destroying the attention span of the public has been the core revenue model of the tech industry for about 25 years. The youth reading "crisis" is wholly manufactured in boardrooms for shareholder profit
"In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
I'm a great test case. 47 years old. 4.0 undergrad 90s, Masters (4.0) before smart phones. Went back to school last year and couldn't read 3 pages in a row of academic text. I've had to really work to dismantle the smart phone attention loss. I should prob just get rid of it. 🤷♀️
Went back to school full-time (community college) as an adult after having been a SAHM for many years. Was *astounded* at the near-universal inability of the young'uns in my classes to parse any large amount of text. It was as if their brains just shut down when confronted with the written word.
screens and screentime for children as a default state
Helps if the parents read for pleasure and model that for their kids. So, so many do not. I was in college in the 1970s - at a southern college, to be sure - and my dorm roomie said she never read anything that wasn't assigned. I couldn't believe it.