I watched Jared's video first, then read your article. Thanks so much for sharing your own reading experiences, Lana. Like others, my heart went out to you, knowing fairy tales and adventure books weren't readily available to you. You reminded me that, although we didn't have many books at home either, what we did have in the village was a library. I spent hours there, years of my life, borrowing books and returning for more as I grew older.
I love that the literacy alarm, as you so rightly say, is being raised. The thought of young people struggling to read an entire book really got my attention. If this is a growing trend, it's deeply worrying for sure. By my bedside, I have a small tower of books on the go: poetry (always), a mythological tale, a memoir, not two, and a nature book. Ah, the magic of bookshops prevails!
I also LOVE, love, luv reading, and can’t imagine my world without it. Students do find the page boring, not everyone, but many students are so glued to the vast entertainment their phone offers that I think a book feels like school work. Some places, like in Cambodia, where I live as an expat, don’t have much of a literary culture either, compounding the issue. Time will tell how this all plays out. Thanks for stopping by Deborah!
"Growing up, I wasn’t read to, nor did I grow up surrounded by children’s books, but reading was modeled." <-- You could have been writing about me too, Lani! I can't remember why or how I fell in love with reading. For me, I think it was a way to escape the family dynamics. A way for me to be in my own world. And I've just never stopped.
I do think that people have stopped reading, though. For instance, several of my college friends, who were once bookworms like me, have stopped reading. And they do say that just read "online" - which I know means social media and the links they get through social media. 🙁
I can 100% relate to what you said, as well! "I think it was a way to escape the family dynamics. A way for me to be in my own world." And to this day, I need alone time, with my book, and this is important to me.
Reading online has definitely replaced reading magazines, novels, and newspapers. There are, of course, die hard fans of print, but the convenience of reading online is incredible. But even if that amount was equal or surpassed the amount of reading a book, I'd still argue that something important has been lost. Thanks, Lou for the restack and for sharing your thoughts here! 🙏💖
I find everything you say here to be startlingly true - especially the bit about not reaching a state of boredom anymore. That is pretty profound. When I was working at the library, I know that teachers struggled with students wanting to do book reports on graphic novels instead of a "real" chapter book. Big sigh! (And at the risk of sounding ancient when I did my A Levels, I had to memorize quotes from Chaucer from the original text!!)
My eldest son was always a keen reader - and still is - but he maintains that people now read in a completely different way. He reads a lot online as well as books but it is, he says, all reading.
I am not sure about this especially after reading your post today. That said, in days gone by, we also had no alternatives. People brought a book to read at the dentist, now it's the phone. Now there are audio books, interactive reading etc. I sympathize hugely with teachers like your good self. It's so hard. The internet has a lot to answer for not the least of which is messing with our collective attention spans ... Great thoughts, Lani.
The phone masks feelings of boredom. Truth. My students admit to this. We used to think that just creativity sprung out of these moments, but I also believe boredom gives us time to reflect or take a much-needed break from the onslaught of content and adverts. What we do when we spend hours scrolling is, essentially, a form of insanity.
Thank you, Sue, for being part of the conversation! I love hearing your thoughts. xo
😆 I know that can’t be true since so many people I know are still in love with the joy of books and there are still so many book clubs around! But, maybe it’s less popular than it used to be? 🤷🏻♀️
Those of us who are no longer in school do have the advantage of getting to read whatever we want instead of something laid out by curriculum. Many times I would barely read the book assigned at school but be a voracious reader of books I was into on my own. 🤭
I think for decades there have been studies regarding reading. During the pandemic, I want to say there was an uptick in reading. There's also been this seesaw re: print vs e-books, and yes, folks still like print books. 📚
That being said, this specific video was referencing the complaints that professors at Ivy League universities have been experiencing with their students. So, while you might be deeply engaged into books 😁 and various reading communities, people are concerned about today's youth and their inability to read whole novels.
At the same time, I keenly remember my friends young teen girls absorbed in novels while we adults had a catch up. These things are hard to speculate, but I was tempted to reply because I had such a strong reaction to the video. Thanks, Atreyee. 🙏
"No one gets bored anymore": I can see how this is true. I remember that how during a summer holiday at my grandmother's I picked some romance novels my aunties stored there because I was bored. It might have kicked off the reading habit, which I acquired later. But I also suffer from concentration problems and nowadays I find it difficult to sit and read for hours - maybe it is just that I seldom have that much time.
I found it worrying though that people pursuing higher education are not able to read a whole book. Reading and analysing books are important skills to develop critical thinking, in my view, as well as the capacity to focus for a longer time on one thing. School should definitively help students develop those skills early on. Not all children come from family who have a reading habit and therefore it should be foster through formal education.
I loved the video on the abacus! I was fascinated by it when I was in China, the accountants of the company I worked for in the late nineties used it every day!
Thank you for your thorough reply, Lauca! 💖I was mesmerized by the abacus video. Now, I want to find one. Seriously. I'm an old bird, but I love the idea of toying with something new.
And yes, you got it. Higher education should be the time to read, read, and read. I 100% agree with everything you said.
As far as lacking concentration for longer periods, you got me thinking about how, sometimes I read just a few pages before going to sleep, and that's okay. In this day and age of TikTok and IG book bloggers, I've definitely felt the pressure to read more and faster, but that's just not how I like to roll. 😅
This makes me incredibly sad and I do think it's true. My partner's 14- and 16-year-old kids, who are both really smart, with intellectual parents, don't read books. The 14-year-old says she's never read an entire book.
To put an optimistic spin on it, hopefully, in the future, students will find reading whole novels engaging and nourishing. It's difficult to speculate, especially since the world keeps changing so fast!
P.S. I'm glad to hear from you. I almost emailed you the other day to touch base. xo
Aw, thanks. You might have stopped receiving my posts if you use an RSS feed -- I moved it off Wordpress and have lost a bunch of functionality :( Anyway, hopefully it will all be restored soon -- I'm working on it. xx
OH, I was wondering why I hadn’t seen you post in so long. Doesn’t tech suck so much when it doesn’t work right? 😭Fingers crossed. Hope to see you soon, xo
Interesting post, Lani. I'm a keen book reader myself, but I wonder whether we shouldn't set aside our book fetish and think of reading as being a freestanding, platform agnostic kind of activity. If we do, we might find that there is more reading going on than ever before. We may not admire much of the text, but people are reading. And there's plenty of excellent reading outside of books, too.
But I might want to go further and suggest that we need less reading and more thinking/reflecting...(including about what we read).
Absolutely. In one of his later videos he stresses the importance of memorization (prior knowledge) and critical thinking and how they go hand in hand. He also did concede that there is obviously lots of reading going on with devices. But, the alarm was originally sounded when uni professors claimed that students no longer have the capacity to read books. So it raises an interesting question: do we adapt to students new ways of consuming material or do we push for the value of reading a whole book?
I'd say, not everyone has stopped reading, and not everyone enjoyed reading in the past either... Most of our grandchildren are avid readers and keep asking for books when offered a gift. I come from a family of 5 children, I was always an avid reader, but my brothers' interest in books varied greatly. My father was a reader and had a big library, my mother enjoyed being read to (by my dad)!
Of course all those screens have had an impact, and many people seem to enjoy reading books on screens... (or listening to audiobooks). Perhaps the perceived lack of reading at school also has something to do with the reading materials?
The video drew upon antidotal evidence from Ivy League professors complaining that students can no longer read books. The title feels hyperbolic, but it's attempting the raise the alarm. It might be true that younger students read a great deal on their devices, but the concern is can they read longer formats? Have they lost interest?
I am not sure if everyone has stopped reading - mainly because I am biased, I love reading and am part of a book club! But like you, I am curious as to whether reading habits have changed with the rise of tech/social media. It would be foolish to ignore their role, and I wonder if younger generations than me have had a vastly different exposure to books/reading than I did. (A friend of mine who works at a British university teaching Eng Lit despairs at the lack of reading that her students do).
Yeah, the video drew upon NYT type of articles that sounded the alarm that professors at the most elite institutions are struggling to get students to read books. I think for most of us here on Substack, reading is a pleasure, but it's the younger generation that's cause for concern.
I watched Jared's video first, then read your article. Thanks so much for sharing your own reading experiences, Lana. Like others, my heart went out to you, knowing fairy tales and adventure books weren't readily available to you. You reminded me that, although we didn't have many books at home either, what we did have in the village was a library. I spent hours there, years of my life, borrowing books and returning for more as I grew older.
I love that the literacy alarm, as you so rightly say, is being raised. The thought of young people struggling to read an entire book really got my attention. If this is a growing trend, it's deeply worrying for sure. By my bedside, I have a small tower of books on the go: poetry (always), a mythological tale, a memoir, not two, and a nature book. Ah, the magic of bookshops prevails!
I also LOVE, love, luv reading, and can’t imagine my world without it. Students do find the page boring, not everyone, but many students are so glued to the vast entertainment their phone offers that I think a book feels like school work. Some places, like in Cambodia, where I live as an expat, don’t have much of a literary culture either, compounding the issue. Time will tell how this all plays out. Thanks for stopping by Deborah!
"Growing up, I wasn’t read to, nor did I grow up surrounded by children’s books, but reading was modeled." <-- You could have been writing about me too, Lani! I can't remember why or how I fell in love with reading. For me, I think it was a way to escape the family dynamics. A way for me to be in my own world. And I've just never stopped.
I do think that people have stopped reading, though. For instance, several of my college friends, who were once bookworms like me, have stopped reading. And they do say that just read "online" - which I know means social media and the links they get through social media. 🙁
I can 100% relate to what you said, as well! "I think it was a way to escape the family dynamics. A way for me to be in my own world." And to this day, I need alone time, with my book, and this is important to me.
Reading online has definitely replaced reading magazines, novels, and newspapers. There are, of course, die hard fans of print, but the convenience of reading online is incredible. But even if that amount was equal or surpassed the amount of reading a book, I'd still argue that something important has been lost. Thanks, Lou for the restack and for sharing your thoughts here! 🙏💖
"Reading builds empathy. It strengthens emotional intelligence. And that, my friend, is a very big deal."
Amen!
Thank you for picking up on that! 🙏💖Because to me, that's the biggest concern.
I find everything you say here to be startlingly true - especially the bit about not reaching a state of boredom anymore. That is pretty profound. When I was working at the library, I know that teachers struggled with students wanting to do book reports on graphic novels instead of a "real" chapter book. Big sigh! (And at the risk of sounding ancient when I did my A Levels, I had to memorize quotes from Chaucer from the original text!!)
My eldest son was always a keen reader - and still is - but he maintains that people now read in a completely different way. He reads a lot online as well as books but it is, he says, all reading.
I am not sure about this especially after reading your post today. That said, in days gone by, we also had no alternatives. People brought a book to read at the dentist, now it's the phone. Now there are audio books, interactive reading etc. I sympathize hugely with teachers like your good self. It's so hard. The internet has a lot to answer for not the least of which is messing with our collective attention spans ... Great thoughts, Lani.
The phone masks feelings of boredom. Truth. My students admit to this. We used to think that just creativity sprung out of these moments, but I also believe boredom gives us time to reflect or take a much-needed break from the onslaught of content and adverts. What we do when we spend hours scrolling is, essentially, a form of insanity.
Thank you, Sue, for being part of the conversation! I love hearing your thoughts. xo
Also very strangely, I wrote about something so similar nearly 10 years ago!
If you have time, have a looksee:
https://www.speranzanow.com/?p=333
I read and commented. Thanks, Sue! Why am I not surprised that we both have longstanding blogs outside of Substack? 😁💖
😆 I know that can’t be true since so many people I know are still in love with the joy of books and there are still so many book clubs around! But, maybe it’s less popular than it used to be? 🤷🏻♀️
Those of us who are no longer in school do have the advantage of getting to read whatever we want instead of something laid out by curriculum. Many times I would barely read the book assigned at school but be a voracious reader of books I was into on my own. 🤭
I think for decades there have been studies regarding reading. During the pandemic, I want to say there was an uptick in reading. There's also been this seesaw re: print vs e-books, and yes, folks still like print books. 📚
That being said, this specific video was referencing the complaints that professors at Ivy League universities have been experiencing with their students. So, while you might be deeply engaged into books 😁 and various reading communities, people are concerned about today's youth and their inability to read whole novels.
At the same time, I keenly remember my friends young teen girls absorbed in novels while we adults had a catch up. These things are hard to speculate, but I was tempted to reply because I had such a strong reaction to the video. Thanks, Atreyee. 🙏
"No one gets bored anymore": I can see how this is true. I remember that how during a summer holiday at my grandmother's I picked some romance novels my aunties stored there because I was bored. It might have kicked off the reading habit, which I acquired later. But I also suffer from concentration problems and nowadays I find it difficult to sit and read for hours - maybe it is just that I seldom have that much time.
I found it worrying though that people pursuing higher education are not able to read a whole book. Reading and analysing books are important skills to develop critical thinking, in my view, as well as the capacity to focus for a longer time on one thing. School should definitively help students develop those skills early on. Not all children come from family who have a reading habit and therefore it should be foster through formal education.
I loved the video on the abacus! I was fascinated by it when I was in China, the accountants of the company I worked for in the late nineties used it every day!
Thank you for your thorough reply, Lauca! 💖I was mesmerized by the abacus video. Now, I want to find one. Seriously. I'm an old bird, but I love the idea of toying with something new.
And yes, you got it. Higher education should be the time to read, read, and read. I 100% agree with everything you said.
As far as lacking concentration for longer periods, you got me thinking about how, sometimes I read just a few pages before going to sleep, and that's okay. In this day and age of TikTok and IG book bloggers, I've definitely felt the pressure to read more and faster, but that's just not how I like to roll. 😅
This makes me incredibly sad and I do think it's true. My partner's 14- and 16-year-old kids, who are both really smart, with intellectual parents, don't read books. The 14-year-old says she's never read an entire book.
To put an optimistic spin on it, hopefully, in the future, students will find reading whole novels engaging and nourishing. It's difficult to speculate, especially since the world keeps changing so fast!
P.S. I'm glad to hear from you. I almost emailed you the other day to touch base. xo
Aw, thanks. You might have stopped receiving my posts if you use an RSS feed -- I moved it off Wordpress and have lost a bunch of functionality :( Anyway, hopefully it will all be restored soon -- I'm working on it. xx
OH, I was wondering why I hadn’t seen you post in so long. Doesn’t tech suck so much when it doesn’t work right? 😭Fingers crossed. Hope to see you soon, xo
Interesting post, Lani. I'm a keen book reader myself, but I wonder whether we shouldn't set aside our book fetish and think of reading as being a freestanding, platform agnostic kind of activity. If we do, we might find that there is more reading going on than ever before. We may not admire much of the text, but people are reading. And there's plenty of excellent reading outside of books, too.
But I might want to go further and suggest that we need less reading and more thinking/reflecting...(including about what we read).
Absolutely. In one of his later videos he stresses the importance of memorization (prior knowledge) and critical thinking and how they go hand in hand. He also did concede that there is obviously lots of reading going on with devices. But, the alarm was originally sounded when uni professors claimed that students no longer have the capacity to read books. So it raises an interesting question: do we adapt to students new ways of consuming material or do we push for the value of reading a whole book?
Perhaps we should try both approaches? And also focus on developing reading skills across all media.
I'd say, not everyone has stopped reading, and not everyone enjoyed reading in the past either... Most of our grandchildren are avid readers and keep asking for books when offered a gift. I come from a family of 5 children, I was always an avid reader, but my brothers' interest in books varied greatly. My father was a reader and had a big library, my mother enjoyed being read to (by my dad)!
Of course all those screens have had an impact, and many people seem to enjoy reading books on screens... (or listening to audiobooks). Perhaps the perceived lack of reading at school also has something to do with the reading materials?
The video drew upon antidotal evidence from Ivy League professors complaining that students can no longer read books. The title feels hyperbolic, but it's attempting the raise the alarm. It might be true that younger students read a great deal on their devices, but the concern is can they read longer formats? Have they lost interest?
I am not sure if everyone has stopped reading - mainly because I am biased, I love reading and am part of a book club! But like you, I am curious as to whether reading habits have changed with the rise of tech/social media. It would be foolish to ignore their role, and I wonder if younger generations than me have had a vastly different exposure to books/reading than I did. (A friend of mine who works at a British university teaching Eng Lit despairs at the lack of reading that her students do).
Yeah, the video drew upon NYT type of articles that sounded the alarm that professors at the most elite institutions are struggling to get students to read books. I think for most of us here on Substack, reading is a pleasure, but it's the younger generation that's cause for concern.