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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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".
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
Deleted Comment
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).
> 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.
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
Dead Comment
I remember teachers assigning “read chapters 4-6 by Thursday” and then giving a quiz to make sure people read and remembered the details.
That doesn’t mean that kids really need to read any single of those books any time in history.
It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
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"
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
Deleted Comment
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.
Never enjoyed the stuff that got assigned in school though. I’d probably like it now.
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 problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.
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.
Start literacy young and the discovery of reading for fun will be easy and natural.
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.
From what I understand, if parents read to kids when they are little, they become readers who enjoy it.
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.
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.
Yes. (n=1)
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
no cap Mr Darcy ur parties are bussin fr fr
Opera? Ballet? Literature? Poetry? Classical music? Modern art?
Do the numbers it seems most people can do without them and still be functional.
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".
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.
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'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.
* 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.
Deleted Comment
* 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
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.
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.
What? They are the same thing.
I basically had to teach myself all over again. Not much fun.
I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".
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.
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
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.
That you don't like something doesn't mean it's actually harmful.
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.
(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)
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...
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.
- 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.
* 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.
Thus it can tend to become limiting; and I say this as someone who actually does enjoy fanfiction.
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.