"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.
Jael Goldfine wrote an excellent piece addressing this topic - 'We are amid a new industrial revolution, she says, which involves a newly cruel form of extractive capitalism carried out in... “the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.”' nyra.nyc/articles/win...
Kids are literally busier than they've ever been. Some HS students I talk to that would be labeled the "highest achieving" have their days scheduled from sunrise to sundown and beyond, and to maximize instructional time, schools have cut books from the curriculum.
One of the only disappointing things about my otherwise perfect daughter, now at an elite university, is that she simply will not read books.
I don't think we should pretend this is a new phenomenon. Boomers and other Gen Xers I work with haven't read anything longer than a tweet in a decade, and it constantly shows up in their inability to exhibit the attention span to read more than 140 characters, & proper reading comprehension.
Six? A year? In 1976??? I read the LoTR trilogy in a week in 1972. (Admittedly, I was extremely hooked and couldn't put it down; a bit rare for me to plow through anything THAT fast.) On average, it was more like 20 books a year in high school. That said, we're not talking War and Peace here.
I'd be curious to see the international numbers because the impression I get from teachers I know is that it isn't really tech but how fucked education in this country is. Then there's the fact Scholastic found half of kids in elementary school read for fun and the number drops into middle school.
looking forward to the @chrislhayes.bsky.social book on attention. there seems to be--I certainly feel it--an all out assault on our ability to pay sustained attention to anything, particularly complex texts
I taught in the South Bronx. A huge problem is we made reading an awful experience. 80% of all texts they engage with is for test-prep, even if we swear that's not the intent. There's no fun in reading. In my wife's int'l school, they are so overworked the concept of fun doesn't exist.
Too bad there isn't more information included about what kids are reading in HS beyond that one anecdote. "No comprehensive data exist on this trend." Books my kids have read in HS: Frankenstein, Scarlet Letter, Gatsby, Parable of the Sower, Between the W & Me, Fahrenheit 451, Macbeth, Educated etc