I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.

It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.

It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.

And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.

What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.

The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.

Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.

There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.

>I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.

And I wish people wouldn't make assumptions and then respond based on those assumptions.