A thing that I got very badly wrong is that I dismissed a lot of anxieties about the decline of reading - after all, look how well-educated today’s kids are - as nostalgic nonsense, but Kemi Badenoch’s “trying to make a case without doing the reading first” approach is, I think, troublingly typical.
Comments
Not great...
I'm not convienced the issue is with younger cohorts, especially as I've seen the 'stops reading at 15, starts again at 25' cycle a few times
And the Zen Master says, "We'll see"
https://youtu.be/B2L1-TgfKb4?si=XDxLKZUlHvs7zS8x
They know a lot more grammar than I was taught, but they hate it
*Hampstead Central Library on Arkwright Road.
Actually, there wasn't enough at primary when I was there either.
Both my kids read until they became teenagers and now I don't think either of them read anything other than what they have to do for school
"But it's good read", she retorted.
"Yes, but a BOOK!" he replied.
I think there are lots of issues w/ lit gcse (amount of content, the text choices, Lang is a nonsense) but a wider issue is the things competing for everyone's attention. Plenty of adults don't read for pleasure much nowadays either.
Kids seemingly devour all the HP books then go back and read them again and never read anything else.
Until they move on to Manga.
Given they came out when I was eleven or twelve and I’m now in my late thirties (and plenty of my peers read), I’m not sure this is the cause of reading reluctance in our current younger generation.
I think they feel safe. But my concern would be that it isn’t a challenge.
(With the proviso that all professional fields tend to follow international trends.)
It was necessary.
https://theorymatters.substack.com/p/reading-as-a-warning-light
They trust whatever the machine is spitting out without fact checking!
Not sure how applicable that would be today, though.
"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it
feels about education.”
~ Harold Howe
"Men of power have no time to read, yet men who do not read are unfit for power."