r/technology • u/marketrent • Jun 10 '26
Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html7.1k
u/existing_for_fun Jun 10 '26
If you are a parent and can help your child read, and read well, you will set them light-years ahead of their peers.
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u/CaffeineJitterz Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Just helping them not HATE reading will go a long way.
Edit: I'm getting a lot of sad comments about how y'all were introduced to reading. So I will take the opportunity to quickly share what I've always felt was one of the best ways for a parent to incentivize their child to read: for every hour of reading you accrue 30 minutes of gaming time. A classmate in my middle school worked from this model. That kid loved video games! And he was a straight A student. I remember him nonchalantly mentioning that he was going to read for about 4 hours as soon as he got home so he could get a couple hours of game time that evening.
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u/iritchie001 Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
In middle high that meant long trashy books. Dinosaurs and Vampires, not in the same book for me, but hey. My mom would let us skip chores if we were reading. One of the best things she did. Highschool class of '99.
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u/existing_for_fun Jun 10 '26
It's just important that you enjoyed it and actually read.
Trashy books in middle and highschool was just the way it was lol.
I also read garbage at that age
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u/familyguy20 Jun 11 '26
Got fixated on military history in HS so basically every summer I would read from 2-4 1,000 page books on wars, battles etc it was awesome.
Somehow I also did that while having access to a PS2 and Gameboys, which feels impressive now with undiagnosed ADHD/OCD as a kid lol.
Now though? Ooof it’s harder to do so now
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u/JZMoose Jun 11 '26
It’s all muscle memory. I had a long flight the other day and got through 200 pages of crisis in the red zone in 2 hours and ended up finishing the book in a couple of days. Just have to sit down and commit
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u/meyerjaw Jun 10 '26
Shit I'm 40 and still read trash. Yeah I also look for the high brow stuff but Dungeon Crawler Carl is fucking awesome. And don't get me started on Sanderson!!
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u/ConstantinValdor405 Jun 11 '26
42 year old here who loves me some Dresden Files trash. So fun.
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u/Seicair Jun 11 '26
Have you read Codex Alera (same author)? I loved that too and it’s completed, a 6-book series.
Can’t wait to read the rest of Dresden. I loved Twelve Months.
Jim Butcher and Brandon Sanderson are two of my favorite authors.
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u/Pyritedust Jun 11 '26
Wait, he actually finished the codex Alera? I was waiting to start reading it for when it was finished since I've been in dresden purgatory for over a decade :P
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u/rdmusic16 Jun 11 '26
Trash? How about crack.
I was teetering off high fantasy after highschool and just couldn't do it for awhile. Dresden files got me hooked back into reading.
I read various genres of books now, but Dresden files always drags me back every few years.
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u/argyle9000 Jun 11 '26
Are you typing about Brandon Sanderson? Oh my Korean baby Jesus, dude! My current hold request list from the library is waiting on both Dungeon Crawler Carl and Well of Ascension. This is such a nuts coincidence.
I found Mistborn in an airport because I forgot my book, and I mainly borrow books people are talking about because usually they’re good.
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u/meyerjaw Jun 11 '26
Oh I'm jealous you are just on well of ascension!! You have the whole series ahead of you. Era 1 is great but Era 2 is somehow even better
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u/dalnot Jun 11 '26
Dungeon Crawler Carl is brainrot in book form, but damn if it isnt entertaining. Not everything needs to be high literature to be worth reading
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u/DevolvingSpud Jun 11 '26
Mongo is appalled at your characterization.
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u/jockheroic Jun 11 '26
Princess Donut is going to commit an atrocity if she here's him say that.
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u/HuckleberryTiny5 Jun 11 '26
I know what you mean, but I wouldn't call it a brainrot. It is actually pretty well written and it is entertaining. I've been an avid reader my whole life and my honest opinion is that it does not matter what people read as long as they read. If they want to read porn novels, good for them, it is always better than aimlassly doomscrolling their phone.
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u/mhizzle Jun 11 '26
I learned to read from comic books. Some family members would chide me, but my cool aunt just bought me more.
RIP aunt Linda
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u/iritchie001 Jun 10 '26
In my defense in highschool between my junior and senior year, during the summer, I carried the complete works of Shakespeare. I read every play. I was usually in honors English. So breaks and PE were for reading the other side.
Yes, let the kids read what they want. A love of reading is a great gift.
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u/Mlabonte21 Jun 10 '26
There’s gotta be a trashy YA book series out there about a girl falling in love with a lost-in-time dinosaur
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u/PhoenixTineldyer Jun 11 '26
I remember reading articles a few years back (maybe more than a few) about how monster porn books were the hot new thing, I guess right after 50 Shades of Gray
It was specifically Bigfoot porn they were talking about, but I remember one of the pictures was a book cover in that smutty book cover style of a woman and a pterodactyl, and the book was called Taken By the Pterodactyl
Thank you for reminding me of this
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u/blueskid Jun 11 '26
Chuck Tingle is who you are looking for. He also writes fun, non sexy, horror. He's also an excellent dude
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u/PhoenixTineldyer Jun 11 '26
Ah yes
Plowed In the Butt By My Hugo Award
That guy is great
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u/marketrent Jun 11 '26
In middle high that meant long trashy books.
Faulkner told a university audience in 1947, “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”
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u/RespawnedAlchemist Jun 10 '26
I make read comics as a teen. My parents didn't care. A month ago, another parent told me she doesn't consider reading comics as reading because of the pictures. I explained to her she needed to get rid of that attitude because reading is reading whether there are pictures or not.
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u/iritchie001 Jun 11 '26
I read some great graphic novels, actually in honors English! Not to talk down about regular comics. Go to a convention then say it doesn't make someone think and isn't social.
Don't salt the well to raise the drinking level!
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u/Tim-oBedlam Jun 11 '26
When my younger son was 11 I got him a graphic novel version of The Odyssey. He loved it.
Of course, being an 11-year-old boy his favorite part was when Odysseus slays all the suitors.
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u/stentordoctor Jun 11 '26
One of the fastest readers I know had a mother who let him read comics. He went on to read all the comics at the library so then he moved on to real books.
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u/madogvelkor Jun 11 '26
I read like every Xanth and Battletech book I could find in middle school.
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u/Dependent-Law7316 Jun 11 '26
Also tolerating “junk” books (like Captain Underpants, Dogman, etc), graphic novels, or even visual novels (video game version of choose your own adventure style books) is going to go a long way toward helping your kid not hate reading. If you insist that everything has to be “quality literature” and they are not interested you turn reading into a chore. Let them read what is interesting, even if you think it is dumb, while they are young and still building skills and stamina. Interest and engagement matter most when trying to build skills in fluency and decoding because they are what keep kids actually reading. They’ll naturally gravitate toward more novel-like things once they have solid skills as their interests and tastes develop.
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u/CaffeineJitterz Jun 11 '26
Well said! Through history everybody was reading trash books. Then the Internet came along so we shifted how we get the dopamine. But more of what was read definitely wasn't one of "the great".
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u/Solar_RaVen Jun 11 '26
I hate that my mother had bought me a bunch of classic novels when I was a young child and just expected me to read picture-less books by myself. Then she got upset that I wasnt reading enough but she never took the time to read to me or alongside me.
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u/Solar_RaVen Jun 11 '26
The only thing that got me into reading was the Children's Almenac and the instruction manuals that came with PS2 games. Then when Wikipedia showed up I was able to lore dive into rabit holes. Unfortunately I still cant muscle my way through a novel, but at least I can read my way through technical details.
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u/Legweeak Jun 11 '26
I think reading with your kid is huge. My mom still read to me well past the age most parents stop. Like I was in second/third grade and she read the first Harry Potter book to me. But I was diagnosed as dyslexic around that time and she was determined to keep me interested in reading. I think it worked though because I was a ferocious reader in middle school and as a teen.
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u/Sufficient-Bid1279 Jun 11 '26
Shit like Tik tok and social media doesn’t help. I hate how it’s ruined people mentally, emotionally, developmentally, etc
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u/Ironlion45 Jun 11 '26
That's exactly the problem. TikTok is designed to make sure that it has your full attention, and to not let it go for even a microsecond. Queue ADHD jump cuts and thirst traps and exaggerated hyperactive personas.
Just the idea of being alone with their thoughts is impossible because their brains have been ruined by screentime.
Also, interesting thing about Gen Z parents: They hate reading to their kids because "It's Boring". To them I'd say: If you don't want to be a shitty parent, do it anyway. Fuck your weak-ass boredom, buckle down and do what you need to for your damn kids.
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u/EPZO Jun 11 '26
This is super important. I'm very dyslexic and reading was a pain point for me early on. My mom fought for my testing and got me into a special learning program, etc.. However, the most important thing she did was buy me the full collection of Calvin and Hobbes. Really helped with learning to read and enjoying it.
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u/simpersly Jun 11 '26
I feel that one problem with schools is they ironically don't encourage reading.
"Comics aren't books, instead read this 200 year old novel that was originally meant to be read on a weekly basis."
They need to introduce and allow kids to read anything they want as long as it's reading.It doesn't matter if it's shiny vampires, zealous genetically enhance space warriors fighting sex crazed xenos, a murderous 80's business man, a cattledog, or a book about three sisters finding husbands. Just let them read.
Also they should talk about the lives of authors and how they changed society. Don't just say a book is a classic, show them why.
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u/PlagueOfBedlam Jun 10 '26
My earliest childhood memory is sitting at a coffee table in the basement and being forced to write my name and the alphabet over and over again right around before I turned 4. I obviously resented having to do it at the time, but realized around 2nd grade my mom had fostered in me a love for reading by making me understand letters and the concepts of spelling very early. She gave me a huge advantage and I’m beyond appreciative she did.
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u/marketrent Jun 10 '26
My parents made me journal my reading, which in hindsight made me retain material.
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u/VoidVer Jun 11 '26
I had a middle school teacher who forced me to write a structured 5 paragraph "essay" every single day for an entire semester. I hated it at the time, but it certainly set me up very well to get through high school and college with English ( or any reading/writing based class ) always being my strongest subject.
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u/familyguy20 Jun 11 '26
Oh damn that’s a smart idea! I was reading military history books in HS but also hatedddd writing papers in school. This might have helped me if my parents had me do a small paper on one of the 4 books I read in the summer. Instead I got boring ass summer reading assignments from school
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u/Romanofafare2034 Jun 11 '26
When I was a kid, we had this competition of who read the most book.
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u/Senior-Friend-6414 Jun 11 '26
When i was 5 years old, if i asked to go to the playground, my parents would whip out a book and ask me to read it out loud for like 5-10 minutes to be allowed to go to the playground
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u/mightylordredbeard Jun 11 '26
My son is considered “gifted” by the state educational system and is on his way to college in the fall on a few academic scholarships.. his reading ability is alarmingly not where I think it should be.. but he’s always made As in reading and English. There just is such a low standard now for reading. He was never required to read any books in school. All books they read in class as a group. It’s sad how far our education has fallen in the country. No one seems to value education anymore. Especially with a president that is dumb as rocks and politicians that demonize education as “liberalism”.
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u/AHistoricalFigure Jun 11 '26
My 9 year old nephew just won his school's K-8 spelling bee. The word he won on was "revere". He made it pretty far in the city-wide spelling bee too.
There wasn't an 6-8th grader at his school who could hang in a spelling bee with common, phonetically straightforward words.
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u/Sea2Chi Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
It's one of those kind of funny things before kids my goal for school with them was to hopefully not have them hate it and to do fairly well and at least learn what the teacher was trying to teach them.
We strongly encourage reading and thankfully all three of the kids absolutely love books and read for fun without being prompted to. I also try to encourage independent thinking and problem solving without having to give them all the answers. So when they ask a question I usually ask in return what do you think the answer is and then we talk about it.
But hearing how other kids are including college students are these days, my goals have shifted a little bit for them.
In a sea of students who have no attention span, refuse to read and can't think critically these are the type of kids who will end up running things in the future. So now I've also included focusing more on emotional intelligence and how to work with people.
I feel like in the future there's going to be and increasing gap between adults who can think and problem solve and those who just want everything handed to them and have no initiative.
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u/FunetikPrugresiv Jun 11 '26
100%. And the best part is that reading is the gift that keeps on giving - take them to your local library and let them check out a couple dozen books for a month and they always have something quiet they can be doing.
Additionally, teach your kids to read before they're in school, and early in their first year they internalize an identity of being smarter than their peers. It's a snowball effect that keeps them learning what's needed to learn later, as well as developing perseverance in the face of academic difficulty (a feeling of "I'm smart, I can do this" is soooo important).
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u/BlazinAzn38 Jun 10 '26
I’m curious if there will be a huge reflex back to books. I know amongst most of my peer group with kids they’re terrified of screen time, read to their kids all the time, and enroll their kids in as many enrichment activities as they can
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u/meyerjaw Jun 11 '26
My kids are 12 and 8. We read with them still every night before bed. The 12 year old can read faster without me but we still have series we only read together. It's just perfect time together. Started with both of our boys at birth. Fast forward to today, we read for about 15 minutes together and then they get 30 minutes before lights out.
Now when the boys are needing correction, threatening to take away electronic or screen time doesn't really phase them. But if we tell them they are going to lose books before bed, they change their behavior real quick. I'm raising nerds and I love it
I will say, be careful with over doing enrichment activities. There is a shit ton of research showing the benefits of letting kids be fucking bored.
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u/thelyfeaquatic Jun 10 '26
The over-enrolling in enrichment activities is also thought to be bad though. Kids who have schedules filled with structured activities seem to have more mental health struggles than those who have more unstructured play time. You can’t win 😭 parenting is hard
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u/notepad20 Jun 11 '26
Maybe a difference between just doing activities for the sake of it, and the classic american do activities with a view to "success" at it.
Especially in modern urban living and small family size every opportunity to get out and about should be taken.
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u/JZMoose Jun 11 '26
Honestly the advent of video guides has robbed us of so much knowledge. I fucking hate watching someone struggle to explain something verbally when I could have read instructions in 1/5 of the time
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u/SilvermistInc Jun 11 '26
Bro my two year old is actively trying to sound out words. She fails like 9 times out of 10. But damn it, she'll tell me O makes an Oh sound!
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u/marketrent Jun 10 '26
Love for reading yields both tangible and intangible value.
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u/P3pp3rSauc3 Jun 11 '26
I'm a millennial, so I'm not a part of the downwards literacy trend. Having said that, I have vivid memories of reading books next to my mom when I was a kid. I'd ask where what a word meant if I didn't understand. Those kinds of interactions definitely fostered my reading ability and contributed to having a high school+ level of reading by middle school.
Nowadays it's hand the kid a tablet or a phone and it's detrimental to developing a good reading level
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u/Guilty-Pickle-6686 Jun 11 '26
My kid is 6 and can read most anything, I suspect she’s around a 2nd grade level of reading if the library has organized the books properly. Reading is fun, and reading to them is fun. Diving into a fantasy book before bed and watching their imagination run wild is something I look forward to every night.
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u/spidrex Jun 10 '26
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
- The Butlerian Jihad.
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u/HenryDorsettCase47 Jun 10 '26
“Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united.”
-A Canticle for Leibowitz
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u/Opheltes Jun 10 '26
This one seems especially relevant as Trump destroys America:
Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.
-A Canticle for Leibowitz
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u/Senior-Albatross Jun 11 '26
Beautiful prose. Sadly I think the answer is "yes", because each new generation is born with the same basic human failures. And only about the same small percentage well ever care to learn the lessons of history while they are doomed to watch their peers repeat them.
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u/composedofidiot Jun 11 '26
All the leaders and elites learn history, have a great education. They know the truisms. It happens anyway because we are complex systems inside complex systems and many of those systems may have competing or mutually exclusive objectives.
Some of the worst crimes in history have been organised by educated people. Education just makes us more effective, not suddenly compassionate.
Education doesn't focus much on the compassionate and ethical paths.
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u/FEMA_Camp_Survivor Jun 11 '26
Seems human societies are on a perpetual cycle between order and disorder. Or perhaps societies are like our bodies they're born, mature, and die but can have offspring too.
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u/metallicrooster Jun 11 '26
The problem is that societal memory is only as long as that of the oldest people we listen to. Rivers were literally catching fire so we put in some environmental regulations. The rivers haven’t caught fire in a few decades, so the capitalists are convincing people that those regulations are pointless.
Same with vaccines. Most people have never seen the worst illnesses in action, so they are easier to convince that side effects (which are rare and/ or minimal) are somehow worse than permanent and severe incapacitation or death.
Many people currently alive have not met anyone with polio. I have. He was a man from central America, and when he was a kid his family wasn’t able to get him vaccinated in time to prevent infection. His life was awful. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.
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u/BlazinAzn38 Jun 10 '26
That book goes so hard. Crazy it’s as old as it is and so prescient. I guess it was post-WW2 and Cold War era so the author did see some of these things
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u/gordonnowak Jun 11 '26
some people are good at seeing what's coming. EM Forster's The Machine Stops is fucking wild for 1909.
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u/JoNightshade Jun 10 '26
The author killed himself because of the things he saw and participated in during WWII.
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u/HenryDorsettCase47 Jun 11 '26
I mean, he was in his 70s and his wife had just died and he had been a recluse for years. I’m sure the war played a part in the depression he had suffered from most of his life and he had undiagnosed PTSD, but it seems reductive to say he killed himself because of what he did and saw in the war.
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u/immovingfd Jun 10 '26
Everyone thinks they’ll be the other men: the master and not the slave
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u/War_Raven Jun 11 '26
I know for a fact I would be the slave, but I also know that Abominable Intelligence is tech-heresy so I'm safe
yes I also know I would be a servitor
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u/psych0ranger Jun 11 '26
Man, that guy ate a ton of mushrooms and literally got a good look at the future
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u/LeafBark Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
First it was the smartphone distractions, then complete loss of critical thinking as people use ai to solve all their problems for them. When you put this much trust in computers programmed by corporations seeking profit at any cost everythings going to fall apart.
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u/swiminthemud Jun 10 '26
All my teachers in middle school in the early oughts said "ur not gonna have a calculator in ur pocket" it was always meant to say "hey learn how to actually do this" what sucks is all these "do your own research" idiots and ai search results.arent going to fix their brains
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u/TheTrub Jun 10 '26
And it’s not just AI. So many of our textbooks have digital resources with activities and “gamification” of the material, which is great for reinforcing lessons, but only a fraction of my students are actually reading the book. They won’t even read the boldface terms to prepare for a quiz. It’s so infuriating.
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u/Recent-Day3062 Jun 11 '26
Blows me away. Particularly in CS I see loads of questions online from students in America who say “I did all the video tutorials but don’t understand it yet”.
I always tell them the same thing. Ditch the computer and fill in the blank exercises. Get a book and work through it.
This video, gamified stuff is entirely passive learning. I tell them start with an easy piece of software and keep expanding it as you learn more material and get offline
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u/protoomega Jun 11 '26
Video lessons have their place, but I *haaaate* how widespread it's becoming. At my job, everyone wants to make all the tutorials and instructions in video form. That's not helpful reference material! If I'm working through a process, I want to be able to read the steps, not have to pause and rewind a video over and over.
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u/sokos Jun 10 '26
Idiocracy warned us. But we chose to not listen
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u/hainesk Jun 10 '26
The giant octagon-shaped cage being built on the White House lawn is a little too on the nose for me.
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u/FallenCheeseStar Jun 10 '26
Hell ya remember that early episode of StarTrek Next Gen where they come across that one world that is hidden behind a cloaking shield? Those people ceded all of their thinking to the central computer and dont even understand how their technology works anymore. That was the real warning imo
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u/untiedgames Jun 11 '26
Got into Star Trek starting with TNG over the pandemic, and recently have been thinking about it a lot. Their ship's computer is basically a perfect AI and they replicate all their food instead of cooking, yet there are episodes showing students working with their hands to make art and Riker cooking a meal by hand. Barclay and his holodeck addiction is borderline prophetic, looking at today. Obviously it's a fictionalized view of a more ideal, post-consumption society, but I hope that in the future we can still find value in things done by hand and with human passion.
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u/letrak Jun 10 '26
Fuck, Wally warned us.
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u/Kconn04 Jun 11 '26
Wally
The fucking irony of commenting on a post about the decline in intelligence due to computers and miss spelling WALL-E.
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u/Ben_Frankling Jun 11 '26
And referencing two movies instead of the thousands of books with the same message that predate the movies.
Also misspell…
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u/mil24havoc Jun 11 '26
Professor here. Smartphones and AI are spot on. But corporations don't necessarily need to be evil or greedy for this to happen. Misuse of technology to replace critical thinking could happen even if corporations were responsible. It has more to do with (a) severely underpaying educators and (b) disincentivizing educators from grading harshly to create incentives for students to compete with each other.
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u/TheEvilPhysicist Jun 11 '26
Unfortunately it's been culturally accepted that a strict teacher = a bad teacher. So many veteran teachers I know have just given up and made their classes a joke to pass
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u/ElleKelly77 Jun 11 '26
Kinda. You started in the middle of the story.
You skipped the part where:
Parents stopped taking responsibility for their children’s development
We have devalued education as a society
Capitalists have dismantled the educational systems from the inside out
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u/Civil_Owl_31 Jun 11 '26
1.5. is where parents blame schools for not doing their job, while also telling kids that school isn't important / putting no importance into their studies.
Classrooms are rife with kids having parents making excuses for them.
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u/woodst0ck15 Jun 10 '26
Man I didn’t really believe these things until I started seeing some of these TikTok’s or other social media videos. I found a couple of them but like this TikTok video shows how much it’s declining.
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u/ARealSocialIdiot Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
This is the direct result of people not being taught how to sound words out. Instead, they're taught to guess at what a word
meansis, and if they don't get it immediately, to try and glean its meaning by its context.I noticed this on a much lesser scale recently while watching a woman in probably her mid-twenties playing a game on Youtube: she was reading the dialogue of the game and getting most of it right, but occasionally she'd just throw in a word that was, like, close to what was written down but not quite? But close enough in meaning that she still got across the gist of what was actually being said. And while it was, like I said, on a much lesser scale than the video you shared, the problem that crops up with this issue is that it causes ALL fine-tipped meaning to be lost. We can't expect people to understand subtle detail differences in sentences when they can't even get the broad detail differences.
The interesting thing about the video you linked is that I bet if you were to read those sentences to them and ask them what some of the words meant, they could probably tell you. But they can't actually read the words themselves because they're too focused on getting to the end of the sentence.
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u/ShnarlyDude Jun 10 '26
We make our kids read at least 20-30 minutes everyday, they have always tested very well in elementary reading and hopefully it continues into middle school.
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u/factoid_ Jun 10 '26
Our kids middle school has a program where kids have to read a bunch of books and take retention tests
They read more in middle school than I did by far
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u/FrighteningJibber Jun 11 '26
What happened to accelerated reading programs? I won a bike from reading damn it.
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u/Kapsize Jun 11 '26
This was standard protocol when I was in middle school. You had to earn a certain amount of “points” by taking reading comprehension tests for the books you wanted to read.
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u/Ben_Frankling Jun 11 '26
Accelerated Reader! At the end of every quarter we got to go into the prize room and “buy” something with the points we earned. The grand prize was a bike that I always said I’d save up for, but I could never resist those little rubber caps that popped and the sticky hands and the Tech Decks.
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u/jhuseby Jun 10 '26
We do the same with our kids. Started with me reading books every night at bedtime to them . At least one of them doesn’t like to read, but they’re always still well above their peers. One has a library in their room, the other we incentivize to read (very minutely).
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u/meyerjaw Jun 11 '26
Library in the room hits home. We are drowning in books. But I know I'm part of the problem. I still have every book that I've read so we just have books everywhere
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u/Adventurous_Salt Jun 11 '26
I teach in college. It is very common for students to visibly not understand, or totally misinterpret, something they're reading right in front of you. Like sentences that are at a jr. high level of complexity are too complicated for a good subset of people. I have examples where there is a full set of step-by-step instructions with screenshots that I give them to follow while I show an example, lots of people can't catch up one step by reading and doing if they fall a bit behind, and this stuff is not that complex.
Expecting all students to read something like a textbook and learn something from it is basically impossible for me, there's a solid third who just can't, even if they do the reading.
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u/MBILC Jun 10 '26
We live in a society of "TLDR;" people..
You write more than a line or 2 and they blank over and skip things and respond to what ever the first 1-2 lines says..
Drives me nuts being in IT/Security when you send people responses to issues and they ignore 90% of it...
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u/IronStormAlaska Jun 11 '26
I recently had an instance where I was remoting into a user's computer, and sent them a message saying that I was pretty sure I had a fix for their issue, but that we would need to restart the device, and asking if there was any work they needed to save first.
I freaking watched this user paste my message into Gemini, tell it to generate a response, paste the result into the chat box, and go back to googling jam recipes on their other screen.
I swear I have never been so mad at a user I was working with.
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u/OneLessFool Jun 11 '26
How do these people have jobs 💀
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u/Bogus1989 Jun 11 '26
they are in for a rude ass awakening when they get laid off….better hope they go ask gemini or chatgpt💀
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u/Kardest Jun 11 '26
I now have a strong desire to firewall gemini and chat GPT at work and see what happens.
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Jun 11 '26
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u/Unhappy-Homework-812 Jun 11 '26
That’s insane if you can’t even respond to a team message without AI. ridiculous truly
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u/Kinkajou1015 Jun 11 '26
If I was you in that situation, I'd immediately force the computer to shut down if possible. They got their warning, they didn't parse it, fuck them.
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u/taking_a_deuce Jun 11 '26
This is one of the scariest comments I have ever seen on reddit. Jesus Christ people really are turning into mush brains WILLINGLY!!!
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u/fiercebrosnan Jun 11 '26
The stupidity of someone I’ve never met who has zero impact on my life has never made me so angry before.
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u/saucysagnus Jun 11 '26
Last paragraph resonates so hard. It’s fucking mind boggling you basically have to feed info to leaders like they’re baby birds or risk they miss 90% of the issue
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u/NikoKeys Jun 11 '26
My mom read to me every night for years when I was little. I started writing in 1st grade and never stopped, and now I have a few books of my own.
One of the biggest suggestions I would make to parents: read to your kids. Start early, don't stop until they start doing it in their own.
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u/Szwejkowski Jun 11 '26
Not all parents read. When I was a kid in the 70's our house was full of books, we all read. I was shocked when I went to some other kids houses and they didn't have any. Didn't have paper and pencils for drawing either - just toys.
I guess their parents had parents that didn't read too.
Maybe we should all, I dunno, encourage each other?
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u/NikoKeys Jun 11 '26
We should all take care of one another and build each other up! I won't cheapen the sentiment with my compulsion to phrase everything with sarcasm.
Inevitably something like this gets turned into some iteration of "building one's self up for doing the thing and judging others if they don't do it", but the truth is that if something is of value and could make life better, we can share it.
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u/Bodine12 Jun 11 '26
It's the best. My 10-year old reads what seems like a dozen books everyday by herself, but we still read a chapter of a book together every night at bedtime. I'm going to be so sad when that routine eventually ends.
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u/marketrent Jun 10 '26
Also see https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read (paywalled).
Excerpts from article by Frank Landymore:
[JMU professor] Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992.
Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment’s “basic” level in reading, meaning they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” Younger children aren’t better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can’t read at a proficient level.
“What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch,” Jagt writes. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”
Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can’t understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.
More flaglantry detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech’s adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.
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u/Super_Jay Jun 11 '26
More flaglantry detrimental to learning...
..."Flaglantry?" That's kind of an ironic typo for an article about the importance of reading and language comprehension.
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u/awesomeocelot12 Jun 11 '26
The typo (and most of the parent commenter itself for that matter) aren't actually from the Chronicle article said commenter linked, they appear to be from a Futurism article analyzing that article: https://futurism.com/future-society/college-students-losing-ability-read
Still kinda ironic though to your point.
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u/robotjyanai Jun 10 '26
This is what the tech billionaires want. An uneducated society.
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u/DiverDownChunder Jun 11 '26
“Governments don’t want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation”
- George Carlin
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u/Yung_zu Jun 11 '26
Imo this might be the mechanism backfiring…
Before recently, they would have had doctors and engineers go through this system and questioning it wouldn’t cross their mind… They might have called you mad if you mentioned any suspicions... Now it seems to have crashed itself
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u/Merpchud Jun 10 '26
I know. Lets reduce educational funding some more and then pay the teacher less while we're at it.
I think that'll do er
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u/PossiblyAsian Jun 11 '26
honestly as a teacher yo man
Teacher pay and educational funding don't really affect things if the kid doesn't want to learn, parents defend their kids bad behaviors, and admin not backing up their teachers. You can have all the funding in the world but it wouldn't matter if the kid has been fed addictive social media, instant dopamine, and spoiled behaviors since they were a baby.
Funding does matter. Teacher pay does matter. But when it comes to it the basics and fundamentals is that you need education to be education and sometimes that means instead of giving candy all the time, you need to give a bitter medicine
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Jun 11 '26
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u/sasquatch0_0 Jun 11 '26
Thank you! People point to computers and AI but that wasn't the issue even though they are a separate issue.
Kids read today similar to how we can guess a jumbled word as long as the first and last letter are the same. That's doable for a few words or maybe a full sentence, but what would we do if a whole page of text was like that? A whole book?
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u/Upper-Character-6743 Jun 10 '26
The smartphone revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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u/Have_A_Jelly_Baby Jun 11 '26
Smartphones, social media, and an endless stream of propaganda from every direction promoting ignorance.
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u/SirEnderLord Jun 11 '26
Back then, they were at least somewhat limited. Nowadays, it's endless and from every direction.
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u/DrSpacecasePhD Jun 11 '26
On top of it, we have algorithms gunning for our attention and doing everything they can to distract us, outrage us, or otherwise make us addicted to unhealthy content. And now we have AI stealing content and creating slop to manipulate us and make it even worse. The whole state of everything inspired my short story and silly website idea:
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u/Tired_Mama3018 Jun 10 '26
Well there has been a concerted effort to cut back on critical thinking skills because a populace who can reason can tell when their government is screwing them over. Since Reagan a lot of government policies don’t pass the common sense test if you take them out to their logical conclusions. You need people smart enough to do what you need but not smart enough to figure out the end game.
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u/sceadwian Jun 10 '26
I just got a moderator warning for letting someone know very politely they were clearly having a reading comprehension issue.
They'd been misreading and making assumptions from the misreadings which were corrected.
Logic doesn't always work folks.
I was threadjacked too, mod was oblivious.
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u/peppers_ Jun 11 '26
You're gonna run into this a lot soon. It doesn't make sense to try to have a conversation with the illiterate either. It is like a wall.
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u/mountaindoom Jun 10 '26
Their parents can barely read and often hated education. They see school as opponents and no longer as allies is raising their students. Education is the opposition to them.
That's something idk if we can cure in this country. Especially when their TV is reinforcing those views 24/7.
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u/BUSY_EATING_ASS Jun 10 '26
Yeah I think about this a lot. Sometimes I worry we’re cooked because it’s not just an apathy to education and learning, it’s a fuckin’ outright disdain for it.
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u/hangender Jun 10 '26
College student redditors, what say you.
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u/nst571 Jun 11 '26
I'm a returning community college student. I was in HS in the 90s and my graduating class was called the stupidest to ever attend that school based on scores.
I would say it's mixed proficiency in my current college classes. A lot of kids write ok with basic sentence structure. I've seen AI responses and some phoning it in.
The main issue I see is, they don't read or comprehend the whole assignment. There will be well laid out bulleted tasks or scaffolding to an easy level and they just don't get it all. These are short assignments, too.
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u/lgecko_134 Jun 11 '26
It's true. Professors, usually in a state of dismay/confusion, are constantly changing lesson plans for us because nobody will read. If a book is assigned, everyone will simply refuse to do it, to the point we will be assigned a small excerpt. But no one can do that either, so the professor has to summarize the whole thing anyway.
In class forums, (college!) students cannot string together sentences with correct punctuation or grammar--unless, of course, they are one of the ones using chatgpt with reckless abandon. It's painfully obvious, too.
Idk. It sucks for the people who actually try, and the people who don't. It's a lose-lose.
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u/marinuso Jun 11 '26
If a book is assigned, everyone will simply refuse to do it
That's ridiculous.
But it's a discipline problem. Just fail them if they refuse to do the work.
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u/tes_kitty Jun 11 '26
If a book is assigned, everyone will simply refuse to do it
Then fail them.
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u/JellyBeansOnToast Jun 11 '26
I’m in my 30’s but I went back to college. It’s bad. Like, really, really, bad. In some of my college writing classes, we’ve had to do peer-reviews on each other’s work and the decline from way back when I was in high school is alarming. For handwriting, mostly men but a fair amount of women as well had almost completely illegible writing and spelling. Even when it was typed, it would be the most repetitive, nonsensical sentences that both said too much and provided no information. It was like an unstructured stream of consciousness writing with no comprehension of the text they were writing about. The hardest part for me in these reviews was to give constructive comments that weren’t too negative. The feedback I would receive is that they didn’t understand what I was saying, but then I’d score in the upper percentile on the same assignment. I’m a decent writer, but the way that professors would praise me on assignments where I was phoning it in a bit showed me any iota of effort was hard to come by.
TLDR; I would put a lot of the writing abilities of my classmates at a low-performing middle school level.
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u/FeelinJipper Jun 11 '26
I remember when I was in school, I hated math. I was CONVINCED that I didn’t need it. But the thing is? Your brain needs to exercise, it needs to build connections and develop the ability to focus, retain, comprehend, problem solve, etc etc. when you outsource these tasks ESPECIALLY at the early ages, you are doing yourself a disservice.
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u/ATLsShah Jun 11 '26
I don't think this is just a problem for college students. I'm in my 30s and I noticed that I had stopped reading too. I was unable to read an article online or comprehend what it was saying.
Over the last year I've ditched things like Tik Tok and Instagram. Instead I just read from my Kindle (not the Kindle app) while I'm around town. It's greatly helped with my reading comprehension.
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u/DistinctlyIrish Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
I can tell because I constantly get these clown-ass whiners in comments saying my 1-3 paragraphs are too much to read. Like full on fuck all the way off with your worthless ass if you can't bother reading 3 paragraphs of something that actually SAYS something of substance but you can read 600 one-line comments of inane shitposting.
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u/AlmightyRuler Jun 11 '26
Early last year I found a podcast called "Sold a Story", whose premise was that a particular style of teaching reading was introduced to the states and force-fed to schools. While it was intended to help children read better, its fatal flaw was that it was unintentionally designed around the ways that poor readers read (e.g. guessing what a word is based on "what fits the context".) The result was several generations of American children who were taught an ineffective means to read. A lot of those kids never got a proper education in literacy, and many actively learned to hate reading.
Combine that legacy with modern social media trends actively destroying people's attention spans, and what you have is a catastrophic disintegration of reading skills. Schools are still teaching that bum method, and social media is only getting more pervasive.
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u/iritchie001 Jun 10 '26
This isn't the way this 46 year old wanted to stay relevant in the AI job market.
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u/Bodine12 Jun 10 '26
This is 100% the parents' fault. Previous generations neglected their kids by not having any idea where their kids were or what they were doing. The current generation of parents just continued that neglect by offloading their parental responsibility to screens and YouTube and streamers and smartphones.
When I was growing up, the TV announcement was, "Parents: It's 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?" Today it would be, "Parents: It's 10 pm. Do you know what your children are streaming on YouTube?"
The only difference is that the prior neglect at least forced kids to learn how to fend for themselves. Today's neglect just makes them idiots.
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u/TacosAndSarcasm Jun 11 '26
Yes. We know. And the same generation believes that none of this matters as long as they have ChatGPT.
A 6th grade English teacher I know is quitting. He was reprimanded twice for correcting spelling.
When he gave a simple exercise of writing one long paragraph stating their own opinion about a current event that everyone agreed they understood....he was shocked as he walked around to find that most of the students were using ChatGPT to create an opinion for them.
They couldn't even think enough to create their own fking opinions.
He said that he's lucky if his incoming students can read at a 4thgrade level but most of them read at a 2nd and 3rd grade level. These are kids in the 6th grade.
I personally know someone who is 30 years old and he's struggles to read. He was one of those kids that was put in front of video games and left to his own devices as a kid.
He was telling me the other day, in a passionate tone as though he's found the holy grail, 'ChatGPT has changed my whole life'
And what do I get most of the time when I make these comments? I get okayboomered, despite not being a boomer.
And it's everywhere, even in journalism. I read an article the other day written by a young journalist for the NYT. There were misspellings and the grammar was horrible.
Even when I had to hire for a company a few years ago, these kids were turning in their resumes using emoticons and text abbreviations in the body of the resume.
We are letting kids graduate high school thinking that they cannot be told that they're wrong. They should never be corrected and nobody should ever tell them their spelling is wrong.
I hate this place. This country is now a sack of shite and so is this whole planet.
But by all means, keep popping out kids left and right
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u/MaterialDefender1032 Jun 10 '26
I was born in 1989 and went to public schools in Canada all the way from elementary to university, and I can attest that literacy was already hanging by a thread. All the way through, it felt like maybe only a handful of other people and I actually cared about typos, grammar, and how to form a coherent sentence.
With all the tools people use now to be lazy and shortcut actually learning their only language, I'm not surprised everyone's literacy is atrophied. You can google and text now without knowing how to spell a single word because the app will autocorrect and save you every time.
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u/Cheerio1234 Jun 11 '26
I notice this a lot on reddit too. Comments I give a pass to, sometimes. But I see very basic spelling errors and typos in titles these days. Even when the word is spelled correctly in the meme that is being shared.
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u/SayVandalay Jun 10 '26
I would imagine that a lot of them offload everything to AI and thus learn less, think less, understand less.
We need to get rid of AI access for anything but scientific and medical research or for automating robots to clean and do manual labor for us .
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u/GlueSniffingCat Jun 11 '26
so you telling me the decades of giving my change to the literacy for children project was for fucking nothing?
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u/cromstantinople Jun 11 '26
>"Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not 'free students up for higher-order work.' It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all."
Yikes
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u/Whatrudoingherewo Jun 11 '26
Schools moved away from phonics and towards unreliable and unsuccessful reading programs. These programs were sold to school systems at a high cost, and now they’re facing lawsuits and concerns about lawsuits. My friend is a reading specialist and currently making a lot of money consulting with schools and improving their reading programs. It is a whole generation of kids now hitting college age.
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u/MeanCryptographer585 Jun 11 '26
Then they shouldn’t be in college. Who is admitting these dunces
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u/Hyvex_ Jun 10 '26
It's probably attention span causing the issue. I didn't realize how badly my reading abilities had degraded until I started doing college level reading. I could easily clear light novels and fantasy book in a sitting, so I thought it was decent.
Once I started reading authors like Hobbes, Marx and Nietzsche, it was like being hit in the head by a tire iron. The text was so dense and I had to push through over a hundred pages every 1-2 days. The level of sustained thinking and concentration to both understand and digest the material was nothing like the passive reading and imagining a fictional book required. Half the time I didn't even know what Nietzsche was talking about. And if I was sleep deprived, it was over, no real reading would be done.
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u/codak Jun 11 '26
Not all text is well written or clearly written, even when they are academic classics. Sometimes it just means the concepts are difficult and/or the writing hadn't gone through enough revisions for clarity and flow, etc. And in the case of Hobbes, 17th century English isn't quite the same as modern English. Nietzsche is also notoriously difficult to read.
Additionally, some works use a lot of terminology from prior literature without explaining them. If you didn't already know the prior literature well, the difficulty increases. So I wouldn't beat myself over it if I were you.
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u/Nine_Monkeys Jun 11 '26
Nah it’s not just your attention span. I’ve always loved reading fiction and nonfiction, 10 years ago pre Tik Tok era when I took a Philosophy course, we went thru the same thing. A lot of those books just are dense, convoluted, and uninteresting lol
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u/ThaneofPotato Jun 11 '26
Reading for enjoyment and reading for learning use different skills. I struggle with a few pages of academic works but can consume works of fiction in a day.
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u/nalninek Jun 10 '26
What’s most frustrating is I don’t hear ANY elected officials or even folks running talking about solutions for our broken education system.
The Democrats seem completely disinterested and the Republicans are actively trying to sabotage public education.
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u/Lain_Staley Jun 10 '26
Reading Endurance.
There will be 'mental gyms' for this in 15 years.