Agreed with Heebie about the Offa My Lawn stuff. I don't have a link handy but complaints about "kids these days" literally go back to the Stone Age. They've been wrong on most occasions, so present and future claims like that have a high bar to clear.
Not sure about the broad mental health crisis. I have the sense that it is/was too uneven for that. Some schools went fully back to school in September. It was stupid to do so for pandemic reasons, but it does mean less disruption to school. I think lots of people have set up pods or similar networks replicating the essentials of the school system.
Then again, maybe I'm quibbling over details. If "only" 10 or 20 percent of kids are falling through the cracks and getting basically no school this year, it's still very bad.
I don't know what "printed" means at all -- at least, I don't know what it means as between "literally on paper" or "edited writing of the kind that could be purchased on paper." I hardly read paper at all these days, but I read a lot that I could buy on paper if I wanted to.
I wonder whether those who dismiss the woke concerns of own voice advocates have thought about the extent to which Gen Z live in a consistently fictional world
I think Opinionated Cervantes would have a lot to say about this.
Only 12% of American youth read anything printed at all every day.
Not even street signs? This is nonsense.
It's probably a survey question, "Did you read anything printed today?" And they interpret that to mean if they read a physical newspaper.
I think that never reading anything longer than a sentence or two, and in particular, never being exposed to/never reading long form written fiction really does keep you more stupid and less empathetic than you might otherwise be. The weakness I would pick out in this argument is the Generation Woke bit, in that, IIRC, one of the earliest and most brutal outbreaks of cancel culture came in the world of YA fiction, where the participants presumably do spend a lot of time reading.
Oh, and fwiw, the paper she seems to be citing about reading is here and it would be very wrong of me to use my "find on scihub" bookmarklet eve if it wasn't broken. Anyone have a relevant jstor account?
They are counting published works in electronic format as "printed."
And the superiority of print over screen as a means for ingesting the same material is argued here in the paper you can read:
In a huge meta-analysis by European researchers in the E-READ Consortium of over 170,000 subjects in 58 studies conducted between 2000 and 2017, young people were significantly better in comprehension skills when reading the same text on print, rather than on digital screens. The researchers found that print enabled higher comprehension across genres, and that this heightened comprehension became more marked when a student was being timed. Perhaps most surprisingly, the superior comprehensibility of print increased over the years: Thus, the readers most likely to be digital natives were actually comprehending text better when reading it in print, rather than on screens.
is skimming the headlines that different than skimming social media...where clickbait algorithms serve clickbait articles written by interns at bankrupt outlets? I'll go way the fuck out on a limb and say, yes, it is different.
Complaints about "kids these days" literally go back to the Stone Age, but mass literacy and mass education don't, at all. Mental abilities atrophy without use, and I think it's totally plausible we could see a decay of reasoning skills between generations.
How about Mass Ignoring The Education of everyone besides the few that get educated? That seems to be the alternative to Mass Education.
Now the kids are constantly communicating with each other over text.
Comparing this to reading a book or newspaper (or even clickbait articles) is ludicrous. Texts carry tiny quantities of information from people one already knows. Even the shortest newspaper items carry more information, from a wider range of experience, in a format demanding more of the reader's brain.
"Printed material" could include the daily comics and racing forms, right?
I wasn't able to find the Wolf article described.
It's too early to tell. Still, I agree with NW and Mossy that this is a problem rather than dismissing it as a "get offa my lawn" boomer panic.
I have a string suspicion that the children of the upper and upper-middle classes are reading, though probably more on screens than on paper.
I think HB hits it on the head in 10. I worry that we are a society that is increasingly built for the convenience of the elite, and ignoring everyone else. (And I'll [virtually] smack the first person who says "twas always thus." That wouldn't make it right even if it were true.)
Well, we busted out of class had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school
I'm sceptical of the empathy piece, because of the permanent abundance of well-read assholes, but also the particular chronology here. If the younger cohorts have less empathy, that may be because they grew up in hungrier times.
There seem to be so many more direct sources of confusion and anxiety than not reading.
there are some perils of self-fictionalizing, but if anything, the noblesse oblige class has been most guilty of this over the centuries
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but, whether literally writing fiction, or interpreting reality with motivated reasoning, or simply performing social roles, the comparison is ludicrous. None of those activities are conducted all day everyday; even for the last, gossip was never instantaneously transmitted or permanently recorded, nor were the upper classes constantly surrounded by and visible to their peers. Further, the skills required for such fictionalization are different to and vastly more demanding than social media self-presentation; even social role performance had to be done in person, in real time.
Kids are flexible and resilient. I'm confident most of them will process what was essentially the world's crappiest gap year just fine. I'm more interested in the effects on toddler-age kids, who are at the age where the fundamental learning of negotiating social interactions occurs during a period of social distancing and drastically smaller interaction circles. That cohort may turn out identifiably different from the ones around it (or not, who knows?).
Oscar Wilde's dictum that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, only good and badly written ones, no longer seems to apply.
If you are going to talk about the good old days when literary figures were treated with greater tolerance, it's probably best not to cite Oscar Wilde.
I'm really curious whether mask-wearing will have any effect on infants developing facial and emotional recognition.
You always knew Batman's emotions because the chin is the window of the soul.
Wilde was duly tried and convicted in a court of law. Twitter is just a fucking mob. (This comment is not entirely in earnest. Also Stephen Fry on Wilde is great, if rambly.)
Twitter isn't a mob of people under 25. At least not mostly.
"Millennials represent the highest percentage of print book consumers, with 81 per cent of adults aged 18-29 confirming they had read a book in any format in 2019"
I thought millennials were older than that.
I'm not sure if Oscar Wilde's problem was more young people or old people.
25: There was a thing in the paper that this is the year when the Millennials start turning 40.
25: Millennials are 25 to 40 or so.
I think that one huge change is how context is understood. Before ubiquitous electronic communication, media were limited, enumerable. You either spoke or listened to someone in person, read something from either identifiable provenance or a low-budget source, or heard public speech-- radio, auditorium. Now there exist streams of text and video harder to distinguish by source type, which as the OP points out are also harder to differentiate by whether they're fictional. Younger people have an easier time differentiating them though I think.
To 5. There's nothing I see for full text of this particular article, but Twenge JM doesn't seem to see much that's getting better:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=twenge+jm&sort=date
Between the 24-hour availability of entertainment and the temptation to use smartphones and social media, sexual activity may not be as attractive as it once was. Put simply, there are now many more choices of things to do in the late evening than there once were and fewer opportunities to initiate sexual activity if both partners are engrossed in social media, electronic gaming, eclectic web magazine participation, or binge watching.
When they hit 50, the erectile dysfunction ads are going to get freaky.
My oldest kid (born 1997) is the bleeding edge of Gen Z. He does read a lot.
events in d.c. on january 6 2021 for ex and more immediately to me the ongoing dumpster fire of sfusd politics would tend to indict the corruption of adult, rather than child, minds by them there modern media production and consumption habits.
29.last: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2767063
To the fiction/nonfiction distinction, which is John Oliver?
He's how a lot of people understand news.
Yeah, 32 is right. Rush Limbaugh did more damage than all of TikTok , counting both people in front of the camera and writing the prediction algorithms.
Plenty of firsthand accounts of about sadness at losing their living parents and other elderly relatives to rightwing media sinkholes.
It's probably just a coincidence that Twenge spelled backward is e.g. Newt.
32 Right -- who can look Trumpism (or its Anglo equivalent) in the eye and say that kids not reading enough is creating some sort of empathy deficit?
And as usual the Boss is right: lots of people get more in the way of emotional intelligence from music than from books, and have for my whole life. (I'm not sure this was anywhere near as true pre-WWII, just because of the technical constraints. I was commenting elsewhere, though, on the controversy about The Eyes of Texas -- the songwriter, a UT undergrad, wrote it in the wee hours before it was supposed to be performed. When he died 40+ years later, in 1947, this single episode consumed more of his obituaries (in multiple newspapers) than the cumulative total of the rest of his life. Now, 70+ years later, the guy's life is again relevant, as people try to decide whether in context the song is racist enough to be forced from the canon. The answer is yes.)
Another upvote for 32. The kids are not the problem, and regardless of their consumption of fiction, as best as I can reckon, young people are far more exposed to diverse viewpoints and much more inclined toward empathy.
I used to read huge amounts of fiction as a kid. I read all of the Dr. Doolittle books, for instance.
And it turns out, that old racist Hugh Lofting has a germane, on-topic quote about the old vs. the young:
"For years it was a constant source of shock to me to find my writings amongst 'juveniles'. It does not bother me any more now, but I still feel there should be a category of 'seniles' to offset the epithet."
In conclusion: Old white people are objectively the worst.
35.1: The day is young; Murdoch has been at this for decades; and being less bad than Fox is an extremely low bar.
Anyway, the problems with Fox (and with TV news generally) are not unlike those attributed to social media: little information, homogenously selected and interpreted, presented to a self-selected audience in a linear format neither requiring nor encouraging critical engagement.
I don't know about the US but it is very noticeable from literature and otherwise how much less idealistic the teaching profession has become in this country since about -- ooh -- 1979?
This is partly Thatcherism, partly the rise of meritocracy-through-education as a public ideal. But there seem to have been two great impulses towards public education from the late 19th century onwards: both of them were driven by the elites, although the left-wing one also had a strong element of selfimprovement -- the workers' educational associations in the UK, and the Swedish equivalent there -- in the two Labour movements with which I am at all familiar.
The Left said that everyone deserved the fruits of culture available previously only to the elite. This was also a religious ideal, peculiar to Protestantism.
The Right said that a strong nation needed an educated workforce able to operate complicated machinery and follow complicated orders in sophisticated armies.
That was really an argument, I'd say, for mass training rather than mass education.
But the old Left vision was undermined -- destroyed in fact -- by the general assault on authority. It's an essential part of learning that it should involve doing things repeatedly for reasons you don't understand until you do understand and have internalised the reasons. This is both an emotional and an intellectual process simultaneously. And if you allow that children should not be subjected to demands that they don't accept, you break that process,
My argument here is explicitly that the only way to educate people into the benefits of knowledge is to assume that they don't know them and can't appreciate them when they start the process. They have to take it on trust. In a world where people are told (on whose authority?) not to trust authority this becomes impossible.
And so the Right wing vision of education, where it is a process of increasing the value of the educated to other people -- employers, most often -- and not to themselves becomes utterly triumphant.
I thought it was mostly about not paying taxes if the money went to schools that let in poor kids.
41 mostly reads to me like the whoosh of goal posts whizzing by, but at any rate - see 42, and also if we are going to live in democracies then guess what authority is always going to be contested ( i mean it will even in non democracies let me introduce you to 1848), the shared commitment to transfer of power if it has legs must include generational transfer.
and the idea that children won't voluntarily undergo massive obsessive brute force assaults on the acquisition of knowledge/expertise flies in the face of all my personal experience of small people (omg the unending years of legos & other small toys taking over all surfaces with the construction of endlessly more elaborate creations, years & years of detailed invention of fleshed out imaginary languages, rereading books for years first encountered as out of reach but intriguing until they become comfort objects long outgrown intellectually ... ) and *really* is wide of the mark re adolescents. what i would give for the ability to summon the stick-to-it-ivness of a teenager learning to for ex fr braid their own hair over the course of one rainy afternoon spent in their bedroom with some good music on tap!
if the idea is that we should aim no higher than dull rote instruction focused solely on endlessly perpetuating the current elite consensus re worthwhile knowledge-culture and the young uns should put up and shut up - i mean, good luck with that!
That wasn't my idea at all. But a base of rote instruction is necessary to learn almost anything from languages onwards. I would agree that ubiquitous calculators have made mental arithmetic less necessary in everyday life.
The point is not whether children will put in huge efforts to learn what they want to learn. Of course they will, or most will. Look at the pain it costs toddlers to learn to walk. My point was about teaching them to learn things they are not immediately motivated to learn.
41, 45: I think your argument is undermined by the empirically verified fact that old people suck.
nw agreed the pain of teaching recalcitrants anything new is real, we part company in who we are assigning the roles of learned vs learner, to whit:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/text-2016-0012/html
https://daily.jstor.org/young-womens-language-patterns-at-the-forefront-of-linguistic-change/
https://books.google.com/books/about/Historical_Sociolinguistics.html?id=PLpZAAAAMAAJ
so let's give it up for all the young women everywhere and at all times, now and forever, creating our futures. i myself remember when they began en masse completely ignoring the coaches admonishments to avoid gender neutral pronouns, and also the moment when i knew high waisted jeans were absolutely, definitively and inexorably coming back. (v happy about this btw! dreading the inevitable cycling back to low rise, a generally less flattering style. also have to wonder what the young women pioneering early 17c hairstyles were thinking, just really - no.)
I'm confident most of them will process what was essentially the world's crappiest gap year just fine.
I think so too. I also think they learned some important lessons, such as "sometimes the whole world changes suddenly and everybody has to adapt" and "through any crisis, there will be assholes trying to make it worse" and "the people in charge don't necessarily know what they are doing."
Those are going to be important lessons for people who are going to be living through the worsening effects of climate change. Probably more important than whatever marginal benefit they would get by doing somewhat better at meeting arbitrary standards for proficiency in various academic subjects.
I mean, if Gen Z winds up not being quite as good at math as Millennials, I think that will be... just fine.
Right, who needs math. Or reading. Or civilization, really. Climate change will lead to no technological or intellectual challenges whatsoever.
Just teach the kids set theory and they can figure out math on their own.
High school math mostly exist for signalling purposes. If everybody did a little worse at it, society would be fine.
51 Apoplexy. Understanding what a least-squares fit is and especially how it can give worthless results is totally within HS math ability, even for kids below median strength by senior year. Not signalling. Maybe there's a point wrt the current trig-heavy curriculum, but most kids benefit from a bunch of practice with algebra before getting calc. Basic stats instead of geometry and trig would be an improvement. Not having any of it, even competence at "algebra" leaves basic and useful operations a complete mystery, citizens unable to understand the definition of BMI or the rudiments of exponential change.
52: I loved calculus, but statistics would probably have been more useful.
With the curriculum as currently (or formerly, back in my day, there's been some change) constituted, fine, maybe. I don't really agree and some of the goals of a mathematics education, like having a comfort with symbolic manipulation, can be reached other ways. But students, and hence adults, not understanding statistics is genuinely bad and makes them worse citizens than they would be otherwise. There's a good deal that can be taught without calculus (so, not too fiddly) that more people should know.
On preview, pretty much what lw said. Trigonometry and calculus have a bad difficulty-to-usage ratio, but I really think they help demystify the world. (They explain the world in a way that seems totally natural and basic once you're fluent with it, and thus without value, but if you don't have them, everything is that much fuzzier.) But I accept that the opportunity cost is too high for most. Geometry is similar, but I think teaching kids how to do proofs--or even that proofs are a thing that can be done, giving a degree of certainty that they might not be used to--is useful even if the setting isn't the best.
most kids benefit from a bunch of practice with algebra before getting calc
Sure, but most kids benefit not at all from calc. The reason they take it is to demonstrate that they are college material.
This thread is a bunch of weird hippy shit, except for NW. Thinking is a skill, one that you have to develop. In many ways it's harder now. (In some ways, it's easier, of course.) High school math is not the unique way to develop this skill, but it is one way. YouTube Riverdale reaction videos are not.
There was a 50 year trend of the raw scores that go into IQ increasing (the Flynn effect). In northern Europe -- this includes both the UK and Scandinavia -- the trend reversed starting around 2000, and raw scores have been dropping. (The US is less clear.)
50: THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN TELLING PEOPLE!!
The weakness I would pick out in this argument is the Generation Woke bit, in that, IIRC, one of the earliest and most brutal outbreaks of cancel culture came in the world of YA fiction, where the participants presumably do spend a lot of time reading.
Right. What do you think they're doing on the internets? What are you doing on the Internets? A shit load of it is written culture!
The operational definition, per moby, seems to be "it's only reading if it's published. By a publisher", which requires the utterly batfuck insane concept that we have special copyright neurons that won't develop without exposure to brands. Reading Cosma's blog? NOT READING. Scrolling the Daily Mail's celeb skin sidebar? READING.
(I am fairly sure Wolf has rolled this out a couple of times now.)
I don't understand what people mean when they talk about a statistics class instead of calculus. Don't you need Calc 1 to say anything meaningful about statistics? (To be fair, I kinda feel the same way about "physics without calculus" classes, that's not at thing! the whole point of calculus of inventing calculus was to make physics work!) It's all about areas under graphs!
The jury is still out on Cosma's blog's celeb skin sidebar.
I mean, honestly, distinctions between the stuff I did for my blog (NOT READING) and the stuff I sold to Axel Springer (READING) couched in *neurology*. What bullshit is this? On the fucking veldt, our east African plains ape ancestors evolved to favour business models invented several thousands of years later?
59: I took two years of high school physics without calc and it was fine. There's the occasional "just accept that the area under the graph is this," and something similar happens in basic statistics: accept that there's something called the central limit theorem, accept that these are the properties of the normal distribution, cool, here's how you calculate a confidence interval. You don't have to prove everything for a practical math course to be useful, and the clearest proof of that is that you used "Calc" instead of "analysis." (If you had said analysis, I would have pointed out that you likely didn't derive everything from set theory. I accept that there is a difference in form between these two examples but I don't care.)
55. Learning the simpler bits of calculus, like derivatives and integrals on speed/velocity/acceleration, or understanding how the simple trig stuff works via calculus, can be both useful and really enlightening. You don't have to know integration by parts and all the fancier tricks, but the introductory bits are actually pretty easy and even useful.
59. Seconded.
58/61: I think an argument can be made differentiating extemporaneous, conversational text that serves as a close analogue to speech--which is most of the textual engagement that young people do online, or to a degree that we're doing here (I'm not the first to say this, I think LB has as well?)--from the sort of more careful writing that occurs when someone can take their time and make a deeper argument, pull in sources, be edited, what have you. I suspect this has an effect but not a particularly strong one.
Anyway, the point is, the smartest generation in all of history is Gen Xers, or maybe late boomers, and the rest of us are just pale reflections of their greatness. Sad but true.
Alex:
1) the people who read Cosma's blog obviously spend a hell of a lot of time reading printed matter as well
2) one of the papers I cited specifically looked at the differing effects of reading the same material in print and on screen.
More generally, long-form literate blogging of the sort that you practice and we both enjoy here is a statistically negligible part of the interwebs. If Unfogged had a your group it would be even more pathetic than my local church's [this analogy may make less sense to Americans] [so ban it]. This is probably -- I admit -- because when you take your kids to a youth group, they are gone, but if you took them here, you'd still be lumbered with them, only worse.
We are in a more epistolary age, yes.
Don't you need Calc 1 to say anything meaningful about statistics?
You can kind of forget 95% of it without too much trouble.
High school math is not the unique way to develop this skill, but it is one way.
Its a way we valorize above other ways, at great personal cost to teenagers who are stuck with having to memorize a bunch of formulas for derivatives because that's the way grandpa learned to think. Most people, if they never learn what a co-tangent is, will be just fine.
Kids have a million other ways to explore and interact with the world today. You make fun of kids for creating dumb YouTube videos, but building a personal media empire wasn't even an option when I was a youth.
50. We had basic set theory in junior high school (aka middle school) back in the Cretaceous.
I freely admit to not giving much of a shit if the society-wide IQ drops by two points and goes down to what it was in 1975. It's not a good sign but there's like 600 other things that are going to doom us first.
I think I've learned and forgotten what set theory is more often than I have passwords for accounts I use twice a year.
YouTube is obviously shitty, but I don't see how it can be any shittier than Nick Jr. and I turned out fine.
smartest generation in all of history is Gen Xers
My late-GenZ teenagers refer to Gen X as Generation Karen.
65.2 - yes, and I am really deeply unconvinced having looked at it. the biggest effect size they found was whether or not the subjects were made to read against the clock*, and none of the theories that motivated them to run the meta analysis actually applied in the experiments, by construction. Maybe people are always slacking by looking at [whatever is a moral panic at the relevant moment] but the experimental setups didn't let them randomly browse the web or install games or some such, just gave them a text to read.
The underlying theory is seriously weird. It's a sort of cargo cult version of McLuhan. "The medium is the message"; ok, the literal physical substrate must have powerful subtle effects independent of format, genre, or content. It's like testing if comprehension of the TV news changed if the TV station had to change frequency assignment for regulatory reasons, or whether different Finnish forests' pulp changes what people read in the newspaper, or whether storing movies on an HDD or SSD changed people's reactions to them. Bizarrely hyperliteral.
*they claim people understood better the faster they had to read, while their down on all this modern stuff relies on the idea people don't read and just "skim" or "power browse" or something. the glaring contradiction is simply ignored.
Did you like really hate high school math or something? Is this a personal grudge?
BRB writing the great American novel - I've bought a really nice notebook. It's a delusion of the same form.
For statistics I agree that you don't need calc 2, you need the parts of calc 1 that don't involve calculation and you need a week or two on numerical integration. I am very much down for replacing Calc 2 with statistics.
(Certainly you don't need Analysis for physics, again this is clear historically, calculus was developed to make mechanics workable and analysis didn't exist until a couple centuries later.)
Somebody has already programmed the computer to figure out the area under the curve.
I took a couple Coursera courses on stats (an embarrassing hole in my education) that assumed no calculus and I got a lot out of it. They did a classic technique that I've seen done at many levels of education: assume you don't need to know the details about a black box right now. If it's important to you, you'll study it later. Only 15% of high school students take calculus, and I don't think it needs to be a gate to learn some stats. I'm talking about mass education, not for specialists.
The analysis riff was just because I thought you were requiring it to be formalized, with everything rigorously proved. (Newtonian calculus was clearly not formal. Fun for a lark, but very different from calculus now.) Yes, calculus helps. I took two years of physics without calculus in high school (second year contemporaneous with calc I/II), and then retook two semesters of physics with calculus in college and, yeah, it was easier and let me consider a wider range of scenarios (I specifically remember some problems with catenaries I'm pretty sure would have been impossible without calculus), but I don't think it led to any deeper understanding than I got in high school without calculus. There's a lot of calculus-like thoughts you can have without the technical machinery, e.g. how a test particle is affected by a field.
55 speaks truth. Why is calculus a pre-med requirement but statistics is not? Doctors to be good really need the latter.
Doctors like odds ratios, but not other statistics.
I've actually been trying to keep up this year by watching talks people have given, in some cases even course lectures, on youtube. Twitter has been a great source of pointers to papers worth reading. Many of my work conversations have moved to slack, where the ability to mix expressed thoughts or questions with bits of code, data, or documentation is really helpful. I doubt that a potentially fragmented medium is in any causal sense the problem, if there is a problem.
Probably orthogonal to a discussion about the meaning of education--- but don't know how much real access there is to intentions or large ideas, all we have are examples of attempts to learn or to teach. The lack of organizational matter (tables of contents, chapter or section titles and the like) is usually a big drawback, and planned material is much better than improvised material.
I liked this youtube video a lot, covers both letters AND numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk
77. I agree that Statistics would be more useful than more Calculus for most people. I didn't hit Statistics until undergrad (it was actually "Probability and Statistics") and it wasn't all that well taught.
81: I genuinely believe that a major problem with medicine, as it is practiced, is that average doctors memorize guidelines and can't critically examine evidence. There are some who are also scientists but many can't evaluate evidence.
I never took statistics, because the professors got really bad ratings, like 1.9. A typical good class was 4 plus on a 5-point scale. Lots of classes were 3 and fine, but barely 2 or below 2 was really bad.
I did take an accounting class. I think the principles of double-entry bookkeeping are fascinating, and more people should study introductory accounting as part of a liberal education.
Actually, are there any good online, free introductory to statistics classes? MIT doesn't count, because that would be too advanced for me, since I believe they do teach statistics from first principles.
86.last: Agreed. Fascinating and useful. It's all about measurement and truth and the possibility of knowing!
Really, my organizing principle is that the first goal of high school mathematics should be all about making adults that are hard to swindle. Not financially, not politically. Along the way this'll mean developing critical thinking skills and at least a little intellectual curiosity. Preparing students for further mathematical education is important but a secondary objective that only applies to a minority.
87: I did the first two courses in Duke's Coursera specialization. They're paid to get a certificate but free to audit; the textbook is pay-what-you-feel-like and good enough. Note that they're about learning to use R, too, so there's a small amount of programming.
82: But they'll call acupuncture pseudoscience for discussing the chi square distribution.
82: But they'll call acupuncture pseudoscience for discussing the chi square distribution.
Okay, let's see. To clarify: the linked and excerpted article is not by Maryanne Wolf but by Lisa Hilton in The Critic; the referenced article by Wolf is most likely this one, in the sadly now defunct Pacific Standard. Curiously, Hilton's article included only one hyperlink, to another of her articles in the same journal, so maybe it's their house style not to include links to the pieces they cite? (I will disclose that I didn't review the other pieces by Hilton on European fine dining to check.) It does, however, sport the following tags: Gen Z, Lionel Shriver, Literature, Woke.
The abstract of the paper in 5 is as follows:
Studies have produced conflicting results about whether digital media (the Internet, texting, social media, and gaming) displace or complement use of older legacy media (print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers; TV; and movies). Here, we examine generational/time period trends in media use in nationally representative samples of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders in the United States, 1976-2016 (N = 1,021,209; 51% female). Digital media use has increased considerably, with the average 12th grader in 2016 spending more than twice as much time online as in 2006, and with time online, texting, and on social media totaling to about 6 hr a day by 2016. Whereas only half of 12th graders visited social media sites almost every day in 2008, 82% did by 2016. At the same time, iGen adolescents in the 2010s spent significantly less time on print media, TV, or movies compared with adolescents in previous decades. The percentage of 12th graders who read a book or a magazine every day declined from 60% in the late 1970s to 16% by 2016, and 8th graders spent almost an hour less time watching TV in 2016 compared with the early 1990s. Trends were fairly uniform across gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The rapid adoption of digital media since the 2000s has displaced the consumption of legacy media.
I too have not downloaded the paper and read it (yet -- I just woke up from a long nap after [not worth narrating] and saw this post). I would be curious to see a few intermediate values between the late 70s and 2019, as well as the breakdown between books and magazines.
Let me cut this off and start a new comment for analysis, for the as-many-as-0 people who want more analysis than this.
I never took a stats class, but I pestered Moby last summer when I needed one.
I'm really bad at explaining things.
I did take an accounting class. I think the principles of double-entry bookkeeping are fascinating, and more people should study introductory accounting as part of a liberal education.
yes yes yes. demystification is liberation.
Peer review isn't really good at stopping outright fraud, but it does a pretty good job at not letting me explain things badly.
Did you like really hate high school math or something? Is this a personal grudge?
I think its fair to say I hated school in general. It really sucked the enjoyment out of my childhood, and I think most of it was unnecessary and ill-suited to my temperament.
I would have been thrilled with the two-day-a-week hybrid structure my son has now, but, alas, they are about to take that away and make him go back full time.
97 is the tl;dr of the OP: reading and writing long texts in compliance with external standards imposes discipline and improves thinking.
Spoiler: I can't make any sense of this shit. There's the moralistic argument that reading makes you a better and smarter person, which is a little like the moralistic argument that you should eat nutritious food with plenty of vegetables. The arguments about food have increased a little in sophistication, to focus on supply rather than mashing the shame button to juke demand. You do also see arguments about the decline of bookstores and the rise of Amazon, or the evisceration of print media, or public libraries not being open in the evenings, or whatever. The Hilton piece does include a reasonable (if comically self-unaware) discussion of the homogeneity of the publishing industry; but she segues into claiming that "If what readers want is books about minority or marginalised experience by writers who belong to that particular, micro-specific minor or marginalised category, then that is what the market will seek to provide." But she just explained how indirect the demand actually is! You're not selling books to people in the public square. There are publishers, agents, literary media, library buyers, awards committees, all these dots you have to connect before you can put a book in front of the eyeballs of "genuine readers," a large percentage of whom, in my experience, read on Kindle.
As far as pushing reading more in schools, it is already pushed endlessly in younger grades as this dutiful, virtuous thing: brain-kale with ancillary incentives required. I haven't followed the YA debates lately, but I do remember reading Elke an otherwise pretty good book which broke into a bizarre, multi-page speech about the different ways this character, as a transracial adoptee, might feel offended by a thing his teacher said, which just stopped the story cold. It made me suspect the sensitivity reader had given feedback that was taken very, very literally.
Anyway anyway. I think the concern here is always about whether elites are getting dumber, with a small proportion of concern about whether social mobility is getting harder. The answers to those two questions are "maybe" and "of course it fucking is (in the US)," but do you want to spend ten years trying and failing to change reading curricula nationwide in order to affect those trend lines, or even to make more kids as canny as Lionel Shriver? Boy.
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The California Klan during Reconstruction and its anti-Asian violence. From a book. Should I buy it? Should I buy a paper copy so I can understand it better???
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Buy it on paper, then burn it on your lawn, then read it on Kindle.
Okay, uh, Opinionated Revisionist Dialectics, I'll do something like that for sure.
103 wasn't me. But thanks for the reminder that I don't eat enough vegetables.
I had a salad for dinner, but it had steak, cheese, and fries on it.
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Jammies' school is making all the teachers make home visits on Friday. This is so weird to me. How do they possibly have training for house calls?
This is on the heels of a directive that they call all their failing students' parents. So Jammies has been slowly chipping away at 100+ phone calls. But now home visits.
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It's mostly because they're terrified that students are slipping away and won't come back and they'll lose a bunch of funding.
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He should bring a bat and do a Buford Pusser impression. Texans love Joe Don Baker.
105: I suspect it was Mossy. Hey Mossy, speaking of health food, I loved China Marches West so much that I suspected it was adulterated with some highly palatable non-history additives, but the only clue I can find is that maybe the author likes Owen Lattimore too much. Also thank you for your links, which are forming a small backlog because I have been depressed as shit, even by my standards. (I get vaccinated tomorrow, happily, but not against depression.)
107: How is Jammies doing? That sounds emotionally brutal. Does he teach in your hometown/same district as your kids, or a place nearby?
It was indeed me. I've not yet read Marches, or Lattimore. Lattimore's fingerprints are all over everything. My impression is that he's one of those scholars who was in the right place and time to have just enough evidence to put together a big bloody synthesis that everyone coould thrive on like bacteria eating an oil spill.
Doing home visits would be very stressful, at least to me.
Home visits in high school sounds awful. Our elementary school guidance counselor did home visits and they were actually great. But by appointment.
Having upheld the highest traditions of this eclectic web magazine by not clicking the link, I didn't realize we were talking about Olympic-level troll Lionel Shriver.
Health care: Why bother when death is the end of this all?
110. last Yes, teaching now seems incredibly tough to do especially in the circumstances hg has mentioned. Typing encouragement from a distance seems pretty silly, but a virtual beer or candy or whatever lights him up to him.
How is Jammies doing? That sounds emotionally brutal. Does he teach in your hometown/same district as your kids, or a place nearby?
He's thoroughly beaten down, but the shock has worn off, I'd say. Just trying to survive till the end of the year.
Currently Heebie U has unusually competent leadership, and our k-12 district has unusually incompetent leadership, and the comparison is breathtaking. Their particular brand of incompetence is to constantly launch insanely grandiose plans, like teachers making home visits from 1-2:30 on Friday, or announcing without warning that remote schooling will be unilaterally ended in a week. Then they get a huge amount of pushback, or realize the many problems with their plans, or try to implement it, and it ends up abandoned or watered down beyond recognition within a few weeks. It is a very efficient way to erode all trust in anything they say.
117: Welcome to my medical director.
Inside a medical director, it's too dark to read. Unless you have a Kindle with background light.
In the acme of "reading for pleasure" no one would have thought of that as a measure of social well-being, right? Precisely because it was one of the cheaper media for mass entertainment at the time, and probably the one with the most material.
Here's an insight I had about playing soccer, when I was in high school:
Suppose I was a 6/10 on skill and a 4/10 on effort. If I got to be an 8/10 on skill, but stayed 4/10 on effort, I wouldn't be a better soccer player, because actually executing those better moves more quickly requires more effort. To be a better soccer player required that I hustle more on the field, period, either with more skills or not. I actually had to work harder. Otherwise I was just flailing and hoping.
I feel like that's the problem with the k-12 leadership in Heebievill and BG's medical director: they're flailing and hoping, because competent leadership (like Heebie U has) is a shit ton of work, and they're not recognizing that they actually have to dig in and do some heavy lifting/planning/thorough thinking through ideas in order to make the organization better. When it comes to leadership, flailing comes from laziness.
Possibly they just hate public education. It's pretty common.
102: This won't be helpful as it's not the choice in front of you, but I'd be more interested in the CA Klan in the 20's, when members or at least allies included officialdom in the Alameda County government.
"teachers making home visits from 1-2:30 on Friday"
I don't even understand this. Literal knock-on-the-door sit-in-the-parlor (ha) home visits? Were those common pre-pandemic?
It was, but they had to stop because so many teachers were stealing lawn ornaments.
Stealing kids underpants isn't a bad idea.
111: I read Lattimore's first two books (Desert Road to Turkestan and High Tartary) when they were reprinted in the mid-1990s, and I found them super interesting. They're probably better because they're reportage with background rather than attempts at grand synthesis.
Forgot to add: Somewhere along the line I read someone -- maybe even his daughter? -- saying that the best way to understand Lattimore was to think of him as a Mongol nationalist.
129: Interesting. But, searching my (electronic, effortlessly searchable) library, the cites point overwhelmingly to later more scholarly work: The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940); Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers 1928-1958 (1962); Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and Russia (1950); and most definitely reach for synthesis. Quoth wiki:
Lattimore's "lifetime intellectual project", notes one recent scholar, was to "develop a 'scientific' model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate and interact with one another along 'frontiers'."And super interesting reportage most certainly wouldn't have shown up in all the dry-as-dust places I've found him.
131: Sounds like I got the better deal on the reading.
I mean, theorizing about Everything is interesting, but more to do than to read someone else's.