8 ms·
I don’t know if this matters much. When I was in school it was rare to actually read a book assignment anyways, and I’m sure with LLMs now it’s less. I’ve star
by stevewodil 10mo ago
I don’t know if this matters much. When I was in school it was rare to actually read a book assignment anyways, and I’m sure with LLMs now it’s less.
I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
- anon7000 10mo agoIt’s odd, I read ravenously as a kid/teen, as did my siblings. You need to read what you enjoy, and for it to not be forced. (For example, summer reading at the library gave out prizes kids cared about for reading books.) Plus, we didn’t have access to much digital media like TV/video games (though it was the early 2010s) because my parents were strict, so books were a solid source of entertainment.
- brightball 10mo agoI read a lot of books that fit my tastes as a kid, usually adventure/fantasy genre stuff. Never enjoyed the stuff that got assigned in school though. I’d probably like it now.
- Natsu 10mo agoAnything you're forced to do too much you lose all enjoyment of. If you're given at least a bit of agency, it's far more enjoyable. I read because I wanted to all the time, but every reading assignment was a chore.
- watwut 10mo agoIt is not just it being homework. It is not like I hated evything in school - I actually discovered quite a few intersting things there. It is that books everyone here is said that kids dont read anymore or brags they read ... are just not interesting books for a kid.
- wkat4242 10mo agoThat was my problem too. Not in the US but in Europe. The stuff we had to read was all by 'highly acclaimed: authors who have carved out this niche of 'literature art ' between them. However their books were dusty, tough, whiny and horrible to get through. Yuck. I never read fiction in my own language ever again just in spite.
- RajT88 10mo agoI too read ravenously as a kid. Strangely, in the 90's we were never assigned full books in English classes, just short stories or chapters.
- amanaplanacanal 10mo agoI'm older than you (graduated high school in 1975). I read tons of sci-fi as a kid. I also don't remember reading any whole novels for English class. Maybe we did, but if so I have successfully blocked them out. I have been amazed at the number of houses I've been in over the years which didn't appear to contain a single book.
- saltcured 10mo agoI graduated high school in '92 (S.F. Bay Area) and can recall several assigned books we read for class in either junior high or high school. I think there were more, but these are the ones I can recall easily today. Pride and Prejudice. Last of the Mohicans. A Separate Peace. Tom Jones. Beowulf. Grendel. Crime and Punishment. Waiting for Godot. Tale of Two Cities. Also, several Shakespeare plays, though I am no longer sure which were read when. We also had other reading assignments where we chose our own books. The above were assigned to everyone.
- footy 10mo agointeresting. Assuming you're talking about high school I had a totally different experience, we were assigned maybe 6 books/semester for the year I spent in mainstream classes (and about double that when I did the IB program but I expected that to be uncommon)
- threethirtytwo 10mo agoIt doesn’t happen anymore because of phones and the internet. Most people in the past read because they had nothing to do and they were willing to invest the time into a good book. You sacrifice a lot of energy in order to get enjoyment from a book. Now with the internet there’s an unlimited stream of zero investment snippets of entertainment. People naturally dive into that because it’s more rational in the short term to do that. Schools stopped reading but it’s as a result of the way students behave. The causal driver is student behavior.
- expedition32 10mo agoGood point. I am old enough to have lived in a pre smartphone time. Hour long train rides would mean folks opened up a book or newspaper.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Telaneo 10mo ago> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives. It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.
- idle_zealot 10mo ago> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives The problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.
- DaSHacka 10mo agoOr, as we've seen recently, you can force them and they still won't be literate enough.
- aaplok 10mo agoYou could force kids to read books without forcing which books to read. The issue as always is to find a balance between giving kids agency and making sure they do what's right.
- lotsofpulp 10mo agoNow that creating written works is trivial, the new skill to have would be figuring out if what you are reading has an ulterior motive, such as advertising. Or even figuring out if it was created with the intent to have any utility at all for the reader. Other than avoiding any written works made after 2020, I am not sure what to tell my kids. Even trusting the claim that something was written after 2020 seems difficult, unless you have a physical print showing its age.
- BeFlatXIII 10mo agoThe kids don't hate classroom reading because of the reading; they hate it because of the associated curriculum. “Why were the curtains blue?” is a skill wasted on children. I only gained an appreciation for such meta-reading during a weeks-long TV Tropes bender during a spat of unemployment after getting fired from my first big-boy job.
- Ekaros 10mo agoMakes me wonder is wrong question been asked. Shouldn't it first be why were curtains described in first place?
- bgbntty2 10mo agoI think school ruined fiction books for me. I had to read long boring books about stories that didn't interest me, with useless sentences describing what the scene looked like or what someone had for dinner. Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases. Maybe if I wasn't forced to read a book in an outdated language about some Christian farmer 300 years ago while I was not in school, and if I could access a succinct version 1/10th of the length of the book, I'd read it. Maybe if I wasn't asked to describe minor details to prove I read the book, I'd actually focus on the story and not on every irrelevant detail. Maybe if my teacher didn't force their religious holier-than-thou attitude and allowed us to form our own opinions, I'd be more engaged. What school taught me was how to get away with not reading the books. I skimmed books by skipping tens of pages at a time or asked friends for the TL;DR or just got an F. Now I have a feeling of uneasiness and dread when I try to read fiction for fun. So I don't. Most 300 page fiction books I had to read could've easily been condensed to 30 pages without any loss of information. Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit. A lot of people won't care about poetry no matter how hard you try to force them to like it. And half of it was propaganda - how $nation survived $struggle, how $nation is so great or beautiful or how $hero did $ethical_thing.
- floren 10mo ago> Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases. no cap Mr Darcy ur parties are bussin fr fr
- bgbntty2 10mo agoI should've used "archaic" instead of "outdated". As in, "incomprehensible to someone speaking proper modern $language". Without a dictionary, a normal student couldn't understand what was being said in many sentences throughout the book. Some books actually had a dictionary in the end, but not for all the archaic words and phrases.
- 10mo ago
- amanaplanacanal 10mo agoI don't understand this. If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading? Or are we taking about kids who never read until school forced them to? From what I understand, if parents read to kids when they are little, they become readers who enjoy it.
- Telaneo 10mo ago> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading? I nearly did to me, or atleast the continual assignments did. It took a long time for me to pick up a fiction book again. School never assigned me technical writing and encyclopedias, so I continued to enjoy those, thankfully.
- 1718627440 10mo ago> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading? Yes. (n=1)
- watwut 10mo agoYes, because it amounts to several hours long homework. Kids are more slower then adults at reading, so this can easily amount to 10 hours of additional homework which you do on top of usual homework. So yes, if you spent 10 hours reading a book you don't care about this week, you don't feel like reading something else. You feel like you spent awful lot of time reading already and feel like reading is something like vacuum cleaning - duty but not something you do for fun.