Three Theses on the Literacy Crisis

ssamclemens 2 days ago 13 commentsRead Article on trevoraleo.substack.com

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

60% Positive

Analyzed from 724 words in the discussion.

Discussion (13 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

AhCoonu7•about 2 hours ago

My personal theory is main reason is that we don't practice reading as much in this era. Some claim it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at skill. Dumping that many hours alone doesn't get you there though. Just like a weight lifter you need to keep pushing your limit by adding a bit of weight to the bar from time to time to gain muscle rather the just retain what you currently have.

Between Steam, Netflix, and your pick of social media there are no end of ways to keep yourself busy in more immediately gratifying ways. Getting in the hours and stretching that mental muscle a bit in book form no longer happens naturally. To be as literate as the generation before you you almost have to consciously choose to put in an equal effort since boredom is not as plentiful as it once was.

That said there are is no lack of other contributing factors as well, but reduced experience as the reason in my opinion seems to best explain why the average dips without the the whole curve dipping.

sandworm101•3 minutes ago

Reading a book doesnt necessarily exercise the mind. The vast majority of books are total junk. And, unlike weights, it is possible to become dumber by reading the wrong books. Spend four hours a day reading vanity press tripe and you would be better off spending those hours with netflix.

songhonglei1985•24 minutes ago

This resonates but I think there's a framing issue. From building educational coding tools for kids, what I've observed is that the volume of textual engagement hasn't necessarily dropped — it's migrated to different forms.

An 11-year-old debugging a Python script is doing intense, sustained reading. Parsing error messages, reading documentation, tracing logic through nested conditionals. A kid building in Roblox Studio is reading and writing Lua. These are literacy acts — just not the kind that show up on NAEP scores or novel-reading surveys.

The real gap isn't hours logged. It's transfer. The kid who can read 200 lines of GDScript to debug why their character won't jump doesn't automatically transfer that stamina to reading a history textbook. The cognitive muscles are being built, but they're specialized.

From what I've seen, when you meet kids where they are — letting them read and write code to solve problems they care about — they'll happily put in hours of focused textual work. The appetite is there. We're measuring the wrong meal.

pcf•19 minutes ago

Even the headline is difficult to understand for the affected group.

Perhaps, soon, it will be necessary to phrase it "Zoolander" style. Maybe something like "Top 3 Shocking Reasons Why You Can't Read Good No More!"

firasd•about 1 hour ago

When it comes to undergrads I doubt people (let's say from the 1980s onwards) were ever doing all the reading assigned in the syllabus anyway. Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof

oersted•about 1 hour ago

I found The Republic really quite entertaining! And it is surprisingly readable for such an old text.

It is written like a play where characters with real personalities have fierce and witty debates. It is rather fun!

DrewADesign•37 minutes ago

I don’t think they were arguing it was a bad or boring book — I think they were arguing that most students don’t have time/energy to do all that reading for all 5 or whatever classes they are taking every semester. I certainly didn’t.

JMKH42•20 minutes ago

I also read that one. Though certainly I also skipped some texts in college.

gregdaniels421•about 1 hour ago

> Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof

I think this comment says more about you than actual students who care. I did all the readings, even the extra ones. So did all the people in my study group for the class. Maybe select for more studious friends.

popalchemist•about 1 hour ago

It's not an isolated incident, he is describing an increasingly common attitude which is utilitarian/"realist" at best and a grotesque materialist corruption of the liberal arts education ideal at worst. Education is generally no longer seen as an end in and of itself, but as a means to more money; insofar as one accepts that view, learning the material is aside the point; getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

jruohonen•about 1 hour ago

> getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

But then there still is a lever, I suppose, including for reading.

runarberg•about 1 hour ago

I‘m not super versed in sociology of education but I was always under the impression that over assigning was a real problem in undergraduate and collage setting (even in high school to an extent I heard last).

My post-modern mind went straight to thinking this was the system working as desired. We over-assign to weed out students of from lower classes such that they are more stressed and less likely to graduate, therefor maintaining a status quo of higher classes being more educated and more deserving of the fruits of the labor of the less educated working classes.

sublinear•37 minutes ago

Lower socioeconomic status students are getting most of their stress from elsewhere. Compromising the syllabus doesn't work. All these debates have been tried before.