With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion!
There has been quite a lot of panic lately about the state of reading among the youth, whether it’s Gen Z college students or British children. I have to admit that I don’t quite know how to interpret this.
On the one hand, sure, read the articles, it seems like there’s a problem. On the other hand, ever since I entered publishing in the early 2000’s, people have always been panicking about kids not reading enough.
What do you think? Have screens won and are kids reading less than they were in previous eras? Or is this a perennial moral panic and things are pretty much as they’ve ever been?
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Art: Reading by the Brook by Winslow Homer
Hi! I’m Drea, I’ve been following this blog for a very long time, but I rarely comment.
2 yrs ago, after yrs of assuming my only path to success was traditional publishing, I took the plunge with the now defunct kindle vella app — yes there’s a story as to why I made this choice.
Currently I’m writing an enemies to lovers Pirate Romantasy, editing an apocalyptic wolf shifter pnr that lends heavily from my fantasy roots, and I just released (self published) my first contemporary romance.
I have a YA fantasy romance, the first in my epic saga, plus more PNR, Romantasy and contemporary romance to edit (which I’ve written full novels of).
My life has gone sideways the past two months and I can’t wait for things to settle and be able to complete these projects.
I think kids read less today than they have in the past. I think it’s especially true with kids over the age of 10. It strikes me that there are far more recreational choices today than ever before. With streaming services, social media, and video games galore it’s hard to imagine many kids would want to sit alone and read for hours. When I think back to my youth (in the dark ages), I often read because there wasn’t much else to do. It was perfect for a rainy day or when we had to “play quiet”. It was a great way to end the day after homework and before bed, especially if there wasn’t anything on TV. I’m not saying that kids don’t like good stories, only that there are so many more ways to get those stories.
My two granddaughters are voracious readers. They read every day. Ages 7 and 14.
I teach 6th grade English (because writing wasn’t paying any bills!) and let me tell you: the state of literacy is terrifying. It’s not *just* that they aren’t reading, the real problem is that they literally cannot. It’s breath taking. We’ve apparently noticed the problem and are implementing “the science of teaching reading” because kids are graduating high school functionally illiterate. But that means for about 15 years, we were not teaching them how to read. We stopped using phonics. We stopped grammar lessons and spelling practice. We don’t teach handwriting. I wish people knew that the curriculum actually had teachers telling kids to look at pictures and guess at what the words were. Now I’ve got another crop of fresh-to-middle schoolers, and they read at a lower level than last year’s group. As a whole, they have no reading stamina. They read graphic novels almost exclusively, if they read anything. Which means they have little to no exposure to grammar and syntax. They don’t understand quotation marks, they don’t understand paragraphs, and the majority of them cannot compose a single coherent sentence. It is terrifying to behold. I’ve told my now adult offspring that I will be homeschooling my grandchildren because I don’t have any trust in the institution I work for. I see what comes out of elementary schools every day, and it is not good, friends.
There are, of course, students who do not follow this rule. But finding a 6th grade student who enjoys reading is definitely the exception. They really stand out because they’re so unusual. I work at a very large school in an extremely affluent suburban area. (Actually, our school district is in the top 10 wealthiest in the nation.) We have almost 1800 students (grades 6, 7, and 8) and I bet I could count on my digits how many students in each grade read real novels for fun. We do not assign reading, we read aloud to the class when we want to do novel studies. Even then, the students cannot follow along in a book. We provide fill-in-the-blank sentence stems for them to “write”. Even then, the majority of the work is gibberish. We provide all manner of technological assistance, like text-to-speech and speech-to-text, so that they do not have to read fluently or be able to spell. Even then, there is little to no comprehension.
We talk a lot about crises in this country. I live this every day. A bona fide, tangible, the-world-might-be-ending crisis that is in my face every minute of every day. Let’s not kid ourselves with the question of whether or not children are *choosing* to read less. I promise you that most of them do not have a choice. They simply cannot.
Yikes yikes yikes….
Absolutely true – and very terrifying! My six kids now range from ages 42 to 29 – and we homeschooled. When my oldest was 10, a professional chided me for teaching him grammar, penmanship, and spelling, because kids didn’t need those skills anymore; computers did the work for them. All my kids spent a couple of years back in the school system when I became a single parent. My 30-year-old struggled with look-say reading in the first grade and had a teacher who coached the kids to “guess” the words” by looking at the pictures. I finally pulled out the old phonics readers and taught her to read the summer before her second grade; the 4-year-old learned on his own by hanging out with us. My 34-year-old has contemporaries that can’t sign their names because they never learned. And I have grandchildren in middle school who cannot read. WriteOn Joliet gave away locally authored books last year at a back-to-school Kids Fest and met plenty of kids (elementary and middle grade) who said they cannot read. Taking away all the electronic distractions in the world so kids can read instead can’t make up for the fact that kids simply can’t read. And for those who can, many kids (even at a high school and college levels) can’t comprehend what they are reading or even have the ability to digest many pages of text. This is, unfortunately, not new. And it’s getting worse. I have no solutions, just dismay.
Becka’s comment is depressing and frightening. It must be exhausting to deal with these challenges every day.
On the plus side:
The children’s book section (including Young Adult) at Barnes and Noble is massive. Someone’s reading all those books! Yes, some are required school reading, and Young Adult has many adult readers. Even so, there’s an awful lot of kids out there enjoying reading.