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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.
You doubt there's a problem because you don't know of it happening in your rural town? In addition to teaching kids to read books, we apparently need to teach adults research and inference fundamentals.
> 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).
> 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.
Okay, now what's the literacy rate in your county? What does the data actually say?
> The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class
That doesn’t mean that kids really need to read any single of those books any time in history.
It’s probably because you are in a rural red state that isn’t concerned with equity and feelings
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.
> What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
A clear majority of parents that I know actually would have the education system do that. Hence the oftentimes poor results.
A private school I looked at in 2025 required iPads (and nothing else) because their entire management of students was don by an iPad application (that worked on nothing but iPads).
The school admin/marketer/consultant/whatever I spoke to during the sales call literally did not understand what I meant when I said "If your management is so incompetent at decision-making that they got shangaied into buying into this deficient ecosystem when almost any other decision would have worked for both major mobile platforms, why on earth would I think that the other decisions they make would be any good".[1]
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[1] Management who make obviously incompetent decisions like "Our study material only works on iPads" are obviously incompetent or otherwise disconnected from reality.
Ironically I think education would be much better if they added after school and pre-school child care. I think the Finnish system is pretty good.
> Comments here are very strange, “Reading books should go the way of cursive! Education is more like childcare anyways.”
That's pretty on-brand for HN though. This place enforces a very peculiar version of anti-intellectualism centered on empty-headed contrarianism.
They want to play devil's advocate but they aren't smart enough so all you get are dumb hot takes.
... 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.
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
I’ve noticed some of these kids can’t tell time on analog clocks nor read cursive handwriting.
I lost the post I meant to reply to, but here is the reply:
I tend to see literature, especially fiction, as a way to practice empathy. A lot of people mentally stagnate later in life, and books help break that. Empathy isn't some magical trait, it's something you can actually train. Think Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep even if the animal is fake, the act of caring still has meaning. Practicing empathy like that helps you understand other people's worldviews. You don't have to agree with them, but if you want to function in life, you at least need to understand why people think the way they do. You can also take Paul Schrader's view that art is a vessel for emotion. It's a place to purge or process uncomfortable feelings. Watching Taxi Driver, for example, gives you a space to confront isolation, violence, and male nihilism. Instead of becoming Travis Bickle, the film lets you observe him and put those thoughts into words. That's Schrader's defense when people say the movie glorifies Bickle; the art itself is the safe space, not the man.
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
To me the ability to read a whole book is a competitive advantage in the job market.
How about us, the adults?
In the latest "War on the rocks" podcast [1], Ryan Evans asked his guest, Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, what books he has read lately (he often, maybe always, asks that question). The guest answered basically that, as a politician, he does not have time to read books anymore, because he is very busy with other things.
I think most listeners of the podcast are absolutely ok with this. Pål Jonson is an important guy, who has a job to do. That job is to keep Sweden safe, and, as Sweden is now part of NATO, by extension to keep NATO safe as well. If he does his job well, then Sweden and NATO together might be able to deter aggression by Russia. If taking time to read books means he has less time to do his job well, then he should not read books.
But if you replace Pål Jonson with somebody else, who are we to say that their job is less important? And if we take a kid, the way the kid understands their jobs is that they need to get ready for life,for their actual, paid, job when the time will come. And if in doing that, they are more efficient by using ChatGPT, then why should they read entire books?
[1] https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/getting-faster-stronger-re...
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.
Maybe I would've had something intelligent to say about this article, had I been allowed to read it.
Two book series that hit the nail for us are the series of Enid Blyton, like Famous Five, (we read to them at age 8-9) and Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid (they read by themselves). Especially the later is a masterpiece for (pre)puberty age. Days upon days of intellectual and emotional satisfaction.
What i found is that there is an aversion to knowledge, there is a ever increasing group of people (not only kids) that refuses everything that involves reading, learning or reasoning.
You present them a game that involves a bit of investigation and they just don't try, you think well they want to shutdown their brains at the moment of relax, but no they just never use their brains. They can't follow a manual to assemble anything no matter if they only have to connect two pieces clearly marked as put them together.
And they reach adult stage in this condition, they can't do anything else that following verbal very precise instructions, and some of them are not stupid, i found very capable people that just reject trying to read anything but have incredible reasoning skills, they just never notice because they never exercised.
My kids read tons of books. But we homeschool and actual books are the main course of our education.
My main concern here is attention span. I think books are good for improving the muscle of attention span. There are other places that you can improve your attention span but I fear they are not being taught in school either.
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.
Un-paywall'd: https://archive.ph/lcAZ3
I’m in my 30s but the UK English reading choices weren’t very inspiring when I studied and you could pass the exams without ever reading full texts so of course that’s what schools encouraged.
I remember doing sections of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth but we never did the whole thing. We did read Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls but that was it for books/plays. Poetry we had a book called Anthology where we had to read and re-read many poems for analysis.
The headline should have been ...especially in English Class.
Even in the 90s most people got book summaries to get through the curriculums. I would say, the highest performing language students and teachers pets at school did exactly that.
School unfortunately is largely about reciting of the teachers knowledge, so there is no need to read the source and think for yourself.
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.
The article seems to be centered around reading assignments. I was reading entire books often when I was in school, yet did my best to avoid reading assignments because they were so dull.
I don't know how they sourced respondents, anecdotally all my kids a reading books as I type that. They read much more than I did at their age; and their friends read as well. They'd probably spend all their time on snapshat or brawlstars, were they to have a say.
Isn't that the characteristic of each generation to feel like education of the next generation is decadent?
Most books could and should be condensed by about 100x. Poor communication skills and zero respect for people's time.
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.
Seattle public schools does not read full books in elementary. Just short form publisher slop. Can’t do reading as a group and discussion because not all kids understand and that wouldn’t be inclusive.
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.
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.