I never understand where these anecdotes come from.
I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
So whatever the problem is, if there even is one, is less to do with school curriculums, english classes, screen time, or the availability of books, and more to do with the culture of many homes not prioritizing reading.
Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates. Same with crime. Kind of goes hand in hand. Education in blue cities needs to be fixed.
> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
> The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
Reading the expected books for school is very different from reading a lot privately at home.
I know quite many fellow pupils who read a lot privately, but detested reading the required books for school (they at best got some summaries somewhere, which in my opinion actually prepared you better for the tests since the people who write summaries typically know quite well which parts/topics of the books teachers consider to be important, and thus do quite some explanations on these).
On the other hand, I know fellow pupils who barely read anything in their free time (they had different interests), but for some reason actually liked (and liked reading) the books that you had to read for some classes.
Those quizzes are part of the problem. It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket.
People rarely read whole books anymore. I know very few adults in my life who read books, lots of people are put off by reading in school and never give it a try in their adult life.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
Required reading in school killed my interest in reading. When I graduated I was very happy that I wouldn't have to read books ever again.
It took me about 5 years or so until anime and manga got me to try another fiction book. That eventually led to reading more books. But when school was done I really did think that I wasn't going to touch a (fiction) book again.
---
It makes me wonder if kids in the future will have "required reading" where they have to play certain old video games. Will that make them hate video games?
In our local highschool (near Copenhagen, Denmark) they have scheduled reading time for all pupils while in school - weekly as part of their normal schoolday. That is, instead of normal class everyone needs to bring a book of their own choosing and read in it. No phones allowed during this time, so they can either read or stare out the window. The local library helps them find books of their own interest.
The idea is to get them find genres and books they like and find joy reading it, while not taking time out of their free time.
I did my PhD, and so I am not averse to reading. But its nowadays rare to find books that have value in being read completely. Most of the time, I would rather read a blog post or a paper, books are often outdated by the time they are published. Books are limited to scenarios where looking at a complete scene of something frozen in time is still instructive.
When I started high school in the early '90s, there was a compulsory summer reading list of 10–12 books, each ranging from 300–800 pages. Then we had to write essays about them. This was just our summer homework before the new school year started. I didn't enjoy it at all; at the same time, I read lots of easy fiction, sometimes several hundred pages a day.
My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.
Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
They're axing honors classes in our high schools so they can mix all the kids together for equity. But because some of the students can't read very well (even in 10th grade), they have to read the books aloud during class, since it would be inequitable to require the kids to read on their own at home.
Not surprisingly, when you're rate-limited by read-aloud speed, you can't get through that many books and excerpts are a natural response.
Probably has to do with the method for teaching reading being terrible for several years, depending on if the school dropped phonics.
I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules. This did not have good outcomes, and last I checked, there was a movement of schools going back to phonics.
Plausibly some kids might still be reading entire novels worth of text online on the regular. Think of all the massive fanfic archives (Including original fics) Lots of fanfic authors have fans of their own, and those have got to be coming from somewhere.
It doesn't need to be in dead tree format. It doesn't need to be famous authors. Just so long as they read!
Ye gods, that's like saying that youth may not be willing to consume a nutritious, balanced diet but we should rejoice that they are at least consuming vast quantities of sugar and fat. With vanishingly rare exceptions, fanfic is crap in textual form, laden to bursting with literary sins both venal and mortal.
The usefulness of reading books is not about what factual information you can glean from them. They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously. In that sense traditionally published works aren't going to offer all that much more than fanfiction.
Beyond a basic level of literacy, I'm not sure it's clear that reading pulp is better for any defined outcome than reading nothing. And I'm not sure why it would be. Once you are able to fully grasp a level of literacy, reading more of that level or below probably isn't really doing anything for you.
I am not responding to the examples, and I am not challenging the claim that famous vs not famous author does not matter, or that dead tree vs screen does not matter; I am raising the question whether it's just a quantity issue ("Just so long as they read", "entire novels worth of text").
Is it? I am not sure either way. Do you lose something by only reading chapters of a novel but never the whole story from the beginning to the end, even if you're still reading the same amount?
The writing quality and complexity of amateur content, even long-form is only around the level of a YA novel, truth be told alot of the stuff I was reading back in junior high in my school library had more depth than this.
It's good that you can get people reading, but reading the equivalent of pulp is very different from real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
Even without the, you know, murder stuff, I think we can do better for kids than another generation of "rationalists", considering the track record here.
Maybe even 99+% these days, seeing how easy it is to publish your first finger-painting online. Doesn't mean there isn't any good stuff, or even a lot of good stuff. 1% of a lot is still a lot.
(ps. and once you get people reading, they tend to keep doing it and develop taste over time. if it's even just a few who wouldn't have done it before. That's good, right?)
(pps. For example: at 2M words, I think pirateaba might exceed the "first 1M words are practice" threshold)
Who cares? If people enjoy it, let them enjoy it. I've read a few YA novels as an adult that I enjoyed, even though I regularly read more complex stuff.
Most people, for most of history, have only ever enjoyed what might be considered "low quality" entertainment - pulp fiction, shitty plays, etc.
> real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
Interestingly, even discounting YA and other stuff like that, you are only describing a very small subset of novels.
That cherry picks the best of the best without comparing them with the other 99.9% of their contemporaries who were pulp authors. They and their literary output are forgotten for good reasons.
If the works are so great then you've got nothing to worry about. Kids will read them on their own. Of course we both know that's not true, because the works are not that great.
They can read Minecraft strategy guides and Yahoo auction fan fics for all I care, since that's a lot better than nothing. I remember not wanting to read what school assigned me and how that killed my desire to read most fiction writing, and would prefer that not happen to more kids.
Art is a matter of taste, and if you go counter to your audience's taste, don't be surprised if they disengage.
>Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
Then you do not understand writing. If Yudkowski really had more interesting ideas, then he would have been able to do HPMOR as original fiction.
Rowling is actually really good, inventing very charming things, very fun sentences, and there's nothing even close in HPMOR (I have read it myself, and enjoyed it to some degree), but you really underestimate how good Rowling is.
Yes, pedantically, and as mentioned in the Notes in the Text in most editions, the Lord of the Rings is a single book sometimes published in three volumes.
Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.
We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.
> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.
Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted.
For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations.
Others could probably come up with additional examples.
... Prepare shorter or lighter materials for them to read, as this article suggests? Why has reading whole books become the holy grail of education system?
The said education system expected this:
> As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
Yeah, sounds like a very great way to filter out perhaps 20% of good readers and make sure the rest 80% will hate reading for the rest of their lives.
You can say it’s like childcare, sure. But learning has to come from somewhere. Parents seem to be doing less and less out of the classroom. Does that mean we’re just giving up then?
Maybe literature is just a terrible medium for culture except for the relatively brief period in human history when they were extraordinarily cheap to produce and disseminate compared to other cultural products.
Edit: but insofar as media criticism in education is bound to the book rather than the dominant forms of the day, I think children are being done a disservice.
It's still by far the best medium that requires you to be active and imaginative while packing the best information density and usability. Plus it works offline, without power, you can carry it around, &c.
Books forge you in a way short "content" we consume all day long today will never be able to, there are a few long form podcasts here and there that could be comparable but that's not the bulk of the media kids "consume"
Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
Slight problem with that if you would like to live in a functioning, thriving democracy: democracy in the sense of "one person, one vote" requires or at least greatly benefits from a broadly educated population. It's not sufficient, but very likely necessary.
The market has never solved anything in ways that are beneifical for humanity. (Just commenting on the first part of your comment, given that your last sentence implies you're just saying what market evangelists would say.)
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.
It’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.
I'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.
It 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.
I 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.
> 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.
The 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.
Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.
If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.
If the purpose is reading then we let kids read books that they like.
I can read a 1000 page history book but after 50 pages of Dutch literature I want to throw it in the garbage bin.
High school KILLS reading. Few survive.
You 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.
Now 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.
> 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.
I 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.
> 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.
I 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.
I was intrigued by the idea that it might be unreasonable for a book to include a glossary or dictionary to explain usages for made up or unfamiliar terms. I like that this list [1] exists because I was struggling to think of such a book. But then I thought about The Lord of the Rings, and it even includes an index of terms among its appendices, which is something I remember using to revisit parts of the story when I first read it. Another book with a glossary of terms is Dune, which I found fun and reasonable to avoid trying to explain hierarchy where doing so would break the narrative flow. But maybe that just means it's not as cleverly constructed or organized as it could have been--but the trade-off has to be how to engage a wide selection of readers...
Is the complaint about the dictionary at the end because it wasn't comprehensive? I'm unreasonably curious about the book and which phrases were included and which were not.
I think all written works occur in a context that should be taken into account when thinking critically about them. That context is temporal and linguistic and is more apparent when you consider something like Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Understanding it requires either a modern reinterpretation or consideration given to the sociolinguistic context in which it was written.
I think you are missing the broader point: why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with? It's not as if there is a dearth of more modern works. It seems like the main function of selecting older works is to make it artificially harder for students to read.
> why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with?
I think there's a trivial answer which is that all things you encounter are fundamentally from an alien context. The degree of alien and intention of the action are the things to consider before proceeding.
For example, why would one choose to read the account of a survivor of tragedy? To develop some amount of (emotional or cognitive) empathy? To learn a broader way of thinking that could apply to a future situation? Most simply: to learn from the past.
If the goal is entertainment, evaluate your participation such that you maximize your utility. If the goal is learning, one should be wary of premature rejection without sufficient context to avoid missing the lesson. And there is an annoying reality in which most situations can teach something.
God forbid we learn new words or learn words form the past... Why even bother with history right? It's just old stuff anyways let's focus on new stuff, what could these old things teach us anyways
Meanwhile my grandma still knew how to speak Latin at 70+, which she learned in school as a teenager
I sometimes take pleasure at reading old language ... and still think that giving it to kids as introduction to reading is absurd.
If they read 10 interesting books a year adding one like that to the mix or offer them the option is great. If they did not encountered interesting bool after agw of 7 when parents stopped reading them, no.
And interesting books for kids are there. Plenty of them of all kind, including pure action/adventure stuff. Including those related to movies or games they play. It is not lack of resources.
> Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit.
Yes and no. I used to start reading at 4 years old, but I forcedly used to memorize some rhymes at 3 years old. Most folk don't believe it is possible to read so early (though Eliezer Yudkowsky has reported about similar age). But my point is - how would I learn reading so early without that poetry?
I don't really like poetry exactly as rest of the fiction genre. And I am still sure it is not shit even for those who are struggling of doing that. I consider poetry exercises as sport exercises: today you claim that some specific muscle is not important for you, but tomorrow you get some injury which happened because of some weak muscle.
But you have also said one important word - propaganda. This is what really shitting any education and propaganda seems like the monster from the Nitzsche's quote "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster".
I also learned to read at 3. I actually remember the switch from illiterate to literate, as I remember realizing that just by looking at road signs I would automatically read them. I told my sister, who couldn't read yet, that there was a downside, as you could never look at language without reading it ever again!
Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation (what is the number system for each hand), spatial reasoning (where is each hand) and categorization (what is each hand).
There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.
Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.
That is the program, yes. I’m not trying to sell you on it, just sharing our experience.
I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.
I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
If you threatened me with 3+ hours a day of speed reading clocks instead of a normal summer I'd probably double down on effort too. And probably not in a way that's healthy long term.
Well, it wasn't a threat. He knew exactly what he'd been struggling with from 1st grade on (officially minor ADHD) and we were trying really hard to keep him off of medication. Since the program has finished he's asked to do it again several times (but we haven't because it's expensive). I've thought about teaching him programming by having him build his own clock trainer.
It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.
- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.
- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.
- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.
- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.
It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.
He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.
Well that is interesting and if you had results then that's all that matters for your family of course.
But sorry to clarify I'm still hung up on the "8 handed clock" thing - what does that mean? What information is displayed on the clocks other than hours, minutes, and seconds?
Hours, minutes, seconds, degrees, arcminutes, arcseconds... I could try to read 6, but honestly I doubt I'd even be able to see the arcseconds hand, it would be moving so quickly.
I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.
I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.
> Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
okay, but if you care about recall and activating regions of the brain that create a better understanding of what you're learning, handwriting wins according to research.
But is there a difference between cursive and block lettering? I fully agree with your overall point about handwritten notes being far superior to typed notes. It forces you to filter out extraneous information instead of being a live transcriptionist of your professor.
I've found drilling notes via method of loci of visualized flashcards/facts for this to be superior for myself which I always sourced from typed notes. Not really familiar with the research that cursive would improve over it.
Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd.
More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting
Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
If it's something I want people to read, I'd never dare write it in cursive, because if I did, I wouldn't count on them being able to read it.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
I grew up in a world where everyone knew cursive, and until this sort of discussion became popular in recent years, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me that there were many people who didn't know. But I guess they had to cut some things out of the curriculum and it's not as useful as it used to be.
I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.
For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.
> Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
Probably yes to both counts.
However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.
Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.
I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.
A part of me wants to learn it as well. It looks so alien that it seems interesting to learn.
Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.
I'm a person who mostly types, writes tons of code, but also is a graphic designer, and I also have pitiful penmanship. I can write regular sans-serif (all caps or properly capitalized), as well as cursive, but ultimately the concept of fonts make more sense to me than anything else in terms of an expression of letters and typography.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025, and paper is not usually the target medium for longer texts. A desire to write without access to some sort of machine is a bit quaint.
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
>>Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025
Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?
>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
It's an impression from my own social circle. I looked for data briefly because of this comment, but didn't find anything conclusive.
It does make sense to hand write short notes in cursive if you're hand writing short notes at all, but many people never learned it, or are so rusty it would take deliberate practice to restore proficiency.
I'll be honest I actually prefer my words to be lasting and have weight so I prefer block letters carved into lead which doesn't benefit much from cursive
I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.
Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.
This sort of thing is some of the weirdest pseudointellectualism I've seen. Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial. Because now we have Google Maps, ballpoint pens, calculators, and analog clocks.
These aren't really comparable. Cursive handwriting varies considerably between people. One person's might be very clear, another might be impossible to discern.
You should talk to teachers, lot of kids can't answer test questions because they don't even understand the words in the question... A growing proportion of kids are close to non functional, with multiple years of delay compared to previous generations.
We have at least a whole generation of kids that were taught to read using "whole language" methods instead of phonetically. None of this really surprises me.
Kids are either into reading or not. There's a critical mass when kids read because they like it, to the point where I need to remind them to read less.
When I was in high-school 20 plus years ago excerpt based reading assignments were fairly common in non-honors/advanced placement classes. Except there were whole textbooks full of excerpt based assignments instead of computer software for this purpose. Anecdotally I took honors and AP English and those classes destroyed my desire to read for years. I only read a few of the assigned books cover to cover because they were either dreadfully boring or the expectations for how quickly we should read them were more than I, a very average student, could manage. Usually some combination of both. Rather than relying on cliffnotes and sparknotes alone I would typically read the first chapter, the last chapter, and then some chapter in the middle so I was prepared for tests and discussions.
At the end of the day the AP exams didn't test you on your knowledge of The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. The exam tested you on your ability to read an excerpt and answer questions about it as well as your ability to write a multi-paragraph essay from a prompt while a proctor wearing the most hideous smelling blackberry perfume bathed you in an olfactory assault every time they walked by. In-classroom writing assignments were the most effective way to prepare and we did them frequently. As a reward for doing well you got to skip a couple of 100 level English credits in college.
Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today, but it feels like the education system never takes a moment to look inward and acknowledge that The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia are dreadfully boring reads. It took me three tries to finish 1984 because the beginning is such a slog. It is strange to say kids aren't interested in reading (from the article) when a lot of the subject matter is objectively dull. Four of the six books in the article header are books I don't even want to think about let alone read.
> Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today
Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Reading thick books requires having some device with no distructions. In my young ages all computers and all smartphones used to have no distructions, but now all computers (except some Linux distros) used to be bombarded with distructions in such a way that I can not read a book on any proprietary OS without getting some notification about anti-virus software or some updates or a need to restart, or just some events happening on the Internets.
My point is not just that distractions distract people, but distructions have become inevitable on almost any modern device able to render PDF with formulas.
Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.
Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
I don't know about other areas, but the school to which I go in Southwestern Ontario still has a library, as does every other school to which I have been.
> Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.
Still accomplishes the goal of allowing kids to read a book.
> Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Kids don't usually have these sort of requirements with their reading lists. Also have you looked into KOReader[1], which has support for djvu it looks like?
> Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
Firstly, I wasn't suggesting installing more proprietary code. Not sure where you got that from. Most scripts/guides I've seen that help disable the more intrusive/annoying parts of Windows are FOSS.
Secondly, then install Linux and only use FOSS, for which there are many options to read books with?
While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.
There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.
I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."
Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.
I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.
It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear. What precisely is the purpose of "English" class? What? To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare. So who cares what they do with their time.
Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.
> The purpose of English class was to provide a field for interdisciplinary subjects. We learned how to write the standard five paragraph essay. We learned how to detect dishonest and manipulative messaging in advertising. We learned to relate themes in literature to contemporary society.
This is how I remember my English classes. We did not spend much time at all on grammar after the 9th grade. We didn’t study any classic literature besides reading a Shakespeare play every year; you had to take a separate course for that. This is also how the classes are treated in most colleges these days; you’ll get English majors who spent 4 years reading critical theory and bad contemporary novels written by friends of the department head, rather than anything with serious cultural cachet.
This is the only serious criticism of the subject, in my opinion; the applications that grammar has in logical reasoning, composition, interpretation, and foreign language acquisition are too significant to shrug off, but it isn’t being taught particularly rigorously anymore.
It's also about how to reason about and understand what you're consuming, how to analyze sources, how media affects you; my wife is an English teacher and the comments here are often completely missing what's truly going on in a school.
The purpose of school is a mix between providing childcare, and making sure most of society have a largely overlapping common upbringing experience. We hear that we encourage diversity - but only of superficial stuff like sexual orientation or skin color. We don't want people that think too differently.
This is why I, despite my deep appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge and having spent a significant chunk of my life in the academia after graduating, want my kids to spend as little time as strictly necessary in primary or secondary schools. And the need comes from the fact that I need some of that childcare, not that I need someone else to teach my children anything.
I’m curious - do you think you’re an independent thinker? Do you think it’s a competitive advantage? What does thinking differently mean? It seems like a thing people say because it sounds good without really interrogating it.
I objectively find myself to be an independent thinker, and I mostly find it distracting. I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships if I spent more time thinking about the kinds of things other people think about, in the way they think about them.
I observe most of the most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns, people look up to them because they understand them, and they develop solutions that are in line with what most people need/want/desire.
I think I'm an independent thinker. One symptom is that I repeatedly find myself observing that other people do things because they're copying other people. This is one symptom, but there's more.
> Do you think it’s a competitive advantage
> I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships
> most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns
Don't care, I'm not optimizing for being competitive, being successful, or any of the other things you mentioned.
See, another symptom of being an independent thinker: I've thought about it on my own and I've concluded I'm not interested in your targets.
This sounds like a very common sort of misanthropic attitude I see littered around the web.
You know how they say - like in making music - in order to break the rules you have understand them?
I don’t like the take directly, but as a person who makes music, what I realize, and I think this is what they meant, it if you don’t study music, most people are likely to naturally slide into the most simplistic forms of it, because that’s what naturally sounds good, so you’re like naturally more inclined to recreate a 1 4 5 progression, rather than Mozart.
Do you think that you may have accidentally slid into this position, or sort of thinking exactly like a like blase’ counter cultural sameness, copying all the self-defined independent thinkers?, or do you think you have some insight into what makes your perspective unique and clearly in some way spiritually valuable to you?
I would be concerned that purely “thinking about it on your own” would lead to a really narrow set of beliefs. Like no offense, but your answer is a carbon copy of “disaffected youth” I’ve both exhibited and seen exhibited my whole life, with maybe a little less bite, so I’m guessing your not that young. But I’m often wrong.
But I am genuinely curious, what do you think makes you an independent thinker? And what purpose does that serve you?
> copying all the self-defined independent thinkers
At this point I can no longer put effort into responding to you. You think that my conception of "thinking for myself" is "listening to people who claim they think for themselves, and repeat what they say"? You know the HN principle of "assume the most generous interpretation"? This is the opposite.
Anyway, FYI, you sound like you're trying to deradicalize an andrew tate fanboy. You're A) really bad at feigning your concern, and B) extremely off target.
You didn’t give me a lot to go on. I think it was the most generous interpretation from what was available. Give me more! What drives you? How am I so off base?
This is genuinely a philosophical question I am deeply interested in, what is individual thought?
Why do you care so much about me? Re-reading our conversation, you were the one that asked "do you think you're an independent thinker", as if hoping for a yes so that you can then attack it. All I said is schools are mostly childcare.
If you care, go check my comment history and ask about something specific.
Do you think independent thought and deep thought are correlated or uncorrelated? When you say most people copy their perspectives do you think that’s bad?
A lot of the thinkers I’ve been interested in lately seem to deeply embed their thoughts in a tradition, so I’ve been thinking that in order to have better thinking I should copy more.
> why do you care so much about me?
Sad question, but what is life but a series of attempts to connect to other people. Having a discourse makes it real. Tell me I’m wrong! Maybe having independent thoughts has real value. Usually “think different” is about as deep as an apple ad.
Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
> Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
Yes, I got this sense. I'm not what you're looking for.
And how are you, right now, communicating? You're writing in English. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, all written down, is its own subject that people aren't born knowing or can acquire like they can speak.
In addition, it's English Literature and Language in the same, so yes, about knowing partly a canon, but how how to interpret texts, both nonfictional and fictional and poetic.
> It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear.
I don't know how to explain to you why it's important to educate humanity.
I agree that that's its purpose, but the fact that there are many adults who are as bad at reading and writing as there are just goes to show how bad the classes are at actually teaching what they're trying to teach.
That said, maths aren't much different. Being bad at maths is a cultural marker of sorts, since many maths classes are very bad indeed at teaching much beyond basic addition and subtraction.
School is good for people who care to care. American students do pretty decently on international standard exams. It's that we have a culture of not giving a fuck, and thus we have adults who can't read something that is over a 6th grade level.
See this very website on people who complain that they can't digest a pretty straightforward article
I'd love to see those exams redone on a selection of adults with nothing to lose if they fail or get a bad score. Maybe the not giving a fuck becomes apparent then.
Out of all of Žižek's writings, that article really isn't that bad. I agree it could do with some headings, but you shouldn't need ChatGPT to summarise it for you, but I'm not surprised some people do.
> To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
Because people VASTLY overestimate their ability with their native language or their command of native language literature.
The SAT English Achievement tests used to absolutely obliterate even students who got good AP English scores. This isn't limited to English--even native Japanese speakers struggle with the advanced JLPT levels, for example. Grammar is hard, yo.
If you don't actively study your native language, your working vocabulary is quite small and your grammatical constructs are excessively simple.
As for shared literature, we were in front of what was claimed to be the house of Jonathan Swift with a bus full of tourists from various English-speaking countries, and the tour guide cracked a joke about "A Modest Proposal". I snickered a bit but didn't think much else. The tour guide pulled me aside later that I was the first person to get the joke and it was almost the end of the year--we're talking hundreds to thousands of people from the US, Australia, India, etc.
I mean, just ask someone to name three main characters and what they did in the last book they read. Most people will struggle. You need to spend some discussion time in order to affix a book into your memory.
I never understand where these anecdotes come from.
I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
So whatever the problem is, if there even is one, is less to do with school curriculums, english classes, screen time, or the availability of books, and more to do with the culture of many homes not prioritizing reading.
> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading
I would not assume this, given that the states with the highest literacy rates are mostly rural and at least half red (NH, MN, ND, VT, SD, NE).
Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates. Same with crime. Kind of goes hand in hand. Education in blue cities needs to be fixed.
> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
> The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
Reading the expected books for school is very different from reading a lot privately at home.
I know quite many fellow pupils who read a lot privately, but detested reading the required books for school (they at best got some summaries somewhere, which in my opinion actually prepared you better for the tests since the people who write summaries typically know quite well which parts/topics of the books teachers consider to be important, and thus do quite some explanations on these).
On the other hand, I know fellow pupils who barely read anything in their free time (they had different interests), but for some reason actually liked (and liked reading) the books that you had to read for some classes.
In Clark County high schools in NV, they do not read a single whole book in English classes even in honors.
Is it an aversion to assigning homework?
I remember teachers assigning “read chapters 4-6 by Thursday” and then giving a quiz to make sure people read and remembered the details.
Those quizzes are part of the problem. It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket.
> get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket
This sounds like a bad quiz, unless the story was set in e.g. the American revolution.
It's an aversion to giving bad grades to the inevitable bulk of students who just won't read it.
It’s the assigned district curriculum. They have a text book with excerpts.
Okay, now what's the literacy rate in your county? What does the data actually say?
Pretty funny if it's Mississippi and they're just correct.
People rarely read whole books anymore. I know very few adults in my life who read books, lots of people are put off by reading in school and never give it a try in their adult life.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
The same thing happened to me.
Required reading in school killed my interest in reading. When I graduated I was very happy that I wouldn't have to read books ever again.
It took me about 5 years or so until anime and manga got me to try another fiction book. That eventually led to reading more books. But when school was done I really did think that I wasn't going to touch a (fiction) book again.
---
It makes me wonder if kids in the future will have "required reading" where they have to play certain old video games. Will that make them hate video games?
In our local highschool (near Copenhagen, Denmark) they have scheduled reading time for all pupils while in school - weekly as part of their normal schoolday. That is, instead of normal class everyone needs to bring a book of their own choosing and read in it. No phones allowed during this time, so they can either read or stare out the window. The local library helps them find books of their own interest.
The idea is to get them find genres and books they like and find joy reading it, while not taking time out of their free time.
I did my PhD, and so I am not averse to reading. But its nowadays rare to find books that have value in being read completely. Most of the time, I would rather read a blog post or a paper, books are often outdated by the time they are published. Books are limited to scenarios where looking at a complete scene of something frozen in time is still instructive.
When I started high school in the early '90s, there was a compulsory summer reading list of 10–12 books, each ranging from 300–800 pages. Then we had to write essays about them. This was just our summer homework before the new school year started. I didn't enjoy it at all; at the same time, I read lots of easy fiction, sometimes several hundred pages a day.
My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.
Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
They're axing honors classes in our high schools so they can mix all the kids together for equity. But because some of the students can't read very well (even in 10th grade), they have to read the books aloud during class, since it would be inequitable to require the kids to read on their own at home.
Not surprisingly, when you're rate-limited by read-aloud speed, you can't get through that many books and excerpts are a natural response.
Probably has to do with the method for teaching reading being terrible for several years, depending on if the school dropped phonics.
I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules. This did not have good outcomes, and last I checked, there was a movement of schools going back to phonics.
Plausibly some kids might still be reading entire novels worth of text online on the regular. Think of all the massive fanfic archives (Including original fics) Lots of fanfic authors have fans of their own, and those have got to be coming from somewhere.
It doesn't need to be in dead tree format. It doesn't need to be famous authors. Just so long as they read!
For long form original see eg:
* The last angel https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.24420...
* The wandering inn https://wanderinginn.com/2017/03/03/rw1-00/
* Or eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel) which made its way off the net and into print, possibly to the detriment of both. :-P Original location (afaict) (no longer available there) : https://www.galactanet.com/writing.html
> "massive fanfic archives"
Ye gods, that's like saying that youth may not be willing to consume a nutritious, balanced diet but we should rejoice that they are at least consuming vast quantities of sugar and fat. With vanishingly rare exceptions, fanfic is crap in textual form, laden to bursting with literary sins both venal and mortal.
The usefulness of reading books is not about what factual information you can glean from them. They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously. In that sense traditionally published works aren't going to offer all that much more than fanfiction.
Beyond a basic level of literacy, I'm not sure it's clear that reading pulp is better for any defined outcome than reading nothing. And I'm not sure why it would be. Once you are able to fully grasp a level of literacy, reading more of that level or below probably isn't really doing anything for you.
The question is whether reading:
- an entire novel worth of short texts, beginning to end
- an entire novel worth of short excerpts from longer texts
- an entire novel, beginning to end
are the same things.
Oh, are you responding to my examples?
* Last angel: A web serial, sure it's chunked into chapters/updates, but paper novels have chapters too.
* The Wandering inn, same as above, it's at 2 million+ words and counting. People read it.
* The Martian: Actually the shortest text of the bunch. Now available as a traditional paper novel.
I am not responding to the examples, and I am not challenging the claim that famous vs not famous author does not matter, or that dead tree vs screen does not matter; I am raising the question whether it's just a quantity issue ("Just so long as they read", "entire novels worth of text").
Is it? I am not sure either way. Do you lose something by only reading chapters of a novel but never the whole story from the beginning to the end, even if you're still reading the same amount?
The writing quality and complexity of amateur content, even long-form is only around the level of a YA novel, truth be told alot of the stuff I was reading back in junior high in my school library had more depth than this.
It's good that you can get people reading, but reading the equivalent of pulp is very different from real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
How can I forget Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality [1].
HPMOR is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky to promote rationalist concepts, and is somewhat influential in startup and AI circles.
Directly: Emmet Shear {co-founder of Twitch (YC S07)} is apparently superfan and gets a cameo.
So for once I get to post something that's almost on-topic for yc. :-P
[1] https://hpmor.com/
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/what-does-a-harry-potter-f...
> How can I forget Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality
If you find out, let me know. I wish I could.
I've never read such self absorbed drivel in my life. To be fair, I've not read any Ayn Rand, so I might be judging harshly.
Maybe not the best thing for kids to be reading!
https://www.thecut.com/article/milo-youngblut-max-snyder-ziv...
Even without the, you know, murder stuff, I think we can do better for kids than another generation of "rationalists", considering the track record here.
90% of everything is crap.
Maybe even 99+% these days, seeing how easy it is to publish your first finger-painting online. Doesn't mean there isn't any good stuff, or even a lot of good stuff. 1% of a lot is still a lot.(ps. and once you get people reading, they tend to keep doing it and develop taste over time. if it's even just a few who wouldn't have done it before. That's good, right?)
(pps. For example: at 2M words, I think pirateaba might exceed the "first 1M words are practice" threshold)
Who cares? If people enjoy it, let them enjoy it. I've read a few YA novels as an adult that I enjoyed, even though I regularly read more complex stuff.
Most people, for most of history, have only ever enjoyed what might be considered "low quality" entertainment - pulp fiction, shitty plays, etc.
> real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
Interestingly, even discounting YA and other stuff like that, you are only describing a very small subset of novels.
Jane Austen was considered pulp. So was Charles Dickens. And Conan Doyle.
Nobody considered those high literature back in the day!
That cherry picks the best of the best without comparing them with the other 99.9% of their contemporaries who were pulp authors. They and their literary output are forgotten for good reasons.
I don't think GP is cherrypicking anything; rather, illustrating how what is seen as slop one day may be seen as "great works" down the road.
>Who cares?
I do? Why would I want my kids to be consuming crap when they could be engaging with great works and high art?
If the works are so great then you've got nothing to worry about. Kids will read them on their own. Of course we both know that's not true, because the works are not that great.
What if that's not the choice? What if the choice is "engage with art they enjoy and appreciate, or not at all"?
They're great works to you, and a slog to them.
They can read Minecraft strategy guides and Yahoo auction fan fics for all I care, since that's a lot better than nothing. I remember not wanting to read what school assigned me and how that killed my desire to read most fiction writing, and would prefer that not happen to more kids.
Art is a matter of taste, and if you go counter to your audience's taste, don't be surprised if they disengage.
Because what constitutes "crap" and "great works and high art" is highly subjective both to personal tastes and the culture of the time.
Most online text is shit and doesn't count IMO. Why would you want to waste your time reading the thoughts of average people (including this one)?
Fanfic reading is not like novel reading in that you don't need to really understand new, unfamiliar characters though.
Thus it can tend to become limiting; and I say this as someone who actually does enjoy fanfiction.
> Fanfic reading is not like novel reading in that you don't need to really understand new, unfamiliar characters though.
So the Lord of the Rings series counts as one book? I'd believe diminishing returns, but not one and done.
Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
>Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
Then you do not understand writing. If Yudkowski really had more interesting ideas, then he would have been able to do HPMOR as original fiction.
Rowling is actually really good, inventing very charming things, very fun sentences, and there's nothing even close in HPMOR (I have read it myself, and enjoyed it to some degree), but you really underestimate how good Rowling is.
Yes, pedantically, and as mentioned in the Notes in the Text in most editions, the Lord of the Rings is a single book sometimes published in three volumes.
Yeah I thought it was such a funny example yo pick out bc, yes it is!
I believe the publisher of LOTR broke it up into multiple books.
Comments here are very strange, “Reading books should go the way of cursive! Education is more like childcare anyways.”
It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.
We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.
> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.
Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted.
For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations.
Others could probably come up with additional examples.
They've rebranded knowledge they don't like as "woke".
... Prepare shorter or lighter materials for them to read, as this article suggests? Why has reading whole books become the holy grail of education system?
The said education system expected this:
> As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
Yeah, sounds like a very great way to filter out perhaps 20% of good readers and make sure the rest 80% will hate reading for the rest of their lives.
You can say it’s like childcare, sure. But learning has to come from somewhere. Parents seem to be doing less and less out of the classroom. Does that mean we’re just giving up then?
Maybe literature is just a terrible medium for culture except for the relatively brief period in human history when they were extraordinarily cheap to produce and disseminate compared to other cultural products.
Edit: but insofar as media criticism in education is bound to the book rather than the dominant forms of the day, I think children are being done a disservice.
It's still by far the best medium that requires you to be active and imaginative while packing the best information density and usability. Plus it works offline, without power, you can carry it around, &c.
Books forge you in a way short "content" we consume all day long today will never be able to, there are a few long form podcasts here and there that could be comparable but that's not the bulk of the media kids "consume"
It is still extraordinary cheap to produce and disseminate novels. If not more so, if you include ebooks or longform blogging.
Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
Slight problem with that if you would like to live in a functioning, thriving democracy: democracy in the sense of "one person, one vote" requires or at least greatly benefits from a broadly educated population. It's not sufficient, but very likely necessary.
I think you're going to attract downvotes from people who just read your first sentence and assume that's the actual gist of your post.
And the people who read the whole comment and see the low effort straw man argument.
The market has never solved anything in ways that are beneifical for humanity. (Just commenting on the first part of your comment, given that your last sentence implies you're just saying what market evangelists would say.)
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.
It’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.
I 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.
I'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.
I 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.
Anything 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.
It 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.
It 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.
I 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.
> 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.
> 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.
The 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.
Makes me wonder is wrong question been asked. Shouldn't it first be why were curtains described in first place?
Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.
If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.
If the purpose is reading then we let kids read books that they like.
I can read a 1000 page history book but after 50 pages of Dutch literature I want to throw it in the garbage bin. High school KILLS reading. Few survive.
Or, as we've seen recently, you can force them and they still won't be literate enough.
You 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.
Now 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.
> 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.
I 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.
It is interesting how everyone parrots that art is important when the vast majority of the population will never actually engage with it.
Opera? Ballet? Literature? Poetry? Classical music? Modern art?
Do the numbers it seems most people can do without them and still be functional.
Fully functional economic units, the true aspiration of all thinking beings.
Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.
> 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
I 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.
I was intrigued by the idea that it might be unreasonable for a book to include a glossary or dictionary to explain usages for made up or unfamiliar terms. I like that this list [1] exists because I was struggling to think of such a book. But then I thought about The Lord of the Rings, and it even includes an index of terms among its appendices, which is something I remember using to revisit parts of the story when I first read it. Another book with a glossary of terms is Dune, which I found fun and reasonable to avoid trying to explain hierarchy where doing so would break the narrative flow. But maybe that just means it's not as cleverly constructed or organized as it could have been--but the trade-off has to be how to engage a wide selection of readers...
Is the complaint about the dictionary at the end because it wasn't comprehensive? I'm unreasonably curious about the book and which phrases were included and which were not.
I think all written works occur in a context that should be taken into account when thinking critically about them. That context is temporal and linguistic and is more apparent when you consider something like Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Understanding it requires either a modern reinterpretation or consideration given to the sociolinguistic context in which it was written.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/180823.Novels_with_Gloss...
I think you are missing the broader point: why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with? It's not as if there is a dearth of more modern works. It seems like the main function of selecting older works is to make it artificially harder for students to read.
> why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with?
I think there's a trivial answer which is that all things you encounter are fundamentally from an alien context. The degree of alien and intention of the action are the things to consider before proceeding.
For example, why would one choose to read the account of a survivor of tragedy? To develop some amount of (emotional or cognitive) empathy? To learn a broader way of thinking that could apply to a future situation? Most simply: to learn from the past.
If the goal is entertainment, evaluate your participation such that you maximize your utility. If the goal is learning, one should be wary of premature rejection without sufficient context to avoid missing the lesson. And there is an annoying reality in which most situations can teach something.
> why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with?
Are you people for real?
God forbid we learn new words or learn words form the past... Why even bother with history right? It's just old stuff anyways let's focus on new stuff, what could these old things teach us anyways
Meanwhile my grandma still knew how to speak Latin at 70+, which she learned in school as a teenager
I sometimes take pleasure at reading old language ... and still think that giving it to kids as introduction to reading is absurd.
If they read 10 interesting books a year adding one like that to the mix or offer them the option is great. If they did not encountered interesting bool after agw of 7 when parents stopped reading them, no.
And interesting books for kids are there. Plenty of them of all kind, including pure action/adventure stuff. Including those related to movies or games they play. It is not lack of resources.
Honestly, I'd gladly pay for and read a version of pride and prejudice rewritten in gen Z slang
> Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit.
Yes and no. I used to start reading at 4 years old, but I forcedly used to memorize some rhymes at 3 years old. Most folk don't believe it is possible to read so early (though Eliezer Yudkowsky has reported about similar age). But my point is - how would I learn reading so early without that poetry?
I don't really like poetry exactly as rest of the fiction genre. And I am still sure it is not shit even for those who are struggling of doing that. I consider poetry exercises as sport exercises: today you claim that some specific muscle is not important for you, but tomorrow you get some injury which happened because of some weak muscle.
But you have also said one important word - propaganda. This is what really shitting any education and propaganda seems like the monster from the Nitzsche's quote "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster".
I also learned to read at 3. I actually remember the switch from illiterate to literate, as I remember realizing that just by looking at road signs I would automatically read them. I told my sister, who couldn't read yet, that there was a downside, as you could never look at language without reading it ever again!
Nobody believes this, but I have VHS evidence of myself reading at 2
Seems like a skill issue on your end.
Is this the right attitude to have to kids who we want to get into reading?
get gud @ reeding
My kids read tons of books. But we homeschool and actual books are the main course of our education.
I’ve noticed some of these kids can’t tell time on analog clocks nor read cursive handwriting.
Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation (what is the number system for each hand), spatial reasoning (where is each hand) and categorization (what is each hand).
There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.
Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.
This one? https://www.arrowsmith.ca/cip-arrowsmith-school
I kinda rabbit holed on this and it seems to be a very lucrative scam
https://medium.com/myndplan/myndplan-9961a084f750
Just $6k to change your life by speed reading clocks for 3 hours a day for two months...
Needless to say this trips my crank/cult smell meter.
That is the program, yes. I’m not trying to sell you on it, just sharing our experience.
I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.
I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
If you threatened me with 3+ hours a day of speed reading clocks instead of a normal summer I'd probably double down on effort too. And probably not in a way that's healthy long term.
Well, it wasn't a threat. He knew exactly what he'd been struggling with from 1st grade on (officially minor ADHD) and we were trying really hard to keep him off of medication. Since the program has finished he's asked to do it again several times (but we haven't because it's expensive). I've thought about teaching him programming by having him build his own clock trainer.
It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.
- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.
- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.
- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.
- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.
It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.
He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.
Well that is interesting and if you had results then that's all that matters for your family of course.
But sorry to clarify I'm still hung up on the "8 handed clock" thing - what does that mean? What information is displayed on the clocks other than hours, minutes, and seconds?
What information does an 8 handed clock convey?
Time?
To the hundred millisecond?
You could also include day, month, year, and how close we are to destroying the world [1].
[1] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/
Hours, minutes, seconds, degrees, arcminutes, arcseconds... I could try to read 6, but honestly I doubt I'd even be able to see the arcseconds hand, it would be moving so quickly.
This is hilarious, I don’t even want to know if it’s legit.
I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.
> I convert that to digital time in my head
What? They are the same thing.
Not to other people I've talked to.
I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.
[1] https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag
Aside from signatures, which don't need to be read, I don't remember the last time I've seen cursive outside of an elementary school.
~25 years ago I decided to take the LSAT. At the time, there was an essay component that was required to be conducted in cursive.
I basically had to teach myself all over again. Not much fun.
Something really cool about reading the Declaration of Independence.
you don't write. people don't write in cursive around you?
Why would you write in cursive? If you care about WPM key board toasts it.
If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not.
Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
> Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
okay, but if you care about recall and activating regions of the brain that create a better understanding of what you're learning, handwriting wins according to research.
But is there a difference between cursive and block lettering? I fully agree with your overall point about handwritten notes being far superior to typed notes. It forces you to filter out extraneous information instead of being a live transcriptionist of your professor.
I've found drilling notes via method of loci of visualized flashcards/facts for this to be superior for myself which I always sourced from typed notes. Not really familiar with the research that cursive would improve over it.
Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd.
More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting
Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
> Why would you write in cursive?
Anyone using paper + pen? Writing a letter or thank you note?
You know, stuff only people who grew up before the internet was popular still do.
If it's something I want people to read, I'd never dare write it in cursive, because if I did, I wouldn't count on them being able to read it.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
I grew up in a world where everyone knew cursive, and until this sort of discussion became popular in recent years, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me that there were many people who didn't know. But I guess they had to cut some things out of the curriculum and it's not as useful as it used to be.
>>Why would you write in cursive?
I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
> Do you just write in block capitals?
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
>>It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.
For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.
Speed and effort arguments are negated for southpaws.
> not linking the letters together then?
Correct.
> Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
Probably yes to both counts.
However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.
Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.
I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.
>>Consider this, do you use shorthand?
I have no idea how to write shorthand. I assume you know how to write cursive, so no I don't think the reasons are the same.
You could learn it. It would take some effort but it's not insurmountable and it's inarguably superior to cursive in terms of effort to write.
I can't write legible cursive. To do that would take time, effort, and practice. Much like it'd take that to learn shorthand.
That's my point. You and I write the way we do because writing in other ways would take more effort than we want to spend.
Well, fair. Maybe I should learn shorthand.
A part of me wants to learn it as well. It looks so alien that it seems interesting to learn.
Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.
I'm a person who mostly types, writes tons of code, but also is a graphic designer, and I also have pitiful penmanship. I can write regular sans-serif (all caps or properly capitalized), as well as cursive, but ultimately the concept of fonts make more sense to me than anything else in terms of an expression of letters and typography.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025, and paper is not usually the target medium for longer texts. A desire to write without access to some sort of machine is a bit quaint.
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
>>Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025
Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?
>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
It's an impression from my own social circle. I looked for data briefly because of this comment, but didn't find anything conclusive.
It does make sense to hand write short notes in cursive if you're hand writing short notes at all, but many people never learned it, or are so rusty it would take deliberate practice to restore proficiency.
People write in cursive the same way a doctor writes a prescription.
Not sure what that means. As in, badly? Dozens of times a day? The same things over and over again? And who are the "people"?
And again, that doesn't really answer my question - if you don't write in cursive, how do you write?
I mean it is illegible and ugly, so why bother?
I’m not sure the last time I’ve handwritten anything longer than a signature and my cursive skills show it.
On a white board or diagram, block letters seem like the most legible choice.
Everything else is typed.
I'll be honest I actually prefer my words to be lasting and have weight so I prefer block letters carved into lead which doesn't benefit much from cursive
> How do you write if not in cursive?
I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.
Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.
I've been journaling and taking handwritten notes in cursive since 1998. You'd think I'd have developed beautiful handwriting - nope, illegible.
I never stopped writing in cursive but then again I don’t write much by hand anymore.
This sort of thing is some of the weirdest pseudointellectualism I've seen. Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial. Because now we have Google Maps, ballpoint pens, calculators, and analog clocks.
These aren't really comparable. Cursive handwriting varies considerably between people. One person's might be very clear, another might be impossible to discern.
The way things are headed, you'll just point your phone at it and have it translated to plaintext in 3-5 years anyhow.
What? Next you are going to tell me they can’t use an abacus or properly impress cuneiform into clay tablets.
You should talk to teachers, lot of kids can't answer test questions because they don't even understand the words in the question... A growing proportion of kids are close to non functional, with multiple years of delay compared to previous generations.
To me the ability to read a whole book is a competitive advantage in the job market.
For what industries?
Any job position requiring intelligence and nuance which unavoidably stems from informing yourself.
But the same will inevitably make you hating the capitalism which eventually makes you not better candidate on the market but worse.
I hate capitalism but I don't make the rules so play the game anyway.
Maybe I would've had something intelligent to say about this article, had I been allowed to read it.
You have to have money to read it but first you need to be able to read to earn money. It is a crazy circular problem.
We have at least a whole generation of kids that were taught to read using "whole language" methods instead of phonetically. None of this really surprises me.
Un-paywall'd: https://archive.ph/lcAZ3
Kids are either into reading or not. There's a critical mass when kids read because they like it, to the point where I need to remind them to read less.
Pretty much every one in the selective school I went to read for fun.
Even the "troublesome" ones.
When I was in high-school 20 plus years ago excerpt based reading assignments were fairly common in non-honors/advanced placement classes. Except there were whole textbooks full of excerpt based assignments instead of computer software for this purpose. Anecdotally I took honors and AP English and those classes destroyed my desire to read for years. I only read a few of the assigned books cover to cover because they were either dreadfully boring or the expectations for how quickly we should read them were more than I, a very average student, could manage. Usually some combination of both. Rather than relying on cliffnotes and sparknotes alone I would typically read the first chapter, the last chapter, and then some chapter in the middle so I was prepared for tests and discussions.
At the end of the day the AP exams didn't test you on your knowledge of The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. The exam tested you on your ability to read an excerpt and answer questions about it as well as your ability to write a multi-paragraph essay from a prompt while a proctor wearing the most hideous smelling blackberry perfume bathed you in an olfactory assault every time they walked by. In-classroom writing assignments were the most effective way to prepare and we did them frequently. As a reward for doing well you got to skip a couple of 100 level English credits in college.
Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today, but it feels like the education system never takes a moment to look inward and acknowledge that The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia are dreadfully boring reads. It took me three tries to finish 1984 because the beginning is such a slog. It is strange to say kids aren't interested in reading (from the article) when a lot of the subject matter is objectively dull. Four of the six books in the article header are books I don't even want to think about let alone read.
> Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today
Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Reading thick books requires having some device with no distructions. In my young ages all computers and all smartphones used to have no distructions, but now all computers (except some Linux distros) used to be bombarded with distructions in such a way that I can not read a book on any proprietary OS without getting some notification about anti-virus software or some updates or a need to restart, or just some events happening on the Internets.
My point is not just that distractions distract people, but distructions have become inevitable on almost any modern device able to render PDF with formulas.
> Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all?
Literally buy books? What about ereaders? Install adblockers and de-shittify your OS? I don't have the problems you seem to have, and I'm on Windows.
Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.
Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
I don't know about other areas, but the school to which I go in Southwestern Ontario still has a library, as does every other school to which I have been.
> Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.
Still accomplishes the goal of allowing kids to read a book.
> Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Kids don't usually have these sort of requirements with their reading lists. Also have you looked into KOReader[1], which has support for djvu it looks like?
> Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
Firstly, I wasn't suggesting installing more proprietary code. Not sure where you got that from. Most scripts/guides I've seen that help disable the more intrusive/annoying parts of Windows are FOSS.
Secondly, then install Linux and only use FOSS, for which there are many options to read books with?
[1] https://koreader.rocks/
All of the literature we recommend in school is outdated, so it makes sense to me that kids would not want to read them.
More school districts should experiment with contemporary novels that make sense in a modern context.
I agree wholeheartedly with this.
While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.
There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.
I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."
Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.
I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.
> it makes sense to me that kids would not want to read them
That's why the 2026 remake of Animal Farm in animated form includes a twerking pig[1]. Education with brainrot is the future!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtjPGXZLW6g
It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear. What precisely is the purpose of "English" class? What? To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare. So who cares what they do with their time.
> Why can't people test against that?
Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.
Another user deleted their comment:
> The purpose of English class was to provide a field for interdisciplinary subjects. We learned how to write the standard five paragraph essay. We learned how to detect dishonest and manipulative messaging in advertising. We learned to relate themes in literature to contemporary society.
This is how I remember my English classes. We did not spend much time at all on grammar after the 9th grade. We didn’t study any classic literature besides reading a Shakespeare play every year; you had to take a separate course for that. This is also how the classes are treated in most colleges these days; you’ll get English majors who spent 4 years reading critical theory and bad contemporary novels written by friends of the department head, rather than anything with serious cultural cachet.
This is the only serious criticism of the subject, in my opinion; the applications that grammar has in logical reasoning, composition, interpretation, and foreign language acquisition are too significant to shrug off, but it isn’t being taught particularly rigorously anymore.
It's about practicing how to read and write. Skills that you'll benefit from in every form of knowledge work that you'll ever do.
I would cut almost every other class from the curriculum before cutting English.
It's also about how to reason about and understand what you're consuming, how to analyze sources, how media affects you; my wife is an English teacher and the comments here are often completely missing what's truly going on in a school.
Explains a lot, actually.
The purpose of school is a mix between providing childcare, and making sure most of society have a largely overlapping common upbringing experience. We hear that we encourage diversity - but only of superficial stuff like sexual orientation or skin color. We don't want people that think too differently.
This is why I, despite my deep appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge and having spent a significant chunk of my life in the academia after graduating, want my kids to spend as little time as strictly necessary in primary or secondary schools. And the need comes from the fact that I need some of that childcare, not that I need someone else to teach my children anything.
I’m curious - do you think you’re an independent thinker? Do you think it’s a competitive advantage? What does thinking differently mean? It seems like a thing people say because it sounds good without really interrogating it.
I objectively find myself to be an independent thinker, and I mostly find it distracting. I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships if I spent more time thinking about the kinds of things other people think about, in the way they think about them.
I observe most of the most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns, people look up to them because they understand them, and they develop solutions that are in line with what most people need/want/desire.
I think I'm an independent thinker. One symptom is that I repeatedly find myself observing that other people do things because they're copying other people. This is one symptom, but there's more.
> Do you think it’s a competitive advantage
> I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships
> most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns
Don't care, I'm not optimizing for being competitive, being successful, or any of the other things you mentioned.
See, another symptom of being an independent thinker: I've thought about it on my own and I've concluded I'm not interested in your targets.
This sounds like a very common sort of misanthropic attitude I see littered around the web.
You know how they say - like in making music - in order to break the rules you have understand them?
I don’t like the take directly, but as a person who makes music, what I realize, and I think this is what they meant, it if you don’t study music, most people are likely to naturally slide into the most simplistic forms of it, because that’s what naturally sounds good, so you’re like naturally more inclined to recreate a 1 4 5 progression, rather than Mozart.
Do you think that you may have accidentally slid into this position, or sort of thinking exactly like a like blase’ counter cultural sameness, copying all the self-defined independent thinkers?, or do you think you have some insight into what makes your perspective unique and clearly in some way spiritually valuable to you?
I would be concerned that purely “thinking about it on your own” would lead to a really narrow set of beliefs. Like no offense, but your answer is a carbon copy of “disaffected youth” I’ve both exhibited and seen exhibited my whole life, with maybe a little less bite, so I’m guessing your not that young. But I’m often wrong.
But I am genuinely curious, what do you think makes you an independent thinker? And what purpose does that serve you?
> copying all the self-defined independent thinkers
At this point I can no longer put effort into responding to you. You think that my conception of "thinking for myself" is "listening to people who claim they think for themselves, and repeat what they say"? You know the HN principle of "assume the most generous interpretation"? This is the opposite.
Anyway, FYI, you sound like you're trying to deradicalize an andrew tate fanboy. You're A) really bad at feigning your concern, and B) extremely off target.
You didn’t give me a lot to go on. I think it was the most generous interpretation from what was available. Give me more! What drives you? How am I so off base?
This is genuinely a philosophical question I am deeply interested in, what is individual thought?
Why do you care so much about me? Re-reading our conversation, you were the one that asked "do you think you're an independent thinker", as if hoping for a yes so that you can then attack it. All I said is schools are mostly childcare.
If you care, go check my comment history and ask about something specific.
Do you think independent thought and deep thought are correlated or uncorrelated? When you say most people copy their perspectives do you think that’s bad?
A lot of the thinkers I’ve been interested in lately seem to deeply embed their thoughts in a tradition, so I’ve been thinking that in order to have better thinking I should copy more.
> why do you care so much about me?
Sad question, but what is life but a series of attempts to connect to other people. Having a discourse makes it real. Tell me I’m wrong! Maybe having independent thoughts has real value. Usually “think different” is about as deep as an apple ad.
Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
> Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
Yes, I got this sense. I'm not what you're looking for.
So what is your independent thinking doing for you? Are you happier then most?
To me, thinking independently isn't a mean to an end, it's an end in itself.
It is awfully hard to get anyone, children or adults, to think at all
i was literally told this at $JOB once: we dont have time to think; just give us a framework to follow
it seems like thinking is a form of torture for some... but maybe its our work/lifestyle that makes it so.. idk
> To read and speak English?
And how are you, right now, communicating? You're writing in English. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, all written down, is its own subject that people aren't born knowing or can acquire like they can speak.
In addition, it's English Literature and Language in the same, so yes, about knowing partly a canon, but how how to interpret texts, both nonfictional and fictional and poetic.
> It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear.
I don't know how to explain to you why it's important to educate humanity.
In the USA, you can test out of it: the GED.
> Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time
Because they can't read or write, and neither can most adults, including developers.
I agree that that's its purpose, but the fact that there are many adults who are as bad at reading and writing as there are just goes to show how bad the classes are at actually teaching what they're trying to teach.
That said, maths aren't much different. Being bad at maths is a cultural marker of sorts, since many maths classes are very bad indeed at teaching much beyond basic addition and subtraction.
School is good for people who care to care. American students do pretty decently on international standard exams. It's that we have a culture of not giving a fuck, and thus we have adults who can't read something that is over a 6th grade level.
See this very website on people who complain that they can't digest a pretty straightforward article
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008788
I'd love to see those exams redone on a selection of adults with nothing to lose if they fail or get a bad score. Maybe the not giving a fuck becomes apparent then.
Out of all of Žižek's writings, that article really isn't that bad. I agree it could do with some headings, but you shouldn't need ChatGPT to summarise it for you, but I'm not surprised some people do.
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Nowadays? Yes. And that’s the problem. It used to not be the case in the past.
> To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?
Because people VASTLY overestimate their ability with their native language or their command of native language literature.
The SAT English Achievement tests used to absolutely obliterate even students who got good AP English scores. This isn't limited to English--even native Japanese speakers struggle with the advanced JLPT levels, for example. Grammar is hard, yo.
If you don't actively study your native language, your working vocabulary is quite small and your grammatical constructs are excessively simple.
As for shared literature, we were in front of what was claimed to be the house of Jonathan Swift with a bus full of tourists from various English-speaking countries, and the tour guide cracked a joke about "A Modest Proposal". I snickered a bit but didn't think much else. The tour guide pulled me aside later that I was the first person to get the joke and it was almost the end of the year--we're talking hundreds to thousands of people from the US, Australia, India, etc.
I mean, just ask someone to name three main characters and what they did in the last book they read. Most people will struggle. You need to spend some discussion time in order to affix a book into your memory.