| ▲ | graemep 3 days ago |
| I think there is a lot going on that contributes to this. 1. Adults read less, so children see their parents reading less often (it at all!) so do not grow up thinking it is a fun thing to do. I love reading because my parents did, and my kids do because I do. 2. Schools do not make reading enjoyable. A teacher I know suggested that their school did somethings to make reading fun, and the management refused because it improve any of their metrics. A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun. There are other things do. There are schools that teach Shakespeare for English literature GCSE without giving them the whole text, and without watching a video of the play, let along going to the theatre. 3. There are fewer and smaller local libraries so kids cannot discover what they like as easily. There are fewer bookshops too, because people read less. |
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| ▲ | Loughla 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| >management refused because it improve any of their metrics This is what everyone in the United States asked for. You wanted data driven decision making. Do not be surprised when the measure becomes the goal. Sorry if this sounds bitter, but I spent all day yesterday arguing with administration at a college that data driven decision making is only as good as the data you feed the system, and that specifically targeting metric improvement for its own sake is step one in the road to mind death. |
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| ▲ | graemep 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The case I was talking about was in the UK. | |
| ▲ | ACCount37 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | We "wanted data driven decision making" because it beats vibe driven decision making. Even if data is meh. | | |
| ▲ | agentcoops 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There are more divisions than just “data” vs “vibes.” After all, even in the natural sciences, the best data is useless without an explanation/hypothesis that can never just be reduced to the data. Precisely what is thrown out in the decline of reading is familiarity with the centuries of hard-won Enlightenment knowledge, especially concerning the stakes of education, which isn’t just vibes and that ought precisely drive our further data-driven insight into these questions. Second best, however, I’d take the “vibes” of a random teacher over the religion-based decision making that seems to be on the rise in the US. “Data-driven” religiously motivated educational policy is the worst of all possible worlds. | | |
| ▲ | lo_zamoyski 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The primary gist of what you wrote is important for people to grasp. Allow me to expand on it a bit, because thoughtless attitudes about "data" are pervasive, perhaps especially among the SV crackpots. "Data" comes from datum [0], that is, what is given. What are the data or givens of measurement? Whenever we measure something, we do so from the standpoint of some prior conceptualization. It makes no sense to speak of measurement apart from some conceptual context, as the measurement is of something as it is understood. It is through this conceptual background that we can situate some thing as a measurement, as data, and understand the meaning of this measurement, infer implications, and so on. Some call this the theory-ladenness of observation. So you cannot say "Data! QED.", first, the meaning of the given is inaccessible without knowledge of its nature and the prior knowledge that allows us to locate the data in the appropriate context, and second, because data are not arguments. Data are used in arguments. So if your conceptual context is flawed, your measurements are vulnerable, both in their motivating rationale and in their interpretation. A little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end. And there's a lot of crap people carry around in their conceptual baggage. So, we have at least three attack surfaces: the conceptual presuppositions of a theory, the theory, and the data sought to corroborate the theory. Of course, theory-ladenness does not necessarily entail relativism [1]. So, the point isn't that we can't know anything, so anything goes, or that we don't know anything, so burn it all down. The argument is that we should be more cognizant of the bases of our justifications. [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/data [1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2025/08/hanson-on-observati... | |
| ▲ | ACCount37 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | We don't use things like SAT because it's an ideal direct metric that captures how educated a student is perfectly, and allows for impeccable measurement of how successful the educational system is. We use it because it beats the alternative - which is either going off vibes or using even more indirect metrics to measure how successful the educational system is. If there's one school that claims it successfully teaches children to love reading, and another school that makes no such claim, but has +50 on SAT over the first school across the board? The second one is probably a better school. | | |
| ▲ | contagiousflow 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > If there's one school that claims it successfully teaches children to love reading, and another school that makes no such claim, but has +50 on SAT over the first school across the board? The second one is probably a better school. Or it's better at SAT prep? That's the entire point of OPs comment. Metrics become targets and then anything (that may still be incredibly important) but doe not contribute to that target gets lost. | | |
| ▲ | ACCount37 3 days ago | parent [-] | | "+50 on SAT across the board" requires at least being fairly good at SAT prep. "Claims it successfully teaches children to love reading" requires nothing but a willingness to make unsubstantiated claims. Both are imperfect performance indicators, but one is considerably less imperfect than the other. | | |
| ▲ | contagiousflow 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Let me make a comparison. If your manager says your performance is based on lines of code, you will be incentivized to write lots and lots of code. Does lots and lots of code mean you are being productive and making good software? Sometimes yes! Sometimes heaps of code means you are being ultraproductive and making amazing software. It could also mean you are writing much more code than you need to, introducing new bugs, not thinking about generalizing patterns, creating technical debt, making a worse UX, all of which I'm guessing you would agree are important to software engineering. But none of those things are going to matter in the lines of code metric. So yes, sometimes having metrics for performance are worse than imperfect. Sometimes they are antithetical to the supposed goals. Student time is a zero sum game, and having a large portion of a crucial time in their development spent cramming for one metric is not going to have good outcomes for a society, only good outcomes for a metric. | | |
| ▲ | ACCount37 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The optimal amount of "teaching the students the actual subjects" you need to do to have them get good SAT scores is significantly higher than zero. Sure, you can cram for SAT, and you can get gains on the metric from that. But you can't just cram all the answers into the students and have them get a perfect score via rote memorization. Students still have to learn things to be able to do well. Which is why SAT beats the "performance is based on lines of code" tier of shitty hilariously gameable metrics. | | |
| ▲ | contagiousflow 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Out of curiosity, when was the last time you were involved in the school system? Things have changed a lot over decades what time previously spent "teaching the students the actual subjects" or time spent with extracurriculars continues to be eaten away by SAT prep. The downside of a bad score is now a disastrous outcome, and other parents have continued to optimize for the best score. | | |
| ▲ | ACCount37 a day ago | parent [-] | | Oh, I don't doubt it that parents and students are optimizing for SAT outcomes themselves. You can't expect them not to. But no amount of SAT prepmaxxing can save you if you just genuinely know nothing - and having SAT is a huge upgrade over not having SAT. For one, it's a huge equalizer. I've seen a few countries that went from "no standardized testing" to "full send standardized testing", and the benefits are too large to ignore. You can improve upon the tests, but removing them is a road to nowhere. | | |
| ▲ | contagiousflow 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm sure the introduction of standardized tests are an improvement upon a current system, but that's not really the point I am making. My point is the ongoing use and optimization of them leads to worse outcomes overall in terms of actual understanding of the material. > For one, it's a huge equalizer Could you explain this for me? It's nice that everyone is taking the same test but every piece of data I've seen points to a clear correlation between household income and SAT score, hardly an equalizer. |
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| ▲ | jacobolus 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | SAT prep per se is an unbelievably shitty thing for people to waste their time on. It's largely mindless and uninteresting, stifles rather than encourages curiosity, emphasizes judging people by substantially arbitrary numerical scores, gives the false impression that some people are inherently better than others, and, in the medium to long term, is a grossly inefficient way to improve performance on the SAT. If you want your own kids to get a high SAT language score when they are high school students, the top things you can do to help them are: (1) read aloud to them when they are very young, as much as you have time for, ideally choosing excellent books of wide variety, (2) keep reading aloud to them when they are older, (3) encourage them to read for pleasure, (4) converse about the world with them, without condescending. If you want your own kids to get a high math score, (1) surround them with technical materials (construction toys, logic puzzles, board games, circuit parts, programmable robots, or whatever) and play with them together – or if on a tight budget, improvise materials from whatever you have at hand, and (2) spend time working non-trivial word problems one-on-one. Start from https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc If you have the personal time to do these steps, you won't have to give a shit about what their SAT score is, because it will be good enough for whatever they need it for. (Sadly as a society we don't have the resources or motivation to get every child enough listening-to-books-read-aloud time or enough playing-with-technical-materials-with-adult-help time, so we try to replace it with cheaper and more scalable vacuous alternatives like multiplication drills, spelling quizzes, and SAT prep.) | | |
| ▲ | StefanBatory 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | In Poland, many schools pride themselves for how good they are at preparing for end of high school exams. Nobody fails, nobody gets bad score. Because if they as much as suspect you will fail, they will not let you graduate. But statistics are kept clean :) | |
| ▲ | nickd2001 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | you might find this interesting : https://www.morethanascore.org.uk Says a lot of what you're saying, with some statistical evidence to back it up | | |
| ▲ | jacobolus 2 days ago | parent [-] | | (Note that the the British "SAT" is different than the American "SAT".) |
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| ▲ | somenameforme 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Vibes can be data. Take for instance the economy. All of these things like the GDP, employment figures, and so are supposed to be objective measurements. But precisely because of this they've been gamed to the point of absolute meaninglessness. Recent news regarding jobs numbers over the past 4 years emphasize this to the point of absurdity. All good numbers go up, all bad numbers go down. How's the economy doing? *shrug* By contrast poll people on their 'vibes' of the economy and you'd suddenly get some real and meaningful data that can't really be gamed beyond outright lying about the results. You'd of course have things like people wearing rose colored glasses with regards to the economy when 'their side' is in power, but that doesn't really change the validity of their opinion. And those opinions, as an aggregate, can really provide a lot of really valuable information. | |
| ▲ | snapcaster 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would push back on that. I think often people's "vibes" are a lot closer to reality than extremely gamed metrics | | |
| ▲ | ACCount37 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There are people whose "vibes" are closer to reality than hard cold data. And then there are people who think their "vibes" are closer to reality than hard cold data. The second group is much, much larger. I don't trust vibes. | | |
| ▲ | andsoitis 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Do you trust your own intuition and judgment on at least some matters or topics where data is scarce, ambiguous, or contradictory? | | |
| ▲ | teamonkey 3 days ago | parent [-] | | In the absence of data yes, but intuition and judgement are just heuristics; they suffer strongly from personal biases and are not necessarily representative of reality. | | |
| ▲ | andsoitis 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It also requires judgment and critical thinking to decide things like: a) is this data accurate b) is this data complete c) is this data relevant etc. So even the act of selecting data is subject to bias, good judgment. | | |
| ▲ | teamonkey 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You make it sound like you’re just shifting the problem elsewhere, when this isn’t the case. It’s not wholly subjective. Some of the processes you can use to understand your data are mathematically proven. Many others are well-tested. In any case the idea is to try to minimise your biases and check whether your assumptions are valid so that you can make better, more reliable, more informed decisions. It doesn’t have to be a perfect system to be better. You might not want to, of course. |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | elevaet 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sometimes vibes includes things we're trying to get away from like stereotyping visible groups of people. | | |
| ▲ | snapcaster 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You're right. Of course i'm not rejecting "data" or "analysis" entirely, what im pushing back against is the (very common) thing that happens in companies where you get into a situation of "who you going to trust? the data or your own lying eyes" kind of thing | | |
| ▲ | elevaet 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah I agree with you. I think it's a good approach to check vibes against data and vice-versa, and not blindly trust one over the other - use one to look critically at the other. They both have defects. |
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| ▲ | lo_zamoyski 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Interesting your mind went there. |
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| ▲ | strken 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Does it? How do you know? | |
| ▲ | tux3 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It depends. Not all good things are legible and easy to put into a spreadsheet. Blind data-driven decisions destroy all illegible good in this world that can't be boiled down to some number going up. And there's a lot of it. |
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| ▲ | squigz 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun. This is, I think, a tricky line to walk. Reading is, like most things, a skill that must be practiced, and school is a good place to do so. I think a bigger part of this practice that kills enjoyment is not being able to choose what you're reading; of course kids are going to dislike reading when they're forced to read books or stories they have no interest in at all. |
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| ▲ | graemep 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | They need to learn to read but not told "you must read" even if they have a choice. My kids learned to read with me (flashcards, Ladybird books) for fun (flashcards were a game), and then just carried on by themselves by picking up interesting books (which relies on having access to interesting books - having books at home makes a huge difference, as does access to libraries and bookshops) | | |
| ▲ | Telemakhos 3 days ago | parent [-] | | One of those inconvenient facts: kids who will be successful in life learn to read at home before starting formal schooling, and they have an adult who reads with them three or more times a week; kids who don't get that at home are much more likely to remain illiterate or to read at well below their grade level. It's inconvenient because there isn't anything anyone except the parent(s) can do about it, and the parent has already made that choice by the time the kid gets to school. | | |
| ▲ | graemep 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This seems to vary quite a bit across countries which suggests to me that something can be done about it - I cannot say what though. Parents can be encouraged and informed, to an extent, but the problem is that if they do not enjoy reading, you cannot pass on something you do not have yourself. Another problem in the UK is that I think policy makers think of reading as a life skill, and education in general as preparation for work, rather than as something to enjoy - at least for the hoi polloi (or "the gammon" to use a disturbingly common term), their own kids are different. | | | |
| ▲ | jacobolus 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's not a specific age where this work has to happen. Reading a variety of challenging books aloud to the class is one of the best things schoolteachers (especially early grades) can do for their students. Listening/language comprehension is incredibly important and underemphasized throughout most schooling. Reading per se (i.e. decoding written symbols into sounds/words, at least in English or similar languages) is a quite discrete skill that takes something like 6–12 months to learn to basic proficiency, working an average of, say, 15 minutes per day with direct guidance. It has some basic pre-requisites (attention span, interest, recognizing the alphabet), but can be done at any age; some kids might be willing to learn to read at age 3 or 4, but it can certainly be started at age 8, 12, 20, or 45. After that, speed and fluency improves with additional practice. Like anything, it's easier to get very fluent if people start younger because they have fewer other obligations. Someone who learned to read at age 4 and then spent hours reading for fun every day for 10 years is going to be far ahead of someone who learned a bit starting at age 8 but never had much help, and afterward only occasionally skimmed some magazines for the next 5 or 6 years but mostly spent their time on something else. | |
| ▲ | watwut 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > kids who will be successful in life learn to read at home before starting formal schooling What I did read was that early reading is not important to anything of importance, at best it can be a proxy to filter out neglected kids. Whether the kid can learn at that point is a question of brain development and you as a parent wont achieve nothing by trying to force it. |
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| ▲ | Symbiote 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Are children forced to read 'boring' books in the quiet reading time at school? I thought the point of that time was to read your own book (chosen from home, the public library, or the school library). As far as I know, school libraries still exist, and still have a wide selection of books. The books are rotated around schools in a county so the selection doesn't get stale. | |
| ▲ | RyanOD 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I agree. It's similar to learning multiplication tables. We can all agree that math is more than endless hours of drill and kill, but there are certain skills where rote memorization is beneficial. When doing AP calculus, for example, there really just isn't time to have to work out 12 x 13 on paper or (god forbid) grab a calculator. |
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| ▲ | panda-giddiness 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Unfortunately, addressing those issues would do little to address the underlying cause: We have many more ways to amuse ourselves compared to a generation ago, most of which require less "reach" for a dopamine hit (social media, netflix, video games, etc). |
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| ▲ | CompoundEyes 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 20-30 minutes of quiet reading time is recess for some of the introverts. |
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| ▲ | araes 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Personally, it seems conspicuous that one of the largest drops in 5-8 and 8-18 occurred in 2023-2024, right when the world experienced a layoff surge [1] and sites like HN noted a significant drop in hiring [2]. "enjoy reading either very much or quite a lot" 2023 to 2024, 5 to 8: 75.3 to 64.7 2023 to 2024, 8 to 18: 43.4 to 34.6 ~250,000 layoffs @ ~1300 companies in 2023 [1]. Add another 100,000 and 1,000 if you take late 2022. And layoffs.fyi just tracks tech layoffs. The WARN database has similar results. Been averaging 300-400 a month since January 2023, vs ~100 / month in the 2021-2022 timeframe. [3] That's a lot of dislocation, moving to find jobs, household chaos, school shifting, and parents with different priorities. [1] "Layoff Charts Tab" https://layoffs.fyi [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dvdssj/oc... [3] https://layoffdata.com/ |
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| ▲ | sandworm101 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I would say that they are reading fewer books but I think total number of hours reading is similar or growing. Reading tweets and text messages is still reading. My nephew has trouble learning to read, until he started playing minecraft and needed to read websites and instructions for mods and such. Then getting his first cellphone did away with any concept of reading difficulties. We have entire economies of people reading text on computers all day (ie my job). I would bet that the average person today read better/faster than their equivalent in centuries past. They are reading junk, but they are actually reading. |
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| ▲ | Peritract 3 days ago | parent [-] | | A lot of the time they're skimming, rather than reading in depth. This is great for picking up key information quickly from a wiki, but it's also easy to miss something complex-but-vital. |
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| ▲ | GuB-42 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I actually thing that millenials (i.e. the parents of 2025 children) read more than any other generation. Just not books. Until recently, the internet was mostly text, we didn't have the bandwidth for anything else. And it meant reading. Text messengers took the place of phone calls, even more reading. Text was also how video games told stories, more reading. And finally, subtitles, they keep growing in popularity, so even when you are watching videos, you are reading. GenX was all about TV, boomers spent more time outside and talking, and if you get far enough back, people didn't even know how to read. I think GenZ still read a lot, but now, audiovisual content is more prevalent on the internet than it was before. Also, audiobooks gained in popularity. Maybe we should make define what "reading" is. Is it actual reading, as in textual communication, or is it consuming books, but in this case, do audiobooks count? If you only count reading paper books, then sure, people read less, but that's because there are so many alternatives nowadays. And maybe some attention deficit. |
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| ▲ | notmyjob 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Stress and pressure due to the job market and housing costs. Smarter teens are drilling leetcode to stay competitive so they won’t be destitute when the boomers liquidate social security and deficit us all into eternal serfdom, or that’s what one of them told me when I asked why he didn’t spend more time reading novels. |
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| ▲ | throawaywpg 3 days ago | parent [-] | | im getting ready for a life of video gaming and living on a beach in a 3rd world country... |
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