
It does make sense to hand write short notes in cursive if you're hand writing short notes at all, but many people never learned it, or are so rusty it would take deliberate practice to restore proficiency.
I'll be honest I actually prefer my words to be lasting and have weight so I prefer block letters carved into lead which doesn't benefit much from cursive
okay, but if you care about recall and activating regions of the brain that create a better understanding of what you're learning, handwriting wins according to research.
Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd.
More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting
Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
But is there a difference between cursive and block lettering? I fully agree with your overall point about handwritten notes being far superior to typed notes. It forces you to filter out extraneous information instead of being a live transcriptionist of your professor.
I've found drilling notes via method of loci of visualized flashcards/facts for this to be superior for myself which I always sourced from typed notes. Not really familiar with the research that cursive would improve over it.
This is not the case in the US (anymore) and atleast some places in Europe. Print gets taught first and you learn to write with that, then cursive comes later, by this point usually as an afterthought.
These aren't really comparable. Cursive handwriting varies considerably between people. One person's might be very clear, another might be impossible to discern.
This sort of thing is some of the weirdest pseudointellectualism I've seen. Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial. Because now we have Google Maps, ballpoint pens, calculators, and analog clocks.
> Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial.
I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".
You should talk to teachers, lot of kids can't answer test questions because they don't even understand the words in the question... A growing proportion of kids are close to non functional, with multiple years of delay compared to previous generations.
Plausibly some kids might still be reading entire novels worth of text online on the regular. Think of all the massive fanfic archives (Including original fics) Lots of fanfic authors have fans of their own, and those have got to be coming from somewhere.
It doesn't need to be in dead tree format. It doesn't need to be famous authors. Just so long as they read!
Ye gods, that's like saying that youth may not be willing to consume a nutritious, balanced diet but we should rejoice that they are at least consuming vast quantities of sugar and fat. With vanishingly rare exceptions, fanfic is crap in textual form, laden to bursting with literary sins both venal and mortal.
People said all kinds of nonsense about comic books and cheap novels leading kids astray in the past. What actually happened is those kids ended up being slightly better readers.
That you don't like something doesn't mean it's actually harmful.
People said that comic books and pulp novels were morally harmful and caused juvenile delinquency, which is indeed nonsense. However that has nothing to do with the quality and depth of the writing so your post is irrelevant.
The usefulness of reading books is not about what factual information you can glean from them. They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously. In that sense traditionally published works aren't going to offer all that much more than fanfiction.
> They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously.
- that nudges readers in interesting (to society) or new (to the reader) directions. Or at least in not in actively harmful ways. Otherwise, OF, livestreaming, or whatever latest social media BS, etc. are king: purposefully designed to create parasocial relationships that trick you thinking you have chance to be noticed.
My main beef with most fan fiction is that in my experience, it unconsciously locks readers into an extremely rigid way of thinking. Of course, this varies from fandom to fandom but woe upon the budding writer who ships the wrong pair or violates the canon.
It mirrors religious dogma, but somehow even worse when compared to all the disputes in Christianity throughout the centuries. (Plus, there's at least a connection between Christianity to modern democracy.)
The writing quality and complexity of amateur content, even long-form is only around the level of a YA novel, truth be told alot of the stuff I was reading back in junior high in my school library had more depth than this.
It's good that you can get people reading, but reading the equivalent of pulp is very different from real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
Maybe even 99+% these days, seeing how easy it is to publish your first finger-painting online. Doesn't mean there isn't any good stuff, or even a lot of good stuff. 1% of a lot is still a lot.
(ps. and once you get people reading, they tend to keep doing it and develop taste over time. if it's even just a few who wouldn't have done it before. That's good, right?)
(pps. For example: at 2M words, I think pirateaba might exceed the "first 1M words are practice" threshold)
Even without the, you know, murder stuff, I think we can do better for kids than another generation of "rationalists", considering the track record here.
Who cares? If people enjoy it, let them enjoy it. I've read a few YA novels as an adult that I enjoyed, even though I regularly read more complex stuff.
Most people, for most of history, have only ever enjoyed what might be considered "low quality" entertainment - pulp fiction, shitty plays, etc.
> real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
Interestingly, even discounting YA and other stuff like that, you are only describing a very small subset of novels.
That cherry picks the best of the best without comparing them with the other 99.9% of their contemporaries who were pulp authors. They and their literary output are forgotten for good reasons.
If the works are so great then you've got nothing to worry about. Kids will read them on their own. Of course we both know that's not true, because the works are not that great.
They can read Minecraft strategy guides and Yahoo auction fan fics for all I care, since that's a lot better than nothing. I remember not wanting to read what school assigned me and how that killed my desire to read most fiction writing, and would prefer that not happen to more kids.
Art is a matter of taste, and if you go counter to your audience's taste, don't be surprised if they disengage.
Beyond a basic level of literacy, I'm not sure it's clear that reading pulp is better for any defined outcome than reading nothing. And I'm not sure why it would be. Once you are able to fully grasp a level of literacy, reading more of that level or below probably isn't really doing anything for you.
I am not responding to the examples, and I am not challenging the claim that famous vs not famous author does not matter, or that dead tree vs screen does not matter; I am raising the question whether it's just a quantity issue ("Just so long as they read", "entire novels worth of text").
Is it? I am not sure either way. Do you lose something by only reading chapters of a novel but never the whole story from the beginning to the end, even if you're still reading the same amount?
>Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
Then you do not understand writing. If Yudkowski really had more interesting ideas, then he would have been able to do HPMOR as original fiction.
Rowling is actually really good, inventing very charming things, very fun sentences, and there's nothing even close in HPMOR (I have read it myself, and enjoyed it to some degree), but you really underestimate how good Rowling is.
Yes, pedantically, and as mentioned in the Notes in the Text in most editions, the Lord of the Rings is a single book sometimes published in three volumes.
Saying everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, that just hasn't found enlightenment is not a good argument. A sizable portion of people will have the opposite revelation.
I for one think people still thinking socialism is a good thing, haven't read enough history books about the 20th century.
Any. Even if you're doing a blue collar job, understanding the fundamentals (or at least the specifics about a particular subfield) makes you "the guy" and adds some job security. As a programmer I often got ahead just because I'd read all of the C standard library, the Windows API docs, etc.
In the latest "War on the rocks" podcast [1], Ryan Evans asked his guest, Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, what books he has read lately (he often, maybe always, asks that question). The guest answered basically that, as a politician, he does not have time to read books anymore, because he is very busy with other things.
I think most listeners of the podcast are absolutely ok with this. Pål Jonson is an important guy, who has a job to do. That job is to keep Sweden safe, and, as Sweden is now part of NATO, by extension to keep NATO safe as well. If he does his job well, then Sweden and NATO together might be able to deter aggression by Russia. If taking time to read books means he has less time to do his job well, then he should not read books.
But if you replace Pål Jonson with somebody else, who are we to say that their job is less important? And if we take a kid, the way the kid understands their jobs is that they need to get ready for life,for their actual, paid, job when the time will come. And if in doing that, they are more efficient by using ChatGPT, then why should they read entire books?
Modern society has gotten so “efficient” and expectations so insane that yeah, anyone at that level of a professional career - especially with a family - I would in no way expect to have time to read anything. Every last inch of their life is going to be hyperscheduled to oblivion.
We have systematically removed any chance for “unproductive” downtime for any high performers if they want to continue to be seen as a high performer.
Not surprising in the least to me, and society as a whole is worse off because of it. Good luck when this person needs to make a hugely impactful and thoughtful decision for society while in their position of power.
Literature is like classical music. One can argue Beethovens 9th symphony is one of the greatest pieces of music of all time, but that doesn’t mean we all have time to sit through 70 minutes a day listening to it.
I bet important people don’t even have time to sit and watch a full movie.
You can learn far more from art than from anything else, if you try. Should important people go to religious services? Without that at arts, where do they get deep, full thoughtful perspectives on the world?
Literature, music, art; they are all intertwined aren’t they? I find at their purest form they are striving for similar goals: pulling out from our collective unconscious a life affirming theme that can be viewed in a new perspective.
When I started high school in the early '90s, there was a compulsory summer reading list of 10–12 books, each ranging from 300–800 pages. Then we had to write essays about them. This was just our summer homework before the new school year started. I didn't enjoy it at all; at the same time, I read lots of easy fiction, sometimes several hundred pages a day.
My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.
What i found is that there is an aversion to knowledge, there is a ever increasing group of people (not only kids) that refuses everything that involves reading, learning or reasoning.
You present them a game that involves a bit of investigation and they just don't try, you think well they want to shutdown their brains at the moment of relax, but no they just never use their brains. They can't follow a manual to assemble anything no matter if they only have to connect two pieces clearly marked as put them together.
And they reach adult stage in this condition, they can't do anything else that following verbal very precise instructions, and some of them are not stupid, i found very capable people that just reject trying to read anything but have incredible reasoning skills, they just never notice because they never exercised.
My main concern here is attention span. I think books are good for improving the muscle of attention span. There are other places that you can improve your attention span but I fear they are not being taught in school either.
People rarely read whole books anymore. I know very few adults in my life who read books, lots of people are put off by reading in school and never give it a try in their adult life.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
Required reading in school killed my interest in reading. When I graduated I was very happy that I wouldn't have to read books ever again.
It took me about 5 years or so until anime and manga got me to try another fiction book. That eventually led to reading more books. But when school was done I really did think that I wasn't going to touch a (fiction) book again.
---
It makes me wonder if kids in the future will have "required reading" where they have to play certain old video games. Will that make them hate video games?
In our local highschool (near Copenhagen, Denmark) they have scheduled reading time for all pupils while in school - weekly as part of their normal schoolday. That is, instead of normal class everyone needs to bring a book of their own choosing and read in it. No phones allowed during this time, so they can either read or stare out the window. The local library helps them find books of their own interest.
The idea is to get them find genres and books they like and find joy reading it, while not taking time out of their free time.
Ironically this wouldn't work for me because I do almost all of my reading on my phone these days. It has become the main use of my phone at this point.
It is a good idea though, as long as they can find things they want to read. I've been sucked into the "bleeding edge" of reading (web novels), so it can be a bit more challenging to find things I really want to read. They are still out there though. Eg The Martian and Project Hail Mary (the former actually started as a web novel) .
If by summer reading assignments, are you referring to Scholastic summer reading programs? I quite enjoyed those as the available options for reading were very wide and I could always get some new Goosebumps books from the book fairs. But those are parent initiated, not something the school assigns. They can't really assign anything over the summer as they have no authority to do so outside of some IEP designed to get a particular student back on track.
I did my PhD, and so I am not averse to reading. But its nowadays rare to find books that have value in being read completely. Most of the time, I would rather read a blog post or a paper, books are often outdated by the time they are published. Books are limited to scenarios where looking at a complete scene of something frozen in time is still instructive.
I’m in my 30s but the UK English reading choices weren’t very inspiring when I studied and you could pass the exams without ever reading full texts so of course that’s what schools encouraged.
I remember doing sections of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth but we never did the whole thing. We did read Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls but that was it for books/plays. Poetry we had a book called Anthology where we had to read and re-read many poems for analysis.
You should be thankful. I had to read the whole canon of Shakespeare and hated it. I learned about the great vowel shift and more about English trivia than I cared to know.
The headline should have been ...especially in English Class.
Even in the 90s most people got book summaries to get through the curriculums. I would say, the highest performing language students and teachers pets at school did exactly that.
School unfortunately is largely about reciting of the teachers knowledge, so there is no need to read the source and think for yourself.
We have at least a whole generation of kids that were taught to read using "whole language" methods instead of phonetically. None of this really surprises me.
The article seems to be centered around reading assignments. I was reading entire books often when I was in school, yet did my best to avoid reading assignments because they were so dull.
I don't know how they sourced respondents, anecdotally all my kids a reading books as I type that. They read much more than I did at their age; and their friends read as well. They'd probably spend all their time on snapshat or brawlstars, were they to have a say.
Isn't that the characteristic of each generation to feel like education of the next generation is decadent?
Kids are either into reading or not. There's a critical mass when kids read because they like it, to the point where I need to remind them to read less.
When I was in high-school 20 plus years ago excerpt based reading assignments were fairly common in non-honors/advanced placement classes. Except there were whole textbooks full of excerpt based assignments instead of computer software for this purpose. Anecdotally I took honors and AP English and those classes destroyed my desire to read for years. I only read a few of the assigned books cover to cover because they were either dreadfully boring or the expectations for how quickly we should read them were more than I, a very average student, could manage. Usually some combination of both. Rather than relying on cliffnotes and sparknotes alone I would typically read the first chapter, the last chapter, and then some chapter in the middle so I was prepared for tests and discussions.
At the end of the day the AP exams didn't test you on your knowledge of The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. The exam tested you on your ability to read an excerpt and answer questions about it as well as your ability to write a multi-paragraph essay from a prompt while a proctor wearing the most hideous smelling blackberry perfume bathed you in an olfactory assault every time they walked by. In-classroom writing assignments were the most effective way to prepare and we did them frequently. As a reward for doing well you got to skip a couple of 100 level English credits in college.
Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today, but it feels like the education system never takes a moment to look inward and acknowledge that The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia are dreadfully boring reads. It took me three tries to finish 1984 because the beginning is such a slog. It is strange to say kids aren't interested in reading (from the article) when a lot of the subject matter is objectively dull. Four of the six books in the article header are books I don't even want to think about let alone read.
> Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today
Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Reading thick books requires having some device with no distructions. In my young ages all computers and all smartphones used to have no distructions, but now all computers (except some Linux distros) used to be bombarded with distructions in such a way that I can not read a book on any proprietary OS without getting some notification about anti-virus software or some updates or a need to restart, or just some events happening on the Internets.
My point is not just that distractions distract people, but distructions have become inevitable on almost any modern device able to render PDF with formulas.
Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.
Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
> Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.
Still accomplishes the goal of allowing kids to read a book.
> Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Kids don't usually have these sort of requirements with their reading lists. Also have you looked into KOReader[1], which has support for djvu it looks like?
> Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
Firstly, I wasn't suggesting installing more proprietary code. Not sure where you got that from. Most scripts/guides I've seen that help disable the more intrusive/annoying parts of Windows are FOSS.
Secondly, then install Linux and only use FOSS, for which there are many options to read books with?
I don't know about other areas, but the school to which I go in Southwestern Ontario still has a library, as does every other school to which I have been.
If you have a library anywhere nearby, you don't need to worry about purchasing and selling individual books. Over they years they have gotten even more lenient with long loan periods, online renewals, mostly eliminated late fees, and (depending on where you live) returns at any library location within a regional system.
My Ukrainian town used to have 3 libraries. Now the only library here is a school one. The reason so much libraries have got destroyed is the censourship. Now Ukrainian govt makes some active progress into censourship of anything printed by Russian language. Since most of the books accumulated for dozens of years were not yet prohibited but definitely unwanted - now I have no libraries at all.
I am very happy to hear that old and cool libraries are still a thing somewhere.
I use to teach local kids how to get pirated books with no DRM but I have a feeling that they will never use my recommendation. They just open their first page with no animated pictures and get lost immediately, their eyes are not even moving through the text in a proper way. They look to me like when I see some new musical instrument which I can not play because I have not observed it earlier.
> Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device.
Install Windows Enterprise IoT LTSC then, problem solved.
Seattle public schools does not read full books in elementary. Just short form publisher slop. Can’t do reading as a group and discussion because not all kids understand and that wouldn’t be inclusive.
While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.
There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.
I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."
Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.
I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.
It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear. What precisely is the purpose of "English" class? What? To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare. So who cares what they do with their time.
Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.
> The purpose of English class was to provide a field for interdisciplinary subjects. We learned how to write the standard five paragraph essay. We learned how to detect dishonest and manipulative messaging in advertising. We learned to relate themes in literature to contemporary society.
This is how I remember my English classes. We did not spend much time at all on grammar after the 9th grade. We didn’t study any classic literature besides reading a Shakespeare play every year; you had to take a separate course for that. This is also how the classes are treated in most colleges these days; you’ll get English majors who spent 4 years reading critical theory and bad contemporary novels written by friends of the department head, rather than anything with serious cultural cachet.
This is the only serious criticism of the subject, in my opinion; the applications that grammar has in logical reasoning, composition, interpretation, and foreign language acquisition are too significant to shrug off, but it isn’t being taught particularly rigorously anymore.
And how are you, right now, communicating? You're writing in English. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, all written down, is its own subject that people aren't born knowing or can acquire like they can speak.
In addition, it's English Literature and Language in the same, so yes, about knowing partly a canon, but how how to interpret texts, both nonfictional and fictional and poetic.
> It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear.
I don't know how to explain to you why it's important to educate humanity.
It's also about how to reason about and understand what you're consuming, how to analyze sources, how media affects you; my wife is an English teacher and the comments here are often completely missing what's truly going on in a school.
I agree that that's its purpose, but the fact that there are many adults who are as bad at reading and writing as there are just goes to show how bad the classes are at actually teaching what they're trying to teach.
That said, maths aren't much different. Being bad at maths is a cultural marker of sorts, since many maths classes are very bad indeed at teaching much beyond basic addition and subtraction.
School is good for people who care to care. American students do pretty decently on international standard exams. It's that we have a culture of not giving a fuck, and thus we have adults who can't read something that is over a 6th grade level.
See this very website on people who complain that they can't digest a pretty straightforward article
I'd love to see those exams redone on a selection of adults with nothing to lose if they fail or get a bad score. Maybe the not giving a fuck becomes apparent then.
Out of all of Žižek's writings, that article really isn't that bad. I agree it could do with some headings, but you shouldn't need ChatGPT to summarise it for you, but I'm not surprised some people do.
> To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
Because people VASTLY overestimate their ability with their native language or their command of native language literature.
The SAT English Achievement tests used to absolutely obliterate even students who got good AP English scores. This isn't limited to English--even native Japanese speakers struggle with the advanced JLPT levels, for example. Grammar is hard, yo.
If you don't actively study your native language, your working vocabulary is quite small and your grammatical constructs are excessively simple.
As for shared literature, we were in front of what was claimed to be the house of Jonathan Swift with a bus full of tourists from various English-speaking countries, and the tour guide cracked a joke about "A Modest Proposal". I snickered a bit but didn't think much else. The tour guide pulled me aside later that I was the first person to get the joke and it was almost the end of the year--we're talking hundreds to thousands of people from the US, Australia, India, etc.
I mean, just ask someone to name three main characters and what they did in the last book they read. Most people will struggle. You need to spend some discussion time in order to affix a book into your memory.
The purpose of school is a mix between providing childcare, and making sure most of society have a largely overlapping common upbringing experience. We hear that we encourage diversity - but only of superficial stuff like sexual orientation or skin color. We don't want people that think too differently.
This is why I, despite my deep appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge and having spent a significant chunk of my life in the academia after graduating, want my kids to spend as little time as strictly necessary in primary or secondary schools. And the need comes from the fact that I need some of that childcare, not that I need someone else to teach my children anything.
I’m curious - do you think you’re an independent thinker? Do you think it’s a competitive advantage? What does thinking differently mean? It seems like a thing people say because it sounds good without really interrogating it.
I objectively find myself to be an independent thinker, and I mostly find it distracting. I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships if I spent more time thinking about the kinds of things other people think about, in the way they think about them.
I observe most of the most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns, people look up to them because they understand them, and they develop solutions that are in line with what most people need/want/desire.
I think I'm an independent thinker. One symptom is that I repeatedly find myself observing that other people do things because they're copying other people. This is one symptom, but there's more.
> Do you think it’s a competitive advantage
> I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships
> most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns
Don't care, I'm not optimizing for being competitive, being successful, or any of the other things you mentioned.
See, another symptom of being an independent thinker: I've thought about it on my own and I've concluded I'm not interested in your targets.
This sounds like a very common sort of misanthropic attitude I see littered around the web.
You know how they say - like in making music - in order to break the rules you have understand them?
I don’t like the take directly, but as a person who makes music, what I realize, and I think this is what they meant, it if you don’t study music, most people are likely to naturally slide into the most simplistic forms of it, because that’s what naturally sounds good, so you’re like naturally more inclined to recreate a 1 4 5 progression, rather than Mozart.
Do you think that you may have accidentally slid into this position, or sort of thinking exactly like a like blase’ counter cultural sameness, copying all the self-defined independent thinkers?, or do you think you have some insight into what makes your perspective unique and clearly in some way spiritually valuable to you?
I would be concerned that purely “thinking about it on your own” would lead to a really narrow set of beliefs. Like no offense, but your answer is a carbon copy of “disaffected youth” I’ve both exhibited and seen exhibited my whole life, with maybe a little less bite, so I’m guessing your not that young. But I’m often wrong.
But I am genuinely curious, what do you think makes you an independent thinker? And what purpose does that serve you?
> copying all the self-defined independent thinkers
At this point I can no longer put effort into responding to you. You think that my conception of "thinking for myself" is "listening to people who claim they think for themselves, and repeat what they say"? You know the HN principle of "assume the most generous interpretation"? This is the opposite.
Anyway, FYI, you sound like you're trying to deradicalize an andrew tate fanboy. You're A) really bad at feigning your concern, and B) extremely off target.
You didn’t give me a lot to go on. I think it was the most generous interpretation from what was available. Give me more! What drives you? How am I so off base?
This is genuinely a philosophical question I am deeply interested in, what is individual thought?
Why do you care so much about me? Re-reading our conversation, you were the one that asked "do you think you're an independent thinker", as if hoping for a yes so that you can then attack it. All I said is schools are mostly childcare.
If you care, go check my comment history and ask about something specific.
Do you think independent thought and deep thought are correlated or uncorrelated? When you say most people copy their perspectives do you think that’s bad?
A lot of the thinkers I’ve been interested in lately seem to deeply embed their thoughts in a tradition, so I’ve been thinking that in order to have better thinking I should copy more.
> why do you care so much about me?
Sad question, but what is life but a series of attempts to connect to other people. Having a discourse makes it real. Tell me I’m wrong! Maybe having independent thoughts has real value. Usually “think different” is about as deep as an apple ad.
Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
> Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
Yes, I got this sense. I'm not what you're looking for.
I never understand where these anecdotes come from.
I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
So whatever the problem is, if there even is one, is less to do with school curriculums, english classes, screen time, or the availability of books, and more to do with the culture of many homes not prioritizing reading.
You doubt there's a problem because you don't know of it happening in your rural town? In addition to teaching kids to read books, we apparently need to teach adults research and inference fundamentals.
I can infere all the facts and logic perfectly well! But thank you.
Evidently not when you cite one anecdotal counter example and over generalize?
(That's not the same commenter.)
Would be funny if it was... I would have thought making an anonymous throwaway account after posting from a 'real' account would be a 'too late' situation, but the plausible deniability here shows otherwise where the original content was not imbued with objectionable etiquette.
> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading
I would not assume this, given that the states with the highest literacy rates are mostly rural and at least half red (NH, MN, ND, VT, SD, NE).
Yeah, reading scores are about how well you teach reading. In terms of NAEP 8th grade reading scores, New York, Georgia, Utah, Illinois, Rhode Island, and California cluster together in the top half, in that order: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/blog_na...
The linked chart says it's for "white students". How does it look when all students are included? ChatGPT shows different results (though these could of course be incorrect).
Much worse for the blue states with heavy immigrant/English second language populations, which is to be expected.
"White students" is likely just the cleanest set of "almost certainly English native and parents are English native speakers."
Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates. Same with crime. Kind of goes hand in hand. Education in blue cities needs to be fixed.
> Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates.
Not true; in both red and blue states, its rural (usually relatively redder for the state) areas that have the highest illiteracy rates.
> Same with crime.
OTOH, with crime its true that higher population density areas (which also tend to be bluer) tend to have higher aggregate crime rates (though some important categories of crime, notably firearms homicides, reverse this.) But the fact that general crime rates do that has been recognized not merely longer than the current ideological divide between the US major parties, but longer than the existence of electoral democracy; the driving factor being density => opportunity => crime. Opportunity scales with dyadic interactions which scale asymptotically with n² (n=density). It's also worth noting that areas within states don't have the kind of Constitutional sovereignty against states that states do against the federal government; with no equivalent of the 10th Amendment protection that states have against federal encroachment. They don't generally have the power define serious crimes, or define punishment for serious crimes (they may have the power to define and punish infractions and misdemeanors), define correctional and rehabilitation policies that apply to serious offenders, etc. All those things are done at the state level. They also have very limited (because of state law) control of public health (mental and physical) policy, taxation levels and distribution, etc. So even if it was policy and not population density driving the difference in crime rates, the local areas aren't the ones in control of most of the potentially-relevant polices, the states are.
oh I am sooo stealing this “blue cities is red states” thing - well done mate wherever you picked this up from, well done!!
The parent repeats precisely the disinformation of a political party. That shows reading comprehension and some communication skills. If this was an English class, it might get a B if the assignment was about disinformation techniques.
But this is social science and we need to apply other cognitive skills, such as understanding empirical evidence, controls, and causal inference. Using those we could generate other hypotheses from factors more strongly correlated than the leading political party, such as funding, generations of systemic discrimination, government violence, or other causes.
Regarding political party, generally the better educated someone is, the more likely they are to be in the Blue party. The most highly educated institutions, including those of science, education, arts, etc., tend to be overwhelmingly Blue.
[dead]
[dead]
> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
> The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
Reading the expected books for school is very different from reading a lot privately at home.
I know quite many fellow pupils who read a lot privately, but detested reading the required books for school (they at best got some summaries somewhere, which in my opinion actually prepared you better for the tests since the people who write summaries typically know quite well which parts/topics of the books teachers consider to be important, and thus do quite some explanations on these).
On the other hand, I know fellow pupils who barely read anything in their free time (they had different interests), but for some reason actually liked (and liked reading) the books that you had to read for some classes.
Yeah, that was totally me.
The only book I ever read for school was by accident. I was already deep into it on my own when the teacher assigned it to us
I do not live in the US, but this was my experience as well. Actually having read the book made my grades worse, because I now disagreed with the claims the teacher wanted to hear. I was always like: no, I have also read the book and no the author doesn't say that.
[dead]
In Clark County high schools in NV, they do not read a single whole book in English classes even in honors.
Is it an aversion to assigning homework?
I remember teachers assigning “read chapters 4-6 by Thursday” and then giving a quiz to make sure people read and remembered the details.
It's an aversion to giving bad grades to the inevitable bulk of students who just won't read it.
There is no real way for teacher to check whether I read the book or not. People who read books regularly fail trivia tests and people who did not read them can quick read "about the book" analysis off web and call it a day.
And crutially, my inclination to finish assigned book and my willingness to read books in general are unrelated. A kid that reads a lot wont neceasary enjoy and finish assigned books - I know I skipped quite a lot of them.
If your premise is that there is no way to test knowledge, then I can see how you might not want to assign books to be read, but I think there are ways to test knowledge and that reading a book should result in knowledge of the book.
something still changed; i've been in classes where the bulk of the students got bad grades and that never stopped the instructor from handing them out.
if we use grades as a yardstick for elementary progress and efficacy then you'd think it would be a bigger deal if a single cog in the system decided to systematically add inaccuracy to the measure simply because a failing student irks them.
You have the principal actors reversed. Teachers would generally love to fail more students. It is the administration that prevents or disincentivizes it.
Grades are a yardstick merely for which district gets more prestige and funding. There is absolutely no incentive for anyone with authority to fail bad students. Reprimands or terminations result from a teacher giving consistently below average grades.
Those quizzes are part of the problem. It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket.
> get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket
This sounds like a bad quiz, unless the story was set in e.g. the American revolution.
> It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket.
Maybe things have really changed a lot since I was in school, but that was certainly not the type of questions that were asked of set works.
The questions were asked such that, the more the student got into the book, the higher the mark they were able to get.
Easy questions (everyone gets this correct if they read the book): Did his friends and family consider $protagonist to be miserly or generous.
Hard questions (only those slightly interested got these correct): Examine the tone of the conversation between $A and $B in $chapter, first from the PoV of $A and then from the PoV of $B. List the differences, if any, in the tone that $A intended his instructions to be received and the tone that $B actually understood it as.
Very hard questions (for those who got +90% on their English grades): In the story arc for $A it can be claimed that the author intended to mirror the arc for Cordelia from King Lear. Make an argument for or against this claim.
That last one is the real deal; answerable only by students who like to read and have read a lot - it involves having read similar characters from similar stories, then knowing about the role of Cordelia, and at least a basic analysis of her character/integrity, maybe having read more works by this same author (they'll know if the mirroring is accidental or intentional), etc.
We were never asked "what color shirt did $A wear to the outing" types of questions (unless, of course, that was integral to the plot - $A was a double-agent, and a red shirt meant one thing to his handler while a blue shirt meant something else).
Did I like the set works? Mostly not, but I had enough fiction under my belt in my final two years of high-school that I could sail through the very difficult questions, pulling in analogies and character arcs, tone, etc from a multitude of Shakespeare plays, social issue fictional books ("Cry, The Beloved Country", "To Kill a Man's Pride", "To Kill a Mockingbird", etc), thrillers (Frederick Forsythe, et al), SciFi (Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick), Horror-ish (Stephen Kind, Dean R Koontz) and more.
With my teenager now, second-final year of high-school, I keep repeating the mantra of "To get high English marks, you need to demonstrate critical thinking, not usage of fancy words", but alas, he never reads anything that can be considered a book, so his marks never get anywhere near the 90% grade that I regularly averaged :-(
The only books he's ever read are those he's been forced to read in school.
> Hard questions (only those slightly interested got these correct): Examine the tone of the conversation between $A and $B in $chapter, first from the PoV of $A and then from the PoV of $B. List the differences, if any, in the tone that $A intended his instructions to be received and the tone that $B actually understood it as.
I always got As on these ... but the primary reason was that I was good at bullshitting. They are super easy when you are good at bullshitting. The trick is not to care that your answer sounds royally stupid. Then you will get A.
And all you need is to check those dialogs when writing the test. If you are expecting me to remember those dialogs, then we are back to the expectation that I basically memorized the book.
> Very hard questions (for those who got +90% on their English grades): In the story arc for $A it can be claimed that the author intended to mirror the arc for Cordelia from King Lear. Make an argument for or against this claim.
Again, I got As ... but they were solidly in the "kind of test that convinces you literature is stupid class" kind of questions. Unless there is some kind of actual interesting insight to be had, this question just shows how empty the whole exercise is.
I never understood people who say their English writing is "bullshitting". Oh you read the book and offered a plausible interpretation? That sounds to me like learning and creating.
> I never understood people who say their English writing is "bullshitting". Oh you read the book and offered a plausible interpretation? That sounds to me like learning and creating.
It was bullshitting, because it was not even an attempt at a good analysis of what the author actually wrote or meant to write. I know for a fact that I was not trying to analyze the book. When I am actually trying to analyze a text, I think about it differently and treat it differently.
The thought process was closer to what I do when I am joking around, it is just that result was put into formal language.
It was a bit like a debate club - you know you are having sleazy untrue argument, but it is being rewarded, so.
> That sounds to me like learning and creating.
I dont think I learned much or anything about literature. I did created something. I learned something that, imo, schools should teach less - generate BS on command.
> I never understood people who say their English writing is "bullshitting". Oh you read the book and offered a plausible interpretation? That sounds to me like learning and creating.
I'm skeptical that watwut was as good in HS English lit as he claims to be: see his other response to me - he basically believes that recycling plot points is both meaningless (correct) and a path to high marks in literature (incorrect) :-/
I mean, it's possible but unlikely that plot examination will lead to good marks.
> he basically believes that recycling plot points is [...] a path to high marks in literature (incorrect) :-/
I had those As.
> I mean, it's possible but unlikely that plot examination will lead to good marks.
The key is that plot must match. The rest of it can be made up.
> Again, I got As ... but they were solidly in the "kind of test that convinces you literature is stupid class" kind of questions. Unless there is some kind of actual interesting insight to be had, this question just shows how empty the whole exercise is.
You are not making much sense.
You got As in the type of question that required demonstration of a broad swath of literature ... but that just shows you how empty the question is?
WTF?
> You got As in the type of question that required demonstration of a broad swath of literature ... but that just shows you how empty the question is?
Yeah. I think that the key to achieving A is that you must not care and just let the creativity in your brain go. Thinking back, basically I did what LLM do today. You have to be able to vaguely associate plot points you vaguely remember from books you did not liked. You have to be able to write argument sounding constructions without care for how much they are true. Without feeling ashamed that you wrote something meaningless.
It is the kind of question that does not provide any meaningful insight to anything. The answer does not matter except for the grade. It wont give you any insight to literature. It does not demonstrate you understood something about the book either. That is why it is empty question - its only purpose is to prove you vaguely remember plot points.
Kids dont read for fun, but they have vague idea that books are something educational that is generally good to do. These sort of exercises will only convince them that reading books is both unfun drag and meaningless thing to do.
We certainly had questions like that as part of bigger assessments and they were pretty reasonable.
However, some of the teachers at my school also had short pop-quizzes meant to ensure that everyone kept up with the reading. These were usually just some details from the assigned chapters and, IMO, often veered into minutia. One really was about the color of something and I don’t remember it being particularly plot-relevant or symbolic, even if it was mentioned a few times.
It wasn’t a huge part of one’s grade, but I distinctly remember being frustrated that these quizzes effectively penalized me for “getting into” the book and reading ahead.
It’s the assigned district curriculum. They have a text book with excerpts.
No, it's an aversion to having (and enforcing) basic standards.
Okay, now what's the literacy rate in your county? What does the data actually say?
Pretty funny if it's Mississippi and they're just correct.
A quick Google search says 67% of elementary school kids scored at or above reading proficiency in my county. 73% for high school.
> The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class
That doesn’t mean that kids really need to read any single of those books any time in history.
It’s probably because you are in a rural red state that isn’t concerned with equity and feelings
Comments here are very strange, “Reading books should go the way of cursive! Education is more like childcare anyways.”
It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.
We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.
I’m a nerd, but we were never a nation of nerds and things turned out pretty well. The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise.
Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.” I went to the Iowa Caucuses back in 2019. These were democrats, but not highly educated ones. Mostly farm and farm adjacent people. But watching them ask questions and deliberate, there was a degree of level-headedness, practicality, prudence, skepticism, and caution that was just remarkable to watch. These are folks who don’t have much book learning but come from generations of people who managed to plan and organize their lives well enough to survive Iowa’s brutally harsh winters and short planting window (about 14 days—either side of that and you and your whole family die). You need smart people to do smart people things, but those conscientious normies are the backbone of a healthy society.
> The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise.
Outliers.
You cannot come to conclusions based on examining outliers only. The better conclusion is from taking a sample of the population, and checking the correlation between test scores and success.
> Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.”
There's plenty of studies that determine the correlation between academic performance and success. Have you possibly even considered that the basic "gut-feeling" only gets better (i.e. more predictive successes) with better academic scores?
IOW, the more you know, the more you learn, the better your heuristic is when making snap conclusions.
I’m not talking about individual success i’m talking about societal success.
> I’m not talking about individual success i’m talking about societal success.
I don't know what that means.
Social mobility? Academic success corresponds quite strongly to that too.
Collective success? Groups who are academically successful also correlate quite well to various measures of success.
I mean, unless we reduce the scope of our samples to the outliers, and look at a non-representative sample, it's really quite hard to support the claim that "gut-feel" is at all valuable without high academic performance.
Lots of people besides nerds care very much which schools their kids attend. Look at home prices.
> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.
Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted.
For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations.
Others could probably come up with additional examples.
My daughter, at her very expensive deep-blue private school, learned that the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois—who didn’t have written language—but didn’t learn about the English civil war where the ideas behind the constitution actually had their genesis.
In terms of being a citizen in America, it’s far more important to understand the English civil war, British history, etc. Those are the instruction manual for the actual society we have inherited. Even in my deep red state public school system, we spent way more time than was warranted on native Americans and other things that people feel guilty about. If you’re born in a multi-generational colony ship, you need to know how the CO2 scrubbers work. It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.
> It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.
It does, because for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers. The politics and institutions turn out to be much harder than the scrubbers - few societies produce the latter, and it's generally the ones with much stronger human rights.
But the world’s most technologically advanced civilization was built by politics and institutions that killed and displaced the native Americans then glorified that effort in movies and television. The guys who built the moon rocket and silicon valley grew up playing cowboys and indians.
Nothing is pure. You are ignoring quite a lot, and quite a lot that distinguishes that society and its peers different from than the others, far less accomplished.
The question is not purity, but facing our own faults, personal and societal, do we give up and indulge them or do we keep our vision and confidence and keep improving?
So many push so hard against liberty and justice.
You're moving the goalposts. You made a good point earlier: "for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers."
We know what "politics and institutions" created the CO2 scrubbers (i.e. our present technologically advanced and prosperous society). It was the ones that displaced and killed the native americans and celebrated it in movies. By your own logic, we should be teaching how to maintain those politics and institutions, so we maintain our prosperity. Insofar as there is any point in learning about history, surely it is learning about what has worked?
This is silly. The 'society' has done very, very many things over the centuries (including other awful ones - slavery, Japanese-American internment, segregation, oppression in Latin America and elsewhere, climate change, etc etc). To pick one and say it's necessary to CO2 scrubbers is just a rhetorical/philosophical game.
That can be fun - we're on HN after all - and even informative to explore, but is not tied to reality.
The point I’m trying to get at is that you seem to be trying to smuggle “liberty and justice” in under the cover of CO2 scrubbers. But the same “politics and institutions” that created our technologically advanced, prosperous society, also did those other things. Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?
Thanks for clarifying - I didn't know what you were after.
> Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?
To say taking away people's freedoms and lives "isn't broken" is obviously part of the philosophical game.
If you mean to posit the old Faustian choice: If doing such things is required for power, should we do them? Do the ends justify the means? It's a challenging hypothetical, of course, but these days it's extremely overdone, widely used by bad people as a propaganda assault in order to seize power, and now some fools take them seriously. I'm bored with it, and taking them seriously is obviously ridiculous and dangerous.
The interesting part gets little discussion, and is far more interesting because it applies to reality: How do we take care of all of people's needs: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for all? Cutting the specs down to 'my needs' or 'many people's needs but destroy the rest' is just the corruption of power.
Some of the answer is low-hanging fruit, provided by generations before us, especially in our free democracy. Some needs to be discussed. Shall we start?
> For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution.
Is this actually common? The argument is quite common, but I expected that the actual number of schools who do this is a very very tiny number.
I'd imagine the same; skipping evolution entirely is hard. Dismissing it however, is not that uncommon.
> Between 2007 and 2019, there definitely was progress: from 51 percent of high school biology teachers reporting emphasizing evolution and not creationism in 2007 to 67 percent in 2019. It was matched by a drop from 23 to 12 percent of teachers who offer mixed messages by endorsing both evolution and creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, from 18 to 15 percent of teachers who endorse neither evolution nor creationism, and from 8.6 to 5.6 percent of teachers who endorse creationism while not endorsing evolution.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-educati...
They've rebranded knowledge they don't like as "woke".
> What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
A clear majority of parents that I know actually would have the education system do that. Hence the oftentimes poor results.
A private school I looked at in 2025 required iPads (and nothing else) because their entire management of students was don by an iPad application (that worked on nothing but iPads).
The school admin/marketer/consultant/whatever I spoke to during the sales call literally did not understand what I meant when I said "If your management is so incompetent at decision-making that they got shangaied into buying into this deficient ecosystem when almost any other decision would have worked for both major mobile platforms, why on earth would I think that the other decisions they make would be any good".[1]
------------------------------
[1] Management who make obviously incompetent decisions like "Our study material only works on iPads" are obviously incompetent or otherwise disconnected from reality.
Ironically I think education would be much better if they added after school and pre-school child care. I think the Finnish system is pretty good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland
> Comments here are very strange, “Reading books should go the way of cursive! Education is more like childcare anyways.”
That's pretty on-brand for HN though. This place enforces a very peculiar version of anti-intellectualism centered on empty-headed contrarianism.
They want to play devil's advocate but they aren't smart enough so all you get are dumb hot takes.
With "obvious" ideas like reading being good, you tend not to have people chiming in to say so. That creates a filter where you only get the contrarianism.
... Prepare shorter or lighter materials for them to read, as this article suggests? Why has reading whole books become the holy grail of education system?
The said education system expected this:
> As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
Yeah, sounds like a very great way to filter out perhaps 20% of good readers and make sure the rest 80% will hate reading for the rest of their lives.
You can say it’s like childcare, sure. But learning has to come from somewhere. Parents seem to be doing less and less out of the classroom. Does that mean we’re just giving up then?
Maybe literature is just a terrible medium for culture except for the relatively brief period in human history when they were extraordinarily cheap to produce and disseminate compared to other cultural products.
Edit: but insofar as media criticism in education is bound to the book rather than the dominant forms of the day, I think children are being done a disservice.
It's still by far the best medium that requires you to be active and imaginative while packing the best information density and usability. Plus it works offline, without power, you can carry it around, &c.
Books forge you in a way short "content" we consume all day long today will never be able to, there are a few long form podcasts here and there that could be comparable but that's not the bulk of the media kids "consume"
It is still extraordinary cheap to produce and disseminate novels. If not more so, if you include ebooks or longform blogging.
Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
Slight problem with that if you would like to live in a functioning, thriving democracy: democracy in the sense of "one person, one vote" requires or at least greatly benefits from a broadly educated population. It's not sufficient, but very likely necessary.
See my last sentence
>Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
I don't pretend to speak for anyone else, but I am more than my economic inputs and outputs, and while it was in a somewhat different context, Heinlein's prose applies in spades WRT your assertion:
“I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal…but a man.” ― Robert A. Heinlein[0][1]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11588525-i-had-to-perform-a...
[1] From Starship Troopers[2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers
I think you're going to attract downvotes from people who just read your first sentence and assume that's the actual gist of your post.
And the people who read the whole comment and see the low effort straw man argument.
The market has never solved anything in ways that are beneifical for humanity. (Just commenting on the first part of your comment, given that your last sentence implies you're just saying what market evangelists would say.)
I don’t know if this matters much. When I was in school it was rare to actually read a book assignment anyways, and I’m sure with LLMs now it’s less.
I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
It’s odd, I read ravenously as a kid/teen, as did my siblings. You need to read what you enjoy, and for it to not be forced. (For example, summer reading at the library gave out prizes kids cared about for reading books.) Plus, we didn’t have access to much digital media like TV/video games (though it was the early 2010s) because my parents were strict, so books were a solid source of entertainment.
I read a lot of books that fit my tastes as a kid, usually adventure/fantasy genre stuff.
Never enjoyed the stuff that got assigned in school though. I’d probably like it now.
Anything you're forced to do too much you lose all enjoyment of. If you're given at least a bit of agency, it's far more enjoyable.
I read because I wanted to all the time, but every reading assignment was a chore.
It is not just it being homework. It is not like I hated evything in school - I actually discovered quite a few intersting things there.
It is that books everyone here is said that kids dont read anymore or brags they read ... are just not interesting books for a kid.
That was my problem too. Not in the US but in Europe. The stuff we had to read was all by 'highly acclaimed: authors who have carved out this niche of 'literature art ' between them.
However their books were dusty, tough, whiny and horrible to get through. Yuck. I never read fiction in my own language ever again just in spite.
I too read ravenously as a kid. Strangely, in the 90's we were never assigned full books in English classes, just short stories or chapters.
I'm older than you (graduated high school in 1975). I read tons of sci-fi as a kid. I also don't remember reading any whole novels for English class. Maybe we did, but if so I have successfully blocked them out.
I have been amazed at the number of houses I've been in over the years which didn't appear to contain a single book.
I graduated high school in '92 (S.F. Bay Area) and can recall several assigned books we read for class in either junior high or high school. I think there were more, but these are the ones I can recall easily today.
Pride and Prejudice. Last of the Mohicans. A Separate Peace. Tom Jones. Beowulf. Grendel. Crime and Punishment. Waiting for Godot. Tale of Two Cities.
Also, several Shakespeare plays, though I am no longer sure which were read when.
We also had other reading assignments where we chose our own books. The above were assigned to everyone.
interesting. Assuming you're talking about high school I had a totally different experience, we were assigned maybe 6 books/semester for the year I spent in mainstream classes (and about double that when I did the IB program but I expected that to be uncommon)
It doesn’t happen anymore because of phones and the internet. Most people in the past read because they had nothing to do and they were willing to invest the time into a good book. You sacrifice a lot of energy in order to get enjoyment from a book.
Now with the internet there’s an unlimited stream of zero investment snippets of entertainment. People naturally dive into that because it’s more rational in the short term to do that.
Schools stopped reading but it’s as a result of the way students behave. The causal driver is student behavior.
Good point. I am old enough to have lived in a pre smartphone time. Hour long train rides would mean folks opened up a book or newspaper.
> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives
The problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.
The kids don't hate classroom reading because of the reading; they hate it because of the associated curriculum. “Why were the curtains blue?” is a skill wasted on children. I only gained an appreciation for such meta-reading during a weeks-long TV Tropes bender during a spat of unemployment after getting fired from my first big-boy job.
Makes me wonder is wrong question been asked. Shouldn't it first be why were curtains described in first place?
Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.
If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.
> 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant
The foundation of the mystery novel.
The blue curtains has become an almost deranged meme at this point, completely disconnected from either curricula or evaluation. Students are not asked why singular descriptive details are chosen as such.
Being able to perform critical analysis of text is an essential skill today. It might be more essential now than any other moment in history. Understanding how narrative writing uses symbols translates cleanly into understanding how political messaging or any persuasive writing uses symbols.
Yes and literature is a pretty bad way to teach critical analysis. My high school did political speeches from history and that segment was infinitely more enjoyable than The Scarlet Letter.
You can just teach the thing you want to teach.
Sure, and there are plenty of classes that use different written forms for their pedagogy. An advantage of novels is that their length often allows for different thematic depth and complexity and their narrative can make it easier to hold a reader's attention through that length.
The problems with teaching symbolism using novels are:
1. Novels considered “curriculum-approved literature” often have symbolism that is irrelevant to a student’s life. It was placed there intentionally by the author, and was blatant to all readers when it was published, but it is indistinguishable to a student from the teacher making things up.
2. Teachers who aren't the best end up teaching from a “it's true because it's true” mindset, which may as well be “because I made it up and said so.” These are quite common.
3. Or the teacher draws from a pool of stock symbolic and thematic answers for all novels. Astute students will spot that immediately and treat it as a game of guessing the teacher’s answer rather than engaging with the text.
If the purpose is reading then we let kids read books that they like.
I can read a 1000 page history book but after 50 pages of Dutch literature I want to throw it in the garbage bin. High school KILLS reading. Few survive.
My experience was a self-admitted outlier but it started by being read to frequently as a small child, before school started. I could technically read for as long as I could remember but reading by myself was boring compared to being read to due to having a very short attention span then.
Start literacy young and the discovery of reading for fun will be easy and natural.
Or, as we've seen recently, you can force them and they still won't be literate enough.
You could force kids to read books without forcing which books to read. The issue as always is to find a balance between giving kids agency and making sure they do what's right.
Now that creating written works is trivial, the new skill to have would be figuring out if what you are reading has an ulterior motive, such as advertising.
Or even figuring out if it was created with the intent to have any utility at all for the reader.
Other than avoiding any written works made after 2020, I am not sure what to tell my kids. Even trusting the claim that something was written after 2020 seems difficult, unless you have a physical print showing its age.
> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.
I don't understand this. If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading? Or are we taking about kids who never read until school forced them to?
From what I understand, if parents read to kids when they are little, they become readers who enjoy it.
> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading?
I nearly did to me, or atleast the continual assignments did. It took a long time for me to pick up a fiction book again. School never assigned me technical writing and encyclopedias, so I continued to enjoy those, thankfully.
Yes, because it amounts to several hours long homework. Kids are more slower then adults at reading, so this can easily amount to 10 hours of additional homework which you do on top of usual homework.
So yes, if you spent 10 hours reading a book you don't care about this week, you don't feel like reading something else. You feel like you spent awful lot of time reading already and feel like reading is something like vacuum cleaning - duty but not something you do for fun.
> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading?
Yes. (n=1)
I think school ruined fiction books for me. I had to read long boring books about stories that didn't interest me, with useless sentences describing what the scene looked like or what someone had for dinner. Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases.
Maybe if I wasn't forced to read a book in an outdated language about some Christian farmer 300 years ago while I was not in school, and if I could access a succinct version 1/10th of the length of the book, I'd read it.
Maybe if I wasn't asked to describe minor details to prove I read the book, I'd actually focus on the story and not on every irrelevant detail.
Maybe if my teacher didn't force their religious holier-than-thou attitude and allowed us to form our own opinions, I'd be more engaged.
What school taught me was how to get away with not reading the books. I skimmed books by skipping tens of pages at a time or asked friends for the TL;DR or just got an F.
Now I have a feeling of uneasiness and dread when I try to read fiction for fun. So I don't.
Most 300 page fiction books I had to read could've easily been condensed to 30 pages without any loss of information.
Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit. A lot of people won't care about poetry no matter how hard you try to force them to like it. And half of it was propaganda - how $nation survived $struggle, how $nation is so great or beautiful or how $hero did $ethical_thing.
As a native US English speaker, I enjoyed Shakespeare and even when we read Beowulf and some Chaucer in mildly transcribed and annotated Middle English. More than any history lesson, it developed in me a feeling for how, in spite of lots of technological and other societal change, the basic human condition is the same.
I imagine it would be interesting to read early texts in other proto languages too. Sadly, I'm not a polyglot and can't really access that experience first-hand.
I graduated from public school a long time ago. I hated Shakespeare. The phrasing and Englishness of it was a complete turn off. And I read a lot. I believe I read almost a fourth of the books in my little public library in my rural town in Texas. As far as writing, I admire the writing in the King James Bible more than Shakespeare although I am Catholic. I would say most of the books I read were crap and written poorly.
[flagged]
> Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases.
no cap Mr Darcy ur parties are bussin fr fr
I should've used "archaic" instead of "outdated". As in, "incomprehensible to someone speaking proper modern $language". Without a dictionary, a normal student couldn't understand what was being said in many sentences throughout the book. Some books actually had a dictionary in the end, but not for all the archaic words and phrases.
I was intrigued by the idea that it might be unreasonable for a book to include a glossary or dictionary to explain usages for made up or unfamiliar terms. I like that this list [1] exists because I was struggling to think of such a book. But then I thought about The Lord of the Rings, and it even includes an index of terms among its appendices, which is something I remember using to revisit parts of the story when I first read it. Another book with a glossary of terms is Dune, which I found fun and reasonable to avoid trying to explain hierarchy where doing so would break the narrative flow. But maybe that just means it's not as cleverly constructed or organized as it could have been--but the trade-off has to be how to engage a wide selection of readers...
Is the complaint about the dictionary at the end because it wasn't comprehensive? I'm unreasonably curious about the book and which phrases were included and which were not.
I think all written works occur in a context that should be taken into account when thinking critically about them. That context is temporal and linguistic and is more apparent when you consider something like Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Understanding it requires either a modern reinterpretation or consideration given to the sociolinguistic context in which it was written.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/180823.Novels_with_Gloss...
I think you are missing the broader point: why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with? It's not as if there is a dearth of more modern works. It seems like the main function of selecting older works is to make it artificially harder for students to read.
> why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with?
I think there's a trivial answer which is that all things you encounter are fundamentally from an alien context. The degree of alien and intention of the action are the things to consider before proceeding.
For example, why would one choose to read the account of a survivor of tragedy? To develop some amount of (emotional or cognitive) empathy? To learn a broader way of thinking that could apply to a future situation? Most simply: to learn from the past.
If the goal is entertainment, evaluate your participation such that you maximize your utility. If the goal is learning, one should be wary of premature rejection without sufficient context to avoid missing the lesson. And there is an annoying reality in which most situations can teach something.
I'm using "context" in the sense of GP as to why it is hard to read e.g. Beowulf. Certainly one could find a modern account of a survivor of tragedy that would be more approachable? But in any case, accounts of tragedies of survivors are not the sort of material one finds in an English class, which is what's being criticized here (and indeed reading such accounts would probably be an improvement for the reasons you give).
> why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with?
Are you people for real?
God forbid we learn new words or learn words form the past... Why even bother with history right? It's just old stuff anyways let's focus on new stuff, what could these old things teach us anyways
Meanwhile my grandma still knew how to speak Latin at 70+, which she learned in school as a teenager
I sometimes take pleasure at reading old language ... and still think that giving it to kids as introduction to reading is absurd.
If they read 10 interesting books a year adding one like that to the mix or offer them the option is great. If they did not encountered interesting bool after agw of 7 when parents stopped reading them, no.
And interesting books for kids are there. Plenty of them of all kind, including pure action/adventure stuff. Including those related to movies or games they play. It is not lack of resources.
> and still think that giving it to kids as introduction to reading is absurd.
But that is not what is happening. Introduction to reading happens pre-school to class two, historic books come from say class 6 onwards.
> But that is not what is happening. Introduction to reading happens pre-school to class two, historic books come from say class 6 onwards.
That is exactly what is happening. The pre-schooler do not really read books, that is an absurd claim. They puzzle out words and sentences. It takes so much effort, they loose attention one paragraph in and dont really recall what happened on the last page.
Giving historic books to grade 6 is exactly the absurd thing that will convince them books cant be fun. It will become totality of their reading and the idea that reading books could be fun will be lost on them entirely.
And unless the parents really went out of their way to introduce them to interesting books, to try again and again with different books, you are loosing them with that entirely. Because this will be the only book they read last 4 months which is "forever" at that age.
> The pre-schooler do not really read books, that is an absurd claim.
And a claim I haven't made.
> They puzzle out words and sentences.
Exactly, which is introduction to reading. They essentially perceive whole words as glyph until some adult points them to the concept of letters (or if they are very smart, they figure it out themselves). When they enter school they start to learn that systematically. After half a year they can typically read short stories. (Here school starts in August/September, and at my family, reading the Christmas story was always the responsibility of the first-grader. Later that year there had been reading competitions and book talks in class.) By the end of class two, you have read tons of books. (Likely still below 100, but still quite some.)
> 4 months which is "forever" at that age.
Exactly and think of what they learn in 6 years. They doubled their age in that time.
> Giving historic books to grade 6 is exactly the absurd thing that will convince them books cant be fun.
I think that really depends on what you mean by historic books. Colloquial books from a century ago are indistinguishable from contemporary books, 200 years ago, they start to have some older words, but are still readable by a young child. 500 years ago is still intelligible, but for a child becomes more something to laugh at, rather then something they read, do to all those words, which are now considered to be improper. Your child likely won't read that on its own motivation, although it can be fun for a few minutes. 1000 years ago, the book will be in Latin, so your child won't even try.
The issue with books in the "native language" classes is much less their raw age, but that they are mostly plays or the new literature genre from that time. To me the play from 50 years ago, was really boring, but the fairy tales from 200 years ago was what I read at night below the blanket, when my parents wanted me to sleep. Yes school lead to me loosing interest in books, but that was not because the book was boring per se, but because we dissected the books until it was like a dead corpse.
> And unless the parents really went out of their way to introduce them to interesting books, to try again and again with different books, you are loosing them with that entirely.
Not really. The issue at that age is more the book supply then the demand. Reading is maybe 35-45% [0] of their wake time at that age. Try reading that much as an adult. At some point I needed to resort to reading the bible (the boring parts), because there was no book in my bookcase I haven't read, after I have already read all the history books in my parents bookcase, that sounded fun.
[0] To do the math:
A child sleeps >10h at night and has 1-1.5h after-lunch nap. So say 14 wake hours, Of this they spend 6 hours in school, which is mostly math or english, so say 40% reading. They take the school bus to and from school, which is mostly talking and reading. After school they also read, so maybe 2h. Then they likely stay on the playground for 3 hours or something, so no reading during that time. Before or after they do homework, most of which involves reading. English anyway and in math you also need to read the exercise descriptions. Then in the late afternoon and before going to bed they still read a bit of their own books, so maybe again 2h.
(6*0.4 + 2 + 2) / 14 = 45.7%
First grade kids are still learning letters and are not reading books yet. Your family is an exception. Second grade kids are NOT reading tons of books yet. That is just untrue.
> Exactly and think of what they learn in 6 years. They doubled their age in that time.
I do know what they learn in 6 grade. You seem to start with some imaginary learning.
> Colloquial books from a century ago are indistinguishable from contemporary books
They are 100% distinguishable. By words, by sentence construction, by topics, by the way plot develops. Oh, and mostly by how characters act.
> Not really. The issue at that age is more the book supply then the demand.
Literally the only source of interesting books are parents. And no, english and math textbook does not count as fun reading. Neither does Shakespeare assigned in school. There is no infinite supply of fun books coming to kids.
> They take the school bus to and from school, which is mostly talking and reading
No one reads books on their way to school these days. They just dont.
> After school they also read, so maybe 2h
Kids dont read after school except for homework.
> English anyway and in math you also need to read the exercise descriptions.
This is ridiculous.
> Then in the late afternoon and before going to bed they still read a bit of their own books, so maybe again 2h.
They dont. Because, unless their parents tried again and again and radncomly hit something fun, they dont even know fun books exist.
You clearly have had different experiences than me, most of which I disagree with, but it boils down to the stuff I already wrote. So I cite some parts from the current curriculum from my German state. I translate some parts, but if you want to read it all, use a translator.
So the source is this: https://www.schulportal.sachsen.de/lplandb/lehrplan/88
As a PDF: https://www.schulportal.sachsen.de/lplandb/lehrplan/file/88/...
Classes 1 and 2 are grouped together, so the actual split is at the distinction of the teacher, which is generally the same.
Summary:
A single year has about ~200 lesson hours and I think these are mostly done in order.Goals (I only translated the paragraph about reading):
written language acquisition 90 lesson hours This is done in the first 90 lessons, which at 5 lessons per week, 4 weeks per month means 4-5 months, which fits my claim that they are generally able to read somewhat fluently after half a year. This is the minimum required by the state for every child, talented children will of course be faster.I do not feel like translating the second part about reading right now, tell me if you actually care about it, I don't feel like being a translator for nothing. It is called "reading/properly using media" and boils down to introduction of literary and basic grammar analysis. It is obviously part of class 2.
> They are 100% distinguishable. By words, by sentence construction, by topics, by the way plot develops. Oh, and mostly by how characters act.
As a child my favorite book was "Emil und die Detektive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_and_the_Detectives) from 1929, I did not perceive anything to be odd, and it was indistinguishable from modern works for me. I did not think of it as being nearly a century old, that is just a normal child book. Maybe a linguist can tell you how this work obviously must be from that specific era, but a child very much can't tell you. What was also very popular in my class/school at that age was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Investigators#German..., of which the German version is from 1968 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Famous_Five, which is from 1942.
> Literally the only source of interesting books are parents.
And the shelf in the class room and the school library and the local library and random book exchanges on the street and books from friends (might count as from parents for you).
> And no, english and math textbook does not count as fun reading.
No, but they count as reading exercise, which is needed before you read fast enough that you enjoy reading yourself over getting read to and to be able to read in secret below the blanket.
> Neither does Shakespeare assigned in school.
In class 1 or 2?? These kinds of things only came maybe in class 9+.
> There is no infinite supply of fun books coming to kids.
Well, when they gain access to a computer (which is not a good idea, but they are children, so they will), they literally have.
> No one reads books on their way to school these days. They just dont.
Well, five years ago when I used the tram to go to school they definitely did. And my younger brother still carries books in his backpack he is not supposed to have.
> Kids dont read after school except for homework.
Common speak for yourself. In the primary school I still see people sitting reading on the floor.
> This is ridiculous.
Ok, how so?
> Because, unless their parents tried again and again and radncomly hit something fun, they dont even know fun books exist.
How would it be possible to keep it secret from them that child books exist? I don't understand your reasoning.
Honestly, I'd gladly pay for and read a version of pride and prejudice rewritten in gen Z slang
It is interesting how everyone parrots that art is important when the vast majority of the population will never actually engage with it.
Opera? Ballet? Literature? Poetry? Classical music? Modern art?
Do the numbers it seems most people can do without them and still be functional.
Fully functional economic units, the true aspiration of all thinking beings.
Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.
> Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.
That's the thing, though - in English literature class, there is nothing stopping the teacher from using popular media to introduce things like tone, ambiance, character motivations, arcs, etc, and then ask for parallels to the set works.
They don't do it though, the system is not set up to produce a bunch of critical thinkers from English Lit.
Yes! Art that's taught in school and that is "required" to know if you want to appear intelligent or fancy is just what GP posted.
But art is also:
* electronic music (if you're not aware, it's not just repetitive dum-dum-dum for 8 minutes, although I enjoy that style, as well);
* rap (it's not just guns, drugs and mysoginy);
* all the other music genres, of course, but I gave electronic music and rap as examples because they're usually treated badly by people who're not familiar with them;
* games (I've been emotionally moved by many flash games, let alone new immersive games);
* movies, series - live action or western animation or anime.
Yet, in school we either learned about classical composers, or about regional composers. Only once, around 10th grade, we had a cool music teacher who played other genres for us - Fat Boy Slim, random metal groups, even a few pretty out-there experimental things. Much better than learning about some composer who lived 50 years ago just because he is from the same country as you.
Same for paintings and similar art. What good does it do a 7th grader to look at Picasso? The context matters, but for people who don't care about such art, it's useless. I won't feel better if I can "intelligently" discuss the art scene in $nation in $year. I have, later in life, read interesting articles that actually mix politics and life in general with the art that was "allowed" to flourish. Like art in Soviet Russia. But that context, if it was given at all, didn't mean anything to a 7th grader, especially if they didn't learn about Soviet Russia in history before the art class. In my experience my education was all over the place.
Agreed. Not to mention the techniques and technical knowhow to create this “lesser” art is far more advanced and requires far more effort then the snobbish art they teach in school.
> Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit.
Yes and no. I used to start reading at 4 years old, but I forcedly used to memorize some rhymes at 3 years old. Most folk don't believe it is possible to read so early (though Eliezer Yudkowsky has reported about similar age). But my point is - how would I learn reading so early without that poetry?
I don't really like poetry exactly as rest of the fiction genre. And I am still sure it is not shit even for those who are struggling of doing that. I consider poetry exercises as sport exercises: today you claim that some specific muscle is not important for you, but tomorrow you get some injury which happened because of some weak muscle.
But you have also said one important word - propaganda. This is what really shitting any education and propaganda seems like the monster from the Nitzsche's quote "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster".
I also learned to read at 3. I actually remember the switch from illiterate to literate, as I remember realizing that just by looking at road signs I would automatically read them. I told my sister, who couldn't read yet, that there was a downside, as you could never look at language without reading it ever again!
I think 4 IS early, but not that uncommon. 5-6 is typically without it being forced.
Nobody believes this, but I have VHS evidence of myself reading at 2
Seems like a skill issue on your end.
I read non-fiction all the time. HN and reddit comments, news articles, Wikipedia articles, books, research papers. My ADHD doesn't help, but doesn't prevent me from finishing 300-page books that are actually interesting. I have yet to find a fiction book that's not full of fluff.
I've read a couple of scripts for movies and TV, and they're, by far, much better than fiction books for me. Just more condensed, more to-the-point.
That's not to say that I admit I can't finish (or even start) a fiction book now. They're ruined for me. But I don't care.
Is this the right attitude to have to kids who we want to get into reading?
get gud @ reeding
[flagged]
They're axing honors classes in our high schools so they can mix all the kids together for equity. But because some of the students can't read very well (even in 10th grade), they have to read the books aloud during class, since it would be inequitable to require the kids to read on their own at home.
Not surprisingly, when you're rate-limited by read-aloud speed, you can't get through that many books and excerpts are a natural response.
Probably has to do with the method for teaching reading being terrible for several years, depending on if the school dropped phonics.
I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules. This did not have good outcomes, and last I checked, there was a movement of schools going back to phonics.
> I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules.
I've read a lot on this; it's "phonetics" vs "look-see".
For a really depressing read, read "Why Johnny can't read", then the sequel "Why Johnny still can't read", and then look at the dates of those two essays.
We already knew decades ago that some methods never worked in the past, and don't work now, but we still hope that they will work in the future, so we keep them around because there are powerful and mostly invisible (to the parents) interests in keeping these discredited methods around.
Who is "they"?
The first two are HS staff. The third is the students.
Can't parents have their child read to themselves at home?
Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
I graduated high school less than a decade ago and I had to read about 90% of those books. And those are just the German ones, there were at least half as many English and French ones too. I have younger cousins who are in the school system now and I am fairly certain that it is still the same. Actually I think it is probably mandated by the curriculum.
There's still plenty of mandatory reading. It's not unusual for high schoolers to have to read at least two books per semester. Here's the problem though: It's just too easy to... you know... not do it. Teachers have no way of reliably telling the difference between those students who complete their reading assignments honestly and those who make due with summaries and AI assistance. Don't ask me how I know ;-)
Interesting. Would you share with us their English names and what they're about?
I will only do things from memory, you can use Google yourself.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
"The suburb crocodiles", which is also how the youth gang in the book is called. Boy wants to be part of the gang, which has idiotic tests of courage. Plot twist is that the guy who refused to do this idiotic tests ends up being the tough guy. I don't remember if this was the main character or not. Ends up saving some other boy in a wheelchair, I think while they play in a collapsing old industrial building.
* Faust I
Maybe the most famous German book from v.Goethe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust,_Part_One Old professor Faust makes a deal with the devil that he can take his soul, if he is able to provide him with true joy. Professor gets young again, parties, seduces a flawless faithful girl, makes her kill her mother, she ends up in prison being pregnant, devil proposes to save here if she ditches god, she refuses. Faust flees, huge cliff hanger until v.Goethe gets to write Faust II at the end of his live.
* Antigone
Famous greek drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone
* Die Räuber
Famous play from the other famous German poet Schiller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robbers
* Hamlet
Shakespeare, original available in English
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
"The visit of the old Lady" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit_(play) The old (now rich) lady visits her home town, which has seen better times and demands the death of her youth lover for a huge amount of money for the town. In the beginning all swear loyalty to the guy, in the end all demand his death, inviting the international press. In between the slow transition is described being framed by the protagonists as the most ethical thing ever.
* Im Westen nichts Neues
"No news from the West (front)" describes the trauma of soldiers in the first world war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front
* Woyzeck
Soldier Woyzeck gets exploited by both his superior and his doctor. The doctor puts him on a only beans diet, he becomes crazy. The doctor comments his mental struggles with "Very interesting, very good, should also try this ..." Ends up killing his spouse due to jealousy and later maybe himself. Never got completed by the original author, and the order of the acts is disputed, which makes for a quite different ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck
I lost the post I meant to reply to, but here is the reply:
I tend to see literature, especially fiction, as a way to practice empathy. A lot of people mentally stagnate later in life, and books help break that. Empathy isn't some magical trait, it's something you can actually train. Think Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep even if the animal is fake, the act of caring still has meaning. Practicing empathy like that helps you understand other people's worldviews. You don't have to agree with them, but if you want to function in life, you at least need to understand why people think the way they do. You can also take Paul Schrader's view that art is a vessel for emotion. It's a place to purge or process uncomfortable feelings. Watching Taxi Driver, for example, gives you a space to confront isolation, violence, and male nihilism. Instead of becoming Travis Bickle, the film lets you observe him and put those thoughts into words. That's Schrader's defense when people say the movie glorifies Bickle; the art itself is the safe space, not the man.
I’ve noticed some of these kids can’t tell time on analog clocks nor read cursive handwriting.
Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation (what is the number system for each hand), spatial reasoning (where is each hand) and categorization (what is each hand).
There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.
Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.
This one? https://www.arrowsmith.ca/cip-arrowsmith-school
I kinda rabbit holed on this and it seems to be a very lucrative scam
https://medium.com/myndplan/myndplan-9961a084f750
All good points, particularly the control group piece. Scrutinizing control groups makes it easy to invalidate most studies about treatments in this space because control groups are so difficult to assemble. You should see the variance in autism spectrum.
It still worked for my son and my friend’s two children.
I have no affiliation with the program at all. I talk about it because it worked for us.
I latched onto it because I know the type of things that I have struggled with my entire life, but just learned a lot of coping mechanisms. I’m also very self aware. I pay a lot of attention to how my own brain works because of the need to develop those coping mechanisms. When I saw the full program, everything made perfect sense to me and I absolutely believe that it would have helped me when I was younger.
Had I been able to tolerate working half days for 7 weeks, I would have participated in the program myself.
Just $6k to change your life by speed reading clocks for 3 hours a day for two months...
Needless to say this trips my crank/cult smell meter.
That is the program, yes. I’m not trying to sell you on it, just sharing our experience.
I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.
I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
If you threatened me with 3+ hours a day of speed reading clocks instead of a normal summer I'd probably double down on effort too. And probably not in a way that's healthy long term.
Well, it wasn't a threat. He knew exactly what he'd been struggling with from 1st grade on (officially minor ADHD) and we were trying really hard to keep him off of medication. Since the program has finished he's asked to do it again several times (but we haven't because it's expensive). I've thought about teaching him programming by having him build his own clock trainer.
It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.
- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.
- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.
- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.
- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.
It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.
He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.
Well that is interesting and if you had results then that's all that matters for your family of course.
But sorry to clarify I'm still hung up on the "8 handed clock" thing - what does that mean? What information is displayed on the clocks other than hours, minutes, and seconds?
I didn’t sit in on it so I can’t say for sure. My son got up to the 2nd version of the 6 handed clock. You have to have perfect accuracy within a certain amount of time to advance to the next tier.
Even with the 6 handed I don’t remember exactly what each was though. I asked Grok and this is what it said.
> In the Arrowsmith Program’s Cognitive Intensive Program (CIP), the primary exercise is the Symbol Relations exercise, commonly known as “Clocks.” This involves reading analog clock faces that progress from 2 hands to up to 8 (or sometimes more) hands. Each hand on the clock represents a separate time (an independent position pointing to a specific hour/minute on the clock face). Participants must interpret the positions of all hands simultaneously, understand the relationships between them (e.g., angles, relative positions, and sequences), and record the times accurately under time pressure. The multiple hands do not represent different concepts symbolically (like hours, minutes, seconds); instead, they increase cognitive load to train the brain’s ability to process and relate multiple pieces of information at once. This strengthens the Symbol Relations cognitive function, which supports logical reasoning, comprehension, seeing connections between ideas, cause-and-effect understanding, and abstract thinking. Progression adds more hands as mastery is achieved, making the task more complex to build capacity in handling interrelated symbols and concepts. The CIP focuses intensively on this exercise to accelerate improvements in reasoning, processing speed, and related skills.
What information does an 8 handed clock convey?
Time?
To the hundred millisecond?
You could also include day, month, year, and how close we are to destroying the world [1].
[1] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/
> Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation
Interesting, for me it is the opposite. With a digital clock I need to do a division/comparison to know how much part of the day/hour has already passed. With an analog clock I can read a proportion directly.
Hours, minutes, seconds, degrees, arcminutes, arcseconds... I could try to read 6, but honestly I doubt I'd even be able to see the arcseconds hand, it would be moving so quickly.
This is hilarious, I don’t even want to know if it’s legit.
I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.
> I convert that to digital time in my head
What? They are the same thing.
Not to other people I've talked to.
I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.
[1] https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag
To me time is somehow both, but more so an analog thing. It is a multimodular linear scale, that turns logarithmic, the moment I focus on any specific point.
Totally agree. I do the same.
The only reason we have analog clocks is because digital ones were much harder to build. That time is of course over for good. It was a compromise imposed by limited technology.
Not really, analog clocks are readable over a much longer distance, because seeing an angle needs much less information, than parsing glyphs.
Tell that to my glasses. At any sort of distance where this could be an advantage, the clock is just going to be a blur anyway.
Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?
Interesting, I also have glasses and am short-sighted, but for me light-emitting objects blur much faster than solid objects. It depends very much on the light type, frequency and brightness, but most LEDs, which most digital clocks use, tend to have an overgleaming effect, which makes them unreadable due to being a block of light.
> Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?
All the time? Being in a train station, sitting in a (class)room (during exam), in the kitchen, walking on the street, etc.
> All the time? Being in a train station,
Phone. Or a wristwatch if you're that type.
> a (class)room (during exam),
My last 7+ exams were all done on a computer. That clock was a lot closer than any that happen to be on a wall.
> in the kitchen, walking on the street, etc.
Phone. Or wristwatch again.
> Phone. Or a wristwatch if you're that type.
Sure, but why would I look down, when there is a clock in every direction I look at. I wristwatch would also be analog again.
> My last 7+ exams were all done on a computer. That clock was a lot closer than any that happen to be on a wall.
I have no clue how your university does prevent cheating, but ok. Here any kind of network-connected(/connectable) device is forbidden. And then there is math, where the only thing you are allowed to have is a pen and the formulary (and maybe a ruler).
> when there is a clock in every direction I look at.
This does not reflect my life. Clocks are out there, but not to the point of there being one a just turn of the head away no matter where I am. My phone is the closest device with an accurate sense of time the vast majority of the time.
> wristwatch would also be analog again.
Smart watches exist. Digital wrist watches also exist, but seem to have gone out of fashion.
> I have no clue how your university does prevent cheating,
By not having shit exams. Most (all?) of mine were open-book. I didn't take maths in uni, but they're also done digitally, although I don't think they're open-book. There you probably only get the formulary.
> This does not reflect my life. Clocks are out there, but not to the point of there being one a just turn of the head away no matter where I am.
That part was specifically about train stations and classrooms.
> By not having shit exams. Most (all?) of mine were open-book.
We also now have mostly open-book exams, the rule to be allowed to use everything, that does not do network calls is the rule for open-book exams. Personally I don't like when exams need to be done on a computer, there is always something that breaks and now you are personally responsible for it. With pen and paper you have peace of mind, the only thing is that you need to have a working pen and even that can be borrowed in an emergency.
> That part was specifically about train stations and classrooms.
Depending on where I'm standing inside a train station, I'll be much more likely to see a digital sign saying when the next one arrived in minutes rather than a clock (a fair amount do have clocks, but they all have digital signs that give you what you actually want more quickly anyway, while being a whole lot more visible). If I'm at a tram or a metro stop, I'll definitely have the sign, but probably no clock.
I've had a computer and thus a digital clock in front of me in class since high school.
Aside from signatures, which don't need to be read, I don't remember the last time I've seen cursive outside of an elementary school.
Something really cool about reading the Declaration of Independence.
you don't write. people don't write in cursive around you?
Why would you write in cursive? If you care about WPM key board toasts it.
If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not.
Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
> Why would you write in cursive?
Anyone using paper + pen? Writing a letter or thank you note?
You know, stuff only people who grew up before the internet was popular still do.
If it's something I want people to read, I'd never dare write it in cursive, because if I did, I wouldn't count on them being able to read it.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
I grew up in a world where everyone knew cursive, and until this sort of discussion became popular in recent years, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me that there were many people who didn't know. But I guess they had to cut some things out of the curriculum and it's not as useful as it used to be.
> Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
>>Why would you write in cursive?
I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
> Do you just write in block capitals?
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
>>It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.
For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.
> not linking the letters together then?
Correct.
> Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
Probably yes to both counts.
However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.
Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.
I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.
I don't get your point of not writing cursive. It is literally the same as what you are already doing, but just stopping raising the hand between letters. It is also not like you have that specific cursive, and then it is unreadable. It is a continuous tradeoff of faster vs. readable, so you can just slow down for some letters and not for others.
The thing that needs effort is learning to write, why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
> why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
As someone who learned cursive by learning a new script first, you're making a big assumption here. Nobody learns to not connect their letters.
I didn't learn to not connect my letters. I learned to write without connecting letters, and never properly learned to connect them (until much later in life), because that was never required (and never emphasised while I was in school anyway). If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess. So I didn't. Not until I learned to write in a new script and could transfer that back to my original handwriting. I still don't write a cursive lowercase F, because Cyrillic doesn't have that glyph, and the one that I'm supposed to use never looks right. Not that it matters, since I only write in cursive for myself.
> If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess.
Oh, okay. They did not tell you in which order and direction you should write letters in print? They focused on that here, but maybe that was actually part for the preparation of learning cursive.
> They did not tell you in which order and direction you should write letters in print?
Not that I can remember, although I can't really anwser that with confidence.
>>Consider this, do you use shorthand?
I have no idea how to write shorthand. I assume you know how to write cursive, so no I don't think the reasons are the same.
You could learn it. It would take some effort but it's not insurmountable and it's inarguably superior to cursive in terms of effort to write.
I can't write legible cursive. To do that would take time, effort, and practice. Much like it'd take that to learn shorthand.
That's my point. You and I write the way we do because writing in other ways would take more effort than we want to spend.
Well, fair. Maybe I should learn shorthand.
A part of me wants to learn it as well. It looks so alien that it seems interesting to learn.
Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.
Speed and effort arguments are negated for southpaws.
I'm a person who mostly types, writes tons of code, but also is a graphic designer, and I also have pitiful penmanship. I can write regular sans-serif (all caps or properly capitalized), as well as cursive, but ultimately the concept of fonts make more sense to me than anything else in terms of an expression of letters and typography.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
> How do you write if not in cursive?
I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.
Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.
Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025, and paper is not usually the target medium for longer texts. A desire to write without access to some sort of machine is a bit quaint.
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
>>Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025
Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?
>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
It's an impression from my own social circle. I looked for data briefly because of this comment, but didn't find anything conclusive.
It does make sense to hand write short notes in cursive if you're hand writing short notes at all, but many people never learned it, or are so rusty it would take deliberate practice to restore proficiency.
People write in cursive the same way a doctor writes a prescription.
Not sure what that means. As in, badly? Dozens of times a day? The same things over and over again? And who are the "people"?
And again, that doesn't really answer my question - if you don't write in cursive, how do you write?
I mean it is illegible and ugly, so why bother?
I’m not sure the last time I’ve handwritten anything longer than a signature and my cursive skills show it.
On a white board or diagram, block letters seem like the most legible choice.
Everything else is typed.
I'll be honest I actually prefer my words to be lasting and have weight so I prefer block letters carved into lead which doesn't benefit much from cursive
okay, but if you care about recall and activating regions of the brain that create a better understanding of what you're learning, handwriting wins according to research.
Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd.
More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting
Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) – available via Psychological Science / SAGE (DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581)
Longcamp et al. (2005) – PubMed or Elsevier (Acta Psychologica)
Smoker et al. (2009) – Human Factors and Ergonomics Society proceedings
Umejima et al. (2021) – Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (open access)
Ito et al. (2020) – HCII conference proceedings (Springer CCIS)
But is there a difference between cursive and block lettering? I fully agree with your overall point about handwritten notes being far superior to typed notes. It forces you to filter out extraneous information instead of being a live transcriptionist of your professor.
I've found drilling notes via method of loci of visualized flashcards/facts for this to be superior for myself which I always sourced from typed notes. Not really familiar with the research that cursive would improve over it.
I don't comprehend your stance at all. Where I am from, handwriting IS cursive and the other thing is called print for a reason.
This is not the case in the US (anymore) and atleast some places in Europe. Print gets taught first and you learn to write with that, then cursive comes later, by this point usually as an afterthought.
> Print gets taught first and you learn to write with that, then cursive comes later
That was also the case for me, but the time between that is some weeks to a few months, and you train writing (perfect) spirals in that time.
I didn't start to learn cursive until fourth grade, and then we did that only for a few weeks or months, and then it never showed up again.
I've been journaling and taking handwritten notes in cursive since 1998. You'd think I'd have developed beautiful handwriting - nope, illegible.
~25 years ago I decided to take the LSAT. At the time, there was an essay component that was required to be conducted in cursive.
I basically had to teach myself all over again. Not much fun.
I never stopped writing in cursive but then again I don’t write much by hand anymore.
These aren't really comparable. Cursive handwriting varies considerably between people. One person's might be very clear, another might be impossible to discern.
The way things are headed, you'll just point your phone at it and have it translated to plaintext in 3-5 years anyhow.
This sort of thing is some of the weirdest pseudointellectualism I've seen. Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial. Because now we have Google Maps, ballpoint pens, calculators, and analog clocks.
> Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial.
I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".
What? Next you are going to tell me they can’t use an abacus or properly impress cuneiform into clay tablets.
You should talk to teachers, lot of kids can't answer test questions because they don't even understand the words in the question... A growing proportion of kids are close to non functional, with multiple years of delay compared to previous generations.
Are they writing the test questions in cursive? If not I’m not sure what this has to do with my comment.
Plausibly some kids might still be reading entire novels worth of text online on the regular. Think of all the massive fanfic archives (Including original fics) Lots of fanfic authors have fans of their own, and those have got to be coming from somewhere.
It doesn't need to be in dead tree format. It doesn't need to be famous authors. Just so long as they read!
For long form original see eg:
* The last angel https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.24420...
* The wandering inn https://wanderinginn.com/2017/03/03/rw1-00/
* Or eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel) which made its way off the net and into print, possibly to the detriment of both. :-P Original location (afaict) (no longer available there) : https://www.galactanet.com/writing.html
> "massive fanfic archives"
Ye gods, that's like saying that youth may not be willing to consume a nutritious, balanced diet but we should rejoice that they are at least consuming vast quantities of sugar and fat. With vanishingly rare exceptions, fanfic is crap in textual form, laden to bursting with literary sins both venal and mortal.
People said all kinds of nonsense about comic books and cheap novels leading kids astray in the past. What actually happened is those kids ended up being slightly better readers.
That you don't like something doesn't mean it's actually harmful.
People said that comic books and pulp novels were morally harmful and caused juvenile delinquency, which is indeed nonsense. However that has nothing to do with the quality and depth of the writing so your post is irrelevant.
People also said the pulp novels and comic books had no literary value. But, if the kids end up better readers, who cares?
Since then, people have suggested such things are a useful way to get kids interested in reading, because they've seen results.
The usefulness of reading books is not about what factual information you can glean from them. They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously. In that sense traditionally published works aren't going to offer all that much more than fanfiction.
> They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously.
- that nudges readers in interesting (to society) or new (to the reader) directions. Or at least in not in actively harmful ways. Otherwise, OF, livestreaming, or whatever latest social media BS, etc. are king: purposefully designed to create parasocial relationships that trick you thinking you have chance to be noticed.
My main beef with most fan fiction is that in my experience, it unconsciously locks readers into an extremely rigid way of thinking. Of course, this varies from fandom to fandom but woe upon the budding writer who ships the wrong pair or violates the canon.
It mirrors religious dogma, but somehow even worse when compared to all the disputes in Christianity throughout the centuries. (Plus, there's at least a connection between Christianity to modern democracy.)
The writing quality and complexity of amateur content, even long-form is only around the level of a YA novel, truth be told alot of the stuff I was reading back in junior high in my school library had more depth than this.
It's good that you can get people reading, but reading the equivalent of pulp is very different from real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
90% of everything is crap.
Maybe even 99+% these days, seeing how easy it is to publish your first finger-painting online. Doesn't mean there isn't any good stuff, or even a lot of good stuff. 1% of a lot is still a lot.(ps. and once you get people reading, they tend to keep doing it and develop taste over time. if it's even just a few who wouldn't have done it before. That's good, right?)
(pps. For example: at 2M words, I think pirateaba might exceed the "first 1M words are practice" threshold)
How can I forget Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality [1].
HPMOR is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky to promote rationalist concepts, and is somewhat influential in startup and AI circles.
Directly: Emmet Shear {co-founder of Twitch (YC S07)} is apparently superfan and gets a cameo.
So for once I get to post something that's almost on-topic for yc. :-P
[1] https://hpmor.com/
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/what-does-a-harry-potter-f...
Maybe not the best thing for kids to be reading!
https://www.thecut.com/article/milo-youngblut-max-snyder-ziv...
Even without the, you know, murder stuff, I think we can do better for kids than another generation of "rationalists", considering the track record here.
> How can I forget Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality
If you find out, let me know. I wish I could.
I've never read such self absorbed drivel in my life. To be fair, I've not read any Ayn Rand, so I might be judging harshly.
Who cares? If people enjoy it, let them enjoy it. I've read a few YA novels as an adult that I enjoyed, even though I regularly read more complex stuff.
Most people, for most of history, have only ever enjoyed what might be considered "low quality" entertainment - pulp fiction, shitty plays, etc.
> real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
Interestingly, even discounting YA and other stuff like that, you are only describing a very small subset of novels.
Jane Austen was considered pulp. So was Charles Dickens. And Conan Doyle.
Nobody considered those high literature back in the day!
That cherry picks the best of the best without comparing them with the other 99.9% of their contemporaries who were pulp authors. They and their literary output are forgotten for good reasons.
I don't think GP is cherrypicking anything; rather, illustrating how what is seen as slop one day may be seen as "great works" down the road.
Are you suggesting Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, or Conan Doyle were considered slop during their own lifetimes? If not, my point stands.
>Who cares?
I do? Why would I want my kids to be consuming crap when they could be engaging with great works and high art?
What if that's not the choice? What if the choice is "engage with art they enjoy and appreciate, or not at all"?
If the works are so great then you've got nothing to worry about. Kids will read them on their own. Of course we both know that's not true, because the works are not that great.
Because what constitutes "crap" and "great works and high art" is highly subjective both to personal tastes and the culture of the time.
They're great works to you, and a slog to them.
They can read Minecraft strategy guides and Yahoo auction fan fics for all I care, since that's a lot better than nothing. I remember not wanting to read what school assigned me and how that killed my desire to read most fiction writing, and would prefer that not happen to more kids.
Art is a matter of taste, and if you go counter to your audience's taste, don't be surprised if they disengage.
Beyond a basic level of literacy, I'm not sure it's clear that reading pulp is better for any defined outcome than reading nothing. And I'm not sure why it would be. Once you are able to fully grasp a level of literacy, reading more of that level or below probably isn't really doing anything for you.
The question is whether reading:
- an entire novel worth of short texts, beginning to end
- an entire novel worth of short excerpts from longer texts
- an entire novel, beginning to end
are the same things.
Oh, are you responding to my examples?
* Last angel: A web serial, sure it's chunked into chapters/updates, but paper novels have chapters too.
* The Wandering inn, same as above, it's at 2 million+ words and counting. People read it.
* The Martian: Actually the shortest text of the bunch. Now available as a traditional paper novel.
I am not responding to the examples, and I am not challenging the claim that famous vs not famous author does not matter, or that dead tree vs screen does not matter; I am raising the question whether it's just a quantity issue ("Just so long as they read", "entire novels worth of text").
Is it? I am not sure either way. Do you lose something by only reading chapters of a novel but never the whole story from the beginning to the end, even if you're still reading the same amount?
Fanfic reading is not like novel reading in that you don't need to really understand new, unfamiliar characters though.
Thus it can tend to become limiting; and I say this as someone who actually does enjoy fanfiction.
> Fanfic reading is not like novel reading in that you don't need to really understand new, unfamiliar characters though.
So the Lord of the Rings series counts as one book? I'd believe diminishing returns, but not one and done.
Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
>Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
Then you do not understand writing. If Yudkowski really had more interesting ideas, then he would have been able to do HPMOR as original fiction.
Rowling is actually really good, inventing very charming things, very fun sentences, and there's nothing even close in HPMOR (I have read it myself, and enjoyed it to some degree), but you really underestimate how good Rowling is.
Yes, pedantically, and as mentioned in the Notes in the Text in most editions, the Lord of the Rings is a single book sometimes published in three volumes.
Yeah I thought it was such a funny example yo pick out bc, yes it is!
I believe the publisher of LOTR broke it up into multiple books.
Most online text is shit and doesn't count IMO. Why would you want to waste your time reading the thoughts of average people (including this one)?
To me the ability to read a whole book is a competitive advantage in the job market.
For what industries?
Any job position requiring intelligence and nuance which unavoidably stems from informing yourself.
But the same will inevitably make you hating the capitalism which eventually makes you not better candidate on the market but worse.
>But the same will inevitably make you hating the capitalism
If anything, reading has made me recognize the cultural and historic universality of the problems folks attribute to capitalism.
Sorry, I meant reading books.
I hate capitalism but I don't make the rules so play the game anyway.
Saying everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, that just hasn't found enlightenment is not a good argument. A sizable portion of people will have the opposite revelation.
I for one think people still thinking socialism is a good thing, haven't read enough history books about the 20th century.
Any. Even if you're doing a blue collar job, understanding the fundamentals (or at least the specifics about a particular subfield) makes you "the guy" and adds some job security. As a programmer I often got ahead just because I'd read all of the C standard library, the Windows API docs, etc.
How about us, the adults?
In the latest "War on the rocks" podcast [1], Ryan Evans asked his guest, Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, what books he has read lately (he often, maybe always, asks that question). The guest answered basically that, as a politician, he does not have time to read books anymore, because he is very busy with other things.
I think most listeners of the podcast are absolutely ok with this. Pål Jonson is an important guy, who has a job to do. That job is to keep Sweden safe, and, as Sweden is now part of NATO, by extension to keep NATO safe as well. If he does his job well, then Sweden and NATO together might be able to deter aggression by Russia. If taking time to read books means he has less time to do his job well, then he should not read books.
But if you replace Pål Jonson with somebody else, who are we to say that their job is less important? And if we take a kid, the way the kid understands their jobs is that they need to get ready for life,for their actual, paid, job when the time will come. And if in doing that, they are more efficient by using ChatGPT, then why should they read entire books?
[1] https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/getting-faster-stronger-re...
Modern society has gotten so “efficient” and expectations so insane that yeah, anyone at that level of a professional career - especially with a family - I would in no way expect to have time to read anything. Every last inch of their life is going to be hyperscheduled to oblivion.
We have systematically removed any chance for “unproductive” downtime for any high performers if they want to continue to be seen as a high performer.
Not surprising in the least to me, and society as a whole is worse off because of it. Good luck when this person needs to make a hugely impactful and thoughtful decision for society while in their position of power.
Literature is like classical music. One can argue Beethovens 9th symphony is one of the greatest pieces of music of all time, but that doesn’t mean we all have time to sit through 70 minutes a day listening to it.
I bet important people don’t even have time to sit and watch a full movie.
You can learn far more from art than from anything else, if you try. Should important people go to religious services? Without that at arts, where do they get deep, full thoughtful perspectives on the world?
Literature, music, art; they are all intertwined aren’t they? I find at their purest form they are striving for similar goals: pulling out from our collective unconscious a life affirming theme that can be viewed in a new perspective.
To me, art in different forms; but usually they are separated into those categories.
> life affirming
I wouldn't always say 'affirming'; maybe they engage with life and usually empathize with the characters and the audience.
When I started high school in the early '90s, there was a compulsory summer reading list of 10–12 books, each ranging from 300–800 pages. Then we had to write essays about them. This was just our summer homework before the new school year started. I didn't enjoy it at all; at the same time, I read lots of easy fiction, sometimes several hundred pages a day.
My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.
What i found is that there is an aversion to knowledge, there is a ever increasing group of people (not only kids) that refuses everything that involves reading, learning or reasoning.
You present them a game that involves a bit of investigation and they just don't try, you think well they want to shutdown their brains at the moment of relax, but no they just never use their brains. They can't follow a manual to assemble anything no matter if they only have to connect two pieces clearly marked as put them together.
And they reach adult stage in this condition, they can't do anything else that following verbal very precise instructions, and some of them are not stupid, i found very capable people that just reject trying to read anything but have incredible reasoning skills, they just never notice because they never exercised.
Maybe I would've had something intelligent to say about this article, had I been allowed to read it.
You have to have money to read it but first you need to be able to read to earn money. It is a crazy circular problem.
My kids read tons of books. But we homeschool and actual books are the main course of our education.
My main concern here is attention span. I think books are good for improving the muscle of attention span. There are other places that you can improve your attention span but I fear they are not being taught in school either.
People rarely read whole books anymore. I know very few adults in my life who read books, lots of people are put off by reading in school and never give it a try in their adult life.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
The same thing happened to me.
Required reading in school killed my interest in reading. When I graduated I was very happy that I wouldn't have to read books ever again.
It took me about 5 years or so until anime and manga got me to try another fiction book. That eventually led to reading more books. But when school was done I really did think that I wasn't going to touch a (fiction) book again.
---
It makes me wonder if kids in the future will have "required reading" where they have to play certain old video games. Will that make them hate video games?
In our local highschool (near Copenhagen, Denmark) they have scheduled reading time for all pupils while in school - weekly as part of their normal schoolday. That is, instead of normal class everyone needs to bring a book of their own choosing and read in it. No phones allowed during this time, so they can either read or stare out the window. The local library helps them find books of their own interest.
The idea is to get them find genres and books they like and find joy reading it, while not taking time out of their free time.
Ironically this wouldn't work for me because I do almost all of my reading on my phone these days. It has become the main use of my phone at this point.
It is a good idea though, as long as they can find things they want to read. I've been sucked into the "bleeding edge" of reading (web novels), so it can be a bit more challenging to find things I really want to read. They are still out there though. Eg The Martian and Project Hail Mary (the former actually started as a web novel) .
If by summer reading assignments, are you referring to Scholastic summer reading programs? I quite enjoyed those as the available options for reading were very wide and I could always get some new Goosebumps books from the book fairs. But those are parent initiated, not something the school assigns. They can't really assign anything over the summer as they have no authority to do so outside of some IEP designed to get a particular student back on track.
I did my PhD, and so I am not averse to reading. But its nowadays rare to find books that have value in being read completely. Most of the time, I would rather read a blog post or a paper, books are often outdated by the time they are published. Books are limited to scenarios where looking at a complete scene of something frozen in time is still instructive.
I’m in my 30s but the UK English reading choices weren’t very inspiring when I studied and you could pass the exams without ever reading full texts so of course that’s what schools encouraged.
I remember doing sections of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth but we never did the whole thing. We did read Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls but that was it for books/plays. Poetry we had a book called Anthology where we had to read and re-read many poems for analysis.
You should be thankful. I had to read the whole canon of Shakespeare and hated it. I learned about the great vowel shift and more about English trivia than I cared to know.
https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/l...
The headline should have been ...especially in English Class.
Even in the 90s most people got book summaries to get through the curriculums. I would say, the highest performing language students and teachers pets at school did exactly that.
School unfortunately is largely about reciting of the teachers knowledge, so there is no need to read the source and think for yourself.
Un-paywall'd: https://archive.ph/lcAZ3
We have at least a whole generation of kids that were taught to read using "whole language" methods instead of phonetically. None of this really surprises me.
The article seems to be centered around reading assignments. I was reading entire books often when I was in school, yet did my best to avoid reading assignments because they were so dull.
I don't know how they sourced respondents, anecdotally all my kids a reading books as I type that. They read much more than I did at their age; and their friends read as well. They'd probably spend all their time on snapshat or brawlstars, were they to have a say.
Isn't that the characteristic of each generation to feel like education of the next generation is decadent?
Kids are either into reading or not. There's a critical mass when kids read because they like it, to the point where I need to remind them to read less.
Pretty much every one in the selective school I went to read for fun.
Even the "troublesome" ones.
Most books could and should be condensed by about 100x. Poor communication skills and zero respect for people's time.
Lord of the rings: A human-like individual leaves his house to drop a ring in some lava.
When I was in high-school 20 plus years ago excerpt based reading assignments were fairly common in non-honors/advanced placement classes. Except there were whole textbooks full of excerpt based assignments instead of computer software for this purpose. Anecdotally I took honors and AP English and those classes destroyed my desire to read for years. I only read a few of the assigned books cover to cover because they were either dreadfully boring or the expectations for how quickly we should read them were more than I, a very average student, could manage. Usually some combination of both. Rather than relying on cliffnotes and sparknotes alone I would typically read the first chapter, the last chapter, and then some chapter in the middle so I was prepared for tests and discussions.
At the end of the day the AP exams didn't test you on your knowledge of The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. The exam tested you on your ability to read an excerpt and answer questions about it as well as your ability to write a multi-paragraph essay from a prompt while a proctor wearing the most hideous smelling blackberry perfume bathed you in an olfactory assault every time they walked by. In-classroom writing assignments were the most effective way to prepare and we did them frequently. As a reward for doing well you got to skip a couple of 100 level English credits in college.
Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today, but it feels like the education system never takes a moment to look inward and acknowledge that The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia are dreadfully boring reads. It took me three tries to finish 1984 because the beginning is such a slog. It is strange to say kids aren't interested in reading (from the article) when a lot of the subject matter is objectively dull. Four of the six books in the article header are books I don't even want to think about let alone read.
> Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today
Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Reading thick books requires having some device with no distructions. In my young ages all computers and all smartphones used to have no distructions, but now all computers (except some Linux distros) used to be bombarded with distructions in such a way that I can not read a book on any proprietary OS without getting some notification about anti-virus software or some updates or a need to restart, or just some events happening on the Internets.
My point is not just that distractions distract people, but distructions have become inevitable on almost any modern device able to render PDF with formulas.
> Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all?
Literally buy books? What about ereaders? Install adblockers and de-shittify your OS? I don't have the problems you seem to have, and I'm on Windows.
Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.
Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
> Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.
Still accomplishes the goal of allowing kids to read a book.
> Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Kids don't usually have these sort of requirements with their reading lists. Also have you looked into KOReader[1], which has support for djvu it looks like?
> Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
Firstly, I wasn't suggesting installing more proprietary code. Not sure where you got that from. Most scripts/guides I've seen that help disable the more intrusive/annoying parts of Windows are FOSS.
Secondly, then install Linux and only use FOSS, for which there are many options to read books with?
[1] https://koreader.rocks/
I don't know about other areas, but the school to which I go in Southwestern Ontario still has a library, as does every other school to which I have been.
If you have a library anywhere nearby, you don't need to worry about purchasing and selling individual books. Over they years they have gotten even more lenient with long loan periods, online renewals, mostly eliminated late fees, and (depending on where you live) returns at any library location within a regional system.
My Ukrainian town used to have 3 libraries. Now the only library here is a school one. The reason so much libraries have got destroyed is the censourship. Now Ukrainian govt makes some active progress into censourship of anything printed by Russian language. Since most of the books accumulated for dozens of years were not yet prohibited but definitely unwanted - now I have no libraries at all.
I am very happy to hear that old and cool libraries are still a thing somewhere.
I use to teach local kids how to get pirated books with no DRM but I have a feeling that they will never use my recommendation. They just open their first page with no animated pictures and get lost immediately, their eyes are not even moving through the text in a proper way. They look to me like when I see some new musical instrument which I can not play because I have not observed it earlier.
> Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device.
Install Windows Enterprise IoT LTSC then, problem solved.
Seattle public schools does not read full books in elementary. Just short form publisher slop. Can’t do reading as a group and discussion because not all kids understand and that wouldn’t be inclusive.
All of the literature we recommend in school is outdated, so it makes sense to me that kids would not want to read them.
More school districts should experiment with contemporary novels that make sense in a modern context.
I agree wholeheartedly with this.
While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.
There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.
I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."
Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.
I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.
> it makes sense to me that kids would not want to read them
That's why the 2026 remake of Animal Farm in animated form includes a twerking pig[1]. Education with brainrot is the future!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtjPGXZLW6g
It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear. What precisely is the purpose of "English" class? What? To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare. So who cares what they do with their time.
> Why can't people test against that?
Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.
Another user deleted their comment:
> The purpose of English class was to provide a field for interdisciplinary subjects. We learned how to write the standard five paragraph essay. We learned how to detect dishonest and manipulative messaging in advertising. We learned to relate themes in literature to contemporary society.
This is how I remember my English classes. We did not spend much time at all on grammar after the 9th grade. We didn’t study any classic literature besides reading a Shakespeare play every year; you had to take a separate course for that. This is also how the classes are treated in most colleges these days; you’ll get English majors who spent 4 years reading critical theory and bad contemporary novels written by friends of the department head, rather than anything with serious cultural cachet.
This is the only serious criticism of the subject, in my opinion; the applications that grammar has in logical reasoning, composition, interpretation, and foreign language acquisition are too significant to shrug off, but it isn’t being taught particularly rigorously anymore.
> To read and speak English?
And how are you, right now, communicating? You're writing in English. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, all written down, is its own subject that people aren't born knowing or can acquire like they can speak.
In addition, it's English Literature and Language in the same, so yes, about knowing partly a canon, but how how to interpret texts, both nonfictional and fictional and poetic.
> It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear.
I don't know how to explain to you why it's important to educate humanity.
It's about practicing how to read and write. Skills that you'll benefit from in every form of knowledge work that you'll ever do.
I would cut almost every other class from the curriculum before cutting English.
It's also about how to reason about and understand what you're consuming, how to analyze sources, how media affects you; my wife is an English teacher and the comments here are often completely missing what's truly going on in a school.
Explains a lot, actually.
> Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time
Because they can't read or write, and neither can most adults, including developers.
I agree that that's its purpose, but the fact that there are many adults who are as bad at reading and writing as there are just goes to show how bad the classes are at actually teaching what they're trying to teach.
That said, maths aren't much different. Being bad at maths is a cultural marker of sorts, since many maths classes are very bad indeed at teaching much beyond basic addition and subtraction.
School is good for people who care to care. American students do pretty decently on international standard exams. It's that we have a culture of not giving a fuck, and thus we have adults who can't read something that is over a 6th grade level.
See this very website on people who complain that they can't digest a pretty straightforward article
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008788
I'd love to see those exams redone on a selection of adults with nothing to lose if they fail or get a bad score. Maybe the not giving a fuck becomes apparent then.
Out of all of Žižek's writings, that article really isn't that bad. I agree it could do with some headings, but you shouldn't need ChatGPT to summarise it for you, but I'm not surprised some people do.
> To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
Because people VASTLY overestimate their ability with their native language or their command of native language literature.
The SAT English Achievement tests used to absolutely obliterate even students who got good AP English scores. This isn't limited to English--even native Japanese speakers struggle with the advanced JLPT levels, for example. Grammar is hard, yo.
If you don't actively study your native language, your working vocabulary is quite small and your grammatical constructs are excessively simple.
As for shared literature, we were in front of what was claimed to be the house of Jonathan Swift with a bus full of tourists from various English-speaking countries, and the tour guide cracked a joke about "A Modest Proposal". I snickered a bit but didn't think much else. The tour guide pulled me aside later that I was the first person to get the joke and it was almost the end of the year--we're talking hundreds to thousands of people from the US, Australia, India, etc.
I mean, just ask someone to name three main characters and what they did in the last book they read. Most people will struggle. You need to spend some discussion time in order to affix a book into your memory.
The purpose of school is a mix between providing childcare, and making sure most of society have a largely overlapping common upbringing experience. We hear that we encourage diversity - but only of superficial stuff like sexual orientation or skin color. We don't want people that think too differently.
This is why I, despite my deep appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge and having spent a significant chunk of my life in the academia after graduating, want my kids to spend as little time as strictly necessary in primary or secondary schools. And the need comes from the fact that I need some of that childcare, not that I need someone else to teach my children anything.
I’m curious - do you think you’re an independent thinker? Do you think it’s a competitive advantage? What does thinking differently mean? It seems like a thing people say because it sounds good without really interrogating it.
I objectively find myself to be an independent thinker, and I mostly find it distracting. I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships if I spent more time thinking about the kinds of things other people think about, in the way they think about them.
I observe most of the most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns, people look up to them because they understand them, and they develop solutions that are in line with what most people need/want/desire.
I think I'm an independent thinker. One symptom is that I repeatedly find myself observing that other people do things because they're copying other people. This is one symptom, but there's more.
> Do you think it’s a competitive advantage
> I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships
> most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns
Don't care, I'm not optimizing for being competitive, being successful, or any of the other things you mentioned.
See, another symptom of being an independent thinker: I've thought about it on my own and I've concluded I'm not interested in your targets.
So what is your independent thinking doing for you? Are you happier then most?
To me, thinking independently isn't a mean to an end, it's an end in itself.
This sounds like a very common sort of misanthropic attitude I see littered around the web.
You know how they say - like in making music - in order to break the rules you have understand them?
I don’t like the take directly, but as a person who makes music, what I realize, and I think this is what they meant, it if you don’t study music, most people are likely to naturally slide into the most simplistic forms of it, because that’s what naturally sounds good, so you’re like naturally more inclined to recreate a 1 4 5 progression, rather than Mozart.
Do you think that you may have accidentally slid into this position, or sort of thinking exactly like a like blase’ counter cultural sameness, copying all the self-defined independent thinkers?, or do you think you have some insight into what makes your perspective unique and clearly in some way spiritually valuable to you?
I would be concerned that purely “thinking about it on your own” would lead to a really narrow set of beliefs. Like no offense, but your answer is a carbon copy of “disaffected youth” I’ve both exhibited and seen exhibited my whole life, with maybe a little less bite, so I’m guessing your not that young. But I’m often wrong.
But I am genuinely curious, what do you think makes you an independent thinker? And what purpose does that serve you?
> copying all the self-defined independent thinkers
At this point I can no longer put effort into responding to you. You think that my conception of "thinking for myself" is "listening to people who claim they think for themselves, and repeat what they say"? You know the HN principle of "assume the most generous interpretation"? This is the opposite.
Anyway, FYI, you sound like you're trying to deradicalize an andrew tate fanboy. You're A) really bad at feigning your concern, and B) extremely off target.
You didn’t give me a lot to go on. I think it was the most generous interpretation from what was available. Give me more! What drives you? How am I so off base?
This is genuinely a philosophical question I am deeply interested in, what is individual thought?
Why do you care so much about me? Re-reading our conversation, you were the one that asked "do you think you're an independent thinker", as if hoping for a yes so that you can then attack it. All I said is schools are mostly childcare.
If you care, go check my comment history and ask about something specific.
Do you think independent thought and deep thought are correlated or uncorrelated? When you say most people copy their perspectives do you think that’s bad?
A lot of the thinkers I’ve been interested in lately seem to deeply embed their thoughts in a tradition, so I’ve been thinking that in order to have better thinking I should copy more.
> why do you care so much about me?
Sad question, but what is life but a series of attempts to connect to other people. Having a discourse makes it real. Tell me I’m wrong! Maybe having independent thoughts has real value. Usually “think different” is about as deep as an apple ad.
Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
> Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
Yes, I got this sense. I'm not what you're looking for.
> I'm not what you're looking for.
I very much doubt that, alas, good day to you sir.
It is awfully hard to get anyone, children or adults, to think at all
i was literally told this at $JOB once: we dont have time to think; just give us a framework to follow
it seems like thinking is a form of torture for some... but maybe its our work/lifestyle that makes it so.. idk
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Nowadays? Yes. And that’s the problem. It used to not be the case in the past.
In the USA, you can test out of it: the GED.