Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/high-school-english-teachers-assigning-books.html

by signa11 • 7 months ago

103 346 7 months ago

nytimes.com

functionmouse• 7 months ago

Maybe I would've had something intelligent to say about this article, had I been allowed to read it.

gscott• 7 months ago

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.

isatis• 7 months ago

Un-paywall'd: https://archive.ph/lcAZ3

stevewodil• 7 months ago

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.

anon7000• 7 months ago

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.

brightball7• 7 months ago

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.

RajT88• 7 months ago

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.

threethirtytwo3• 7 months ago

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.

Telaneo19• 7 months ago

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.

idle_zealot• 7 months ago

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.

DaSHacka• 7 months ago

Or, as we've seen recently, you can force them and they still won't be literate enough.

BeFlatXIII6• 7 months ago

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.

TitaRusell3• 7 months ago

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.

Nasrudith• 7 months ago

My experience was a self-admitted outlier but it started by being read to frequently as a small child, before school started. I could technically read for as long as I could remember but reading by myself was boring compared to being read to due to having a very short attention span then.

Start literacy young and the discovery of reading for fun will be easy and natural.

bgbntty24• 7 months ago

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.

floren3• 7 months ago

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

eimrine7• 7 months ago

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".

BeFlatXIII6• 7 months ago

Seems like a skill issue on your end.

TitaRusell3• 7 months ago

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.

saltcured2• 7 months ago

As a native US English speaker, I enjoyed Shakespeare and even when we read Beowulf and some Chaucer in mildly transcribed and annotated Middle English. More than any history lesson, it developed in me a feeling for how, in spite of lots of technological and other societal change, the basic human condition is the same.

I imagine it would be interesting to read early texts in other proto languages too. Sadly, I'm not a polyglot and can't really access that experience first-hand.

ThrowMeAway16182• 7 months ago

[flagged]

amanaplanacanal4• 7 months ago

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.

Telaneo19• 7 months ago

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.

171862744020• 7 months ago

If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading?

Yes. (n=1)

watwut11• 7 months ago

Yes, because it amounts to several hours long homework. Kids are more slower then adults at reading, so this can easily amount to 10 hours of additional homework which you do on top of usual homework.

So yes, if you spent 10 hours reading a book you don't care about this week, you don't feel like reading something else. You feel like you spent awful lot of time reading already and feel like reading is something like vacuum cleaning - duty but not something you do for fun.

robcohen• 7 months ago

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.

ekjhgkejhgk6• 7 months ago

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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 7 months ago

It is awfully hard to get anyone, children or adults, to think at all

techblueberry5• 7 months ago

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.

wavemode• 7 months ago

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.

malnourish• 7 months ago

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.

tekla2• 7 months ago

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.

Telaneo19• 7 months ago

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.

djoldman• 7 months ago

In the USA, you can test out of it: the GED.

bsder• 7 months ago

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.

miltonlost• 7 months ago

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.

lurk22• 7 months ago

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.

lurk22• 7 months ago

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.

znpy• 7 months ago

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.

adfm• 7 months ago

I’ve noticed some of these kids can’t tell time on analog clocks nor read cursive handwriting.

kevmo314• 7 months ago

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.

ls612• 7 months ago

I never stopped writing in cursive but then again I don’t write much by hand anymore.

lucyjojo• 7 months ago

you don't write. people don't write in cursive around you?

macintux• 7 months ago

~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.

brightball7• 7 months ago

Something really cool about reading the Declaration of Independence.

bigyabai• 7 months ago

The way things are headed, you'll just point your phone at it and have it translated to plaintext in 3-5 years anyhow.

brightball7• 7 months ago

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.

komali25• 7 months ago

What information does an 8 handed clock convey?

msteffen• 7 months ago

This one? https://www.arrowsmith.ca/cip-arrowsmith-school

CGamesPlay• 7 months ago

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.

refibrillator• 7 months ago

This is hilarious, I don’t even want to know if it’s legit.

171862744020• 7 months ago

Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation

Interesting, for me it is the opposite. With a digital clock I need to do a division/comparison to know how much part of the day/hour has already passed. With an analog clock I can read a proportion directly.

Telaneo19• 7 months ago

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.

inimino• 7 months ago

I convert that to digital time in my head

What? They are the same thing.

tssva2• 7 months ago

What? Next you are going to tell me they can’t use an abacus or properly impress cuneiform into clay tablets.

lm284693• 7 months ago

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.

squigz7• 7 months ago

These aren't really comparable. Cursive handwriting varies considerably between people. One person's might be very clear, another might be impossible to discern.

amitav12• 7 months ago

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.

171862744020• 7 months ago

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.

I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".

tomcam2• 7 months ago

To me the ability to read a whole book is a competitive advantage in the job market.

eimrine7• 7 months ago

For what industries?

epolanski2• 7 months ago

Any job position requiring intelligence and nuance which unavoidably stems from informing yourself.

tomcam2• 7 months ago

Any. Even if you're doing a blue collar job, understanding the fundamentals (or at least the specifics about a particular subfield) makes you "the guy" and adds some job security. As a programmer I often got ahead just because I'd read all of the C standard library, the Windows API docs, etc.

tyleo• 7 months ago

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?

cr125rider• 7 months ago

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?

scoofy• 7 months ago

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.

atmavatar• 7 months ago

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.

rayiner7• 7 months ago

I’m a nerd, but we were never a nation of nerds and things turned out pretty well. The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise.

Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.” I went to the Iowa Caucuses back in 2019. These were democrats, but not highly educated ones. Mostly farm and farm adjacent people. But watching them ask questions and deliberate, there was a degree of level-headedness, practicality, prudence, skepticism, and caution that was just remarkable to watch. These are folks who don’t have much book learning but come from generations of people who managed to plan and organize their lives well enough to survive Iowa’s brutally harsh winters and short planting window (about 14 days—either side of that and you and your whole family die). You need smart people to do smart people things, but those conscientious normies are the backbone of a healthy society.

mmooss12• 7 months ago

Lots of people besides nerds care very much which schools their kids attend. Look at home prices.

jhanschoo• 7 months ago

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.

lm284693• 7 months ago

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"

mfro• 7 months ago

It is still extraordinary cheap to produce and disseminate novels. If not more so, if you include ebooks or longform blogging.

raincole• 7 months ago

... 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.

barbazoo2• 7 months ago

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.

smueller1234• 7 months ago

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.

bmitc• 7 months ago

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.)

onraglanroad2• 7 months ago

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.

nobody9999• 7 months ago

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 pretend to speak for anyone else, but I am more than my economic inputs and outputs, and while it was in a somewhat different context, Heinlein's prose applies in spades WRT your assertion:

“I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal…but a man.” ― Robert A. Heinlein[0][1]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11588525-i-had-to-perform-a...

[1] From Starship Troopers[2]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers

lelanthran9• 7 months ago

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]

------------------------------

[1] Management who make obviously incompetent decisions like "Our study material only works on iPads" are obviously incompetent or otherwise disconnected from reality.

Cornbilly2• 7 months ago

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.

nitwit0053• 7 months ago

With "obvious" ideas like reading being good, you tend not to have people chiming in to say so. That creates a filter where you only get the contrarianism.

foxyv• 7 months ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland

frompdx• 7 months ago

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.

eimrine7• 7 months ago

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.

squigz7• 7 months ago

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.

oxag3n• 7 months ago

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.

inemesitaffia• 7 months ago

Pretty much every one in the selective school I went to read for fun.

Even the "troublesome" ones.

skeptrune• 7 months ago

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.

kotaKat• 7 months ago

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

Pikamander2• 7 months ago

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.

Kim_Bruning4• 7 months ago

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

fgh_azer2• 7 months ago

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.

Kim_Bruning4• 7 months ago

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.

corimaith• 7 months ago

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.

Kim_Bruning4• 7 months ago

90% of everything is crap.

  --Sturgeon's law.

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)

squigz7• 7 months ago

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.

Kim_Bruning4• 7 months ago

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...

impossiblefork2• 7 months ago

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.

delichon• 7 months ago

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.

ThrowawayR24• 7 months ago

"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.

Aerroon4• 7 months ago

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.

nitwit0053• 7 months ago

People said all kinds of nonsense about comic books and cheap novels leading kids astray in the past. What actually happened is those kids ended up being slightly better readers.

That you don't like something doesn't mean it's actually harmful.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 7 months ago

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)?

eudamoniac6• 7 months ago

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.

spicyusername2• 7 months ago

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.

fzeroracer• 7 months ago

Okay, now what's the literacy rate in your county? What does the data actually say?

QuadmasterXLII• 7 months ago

Pretty funny if it's Mississippi and they're just correct.

spicyusername2• 7 months ago

A quick Google search says 67% of elementary school kids scored at or above reading proficiency in my county. 73% for high school.

idontwantthis3• 7 months ago

In Clark County high schools in NV, they do not read a single whole book in English classes even in honors.

smelendez• 7 months ago

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.

aleph_minus_one• 7 months ago

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.

nomdep• 7 months ago

Yeah, that was totally me.

The only book I ever read for school was by accident. I was already deep into it on my own when the teacher assigned it to us

171862744020• 7 months ago

I do not live in the US, but this was my experience as well. Actually having read the book made my grades worse, because I now disagreed with the claims the teacher wanted to hear. I was always like: no, I have also read the book and no the author doesn't say that.

apparent4• 7 months ago

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).

theultdev• 7 months ago

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.

rayiner7• 7 months ago

Yeah, reading scores are about how well you teach reading. In terms of NAEP 8th grade reading scores, New York, Georgia, Utah, Illinois, Rhode Island, and California cluster together in the top half, in that order: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/blog_na...

ruszki• 7 months ago

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.

mmooss12• 7 months ago

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.

throwawayqqq11• 7 months ago

I can infere all the facts and logic perfectly well! But thank you.

nothercastle2• 7 months ago

It’s probably because you are in a rural red state that isn’t concerned with equity and feelings

haizhung• 7 months ago

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.

sureglymop• 7 months ago

I graduated high school less than a decade ago and I had to read about 90% of those books. And those are just the German ones, there were at least half as many English and French ones too. I have younger cousins who are in the school system now and I am fairly certain that it is still the same. Actually I think it is probably mandated by the curriculum.

renehsz• 7 months ago

There's still plenty of mandatory reading. It's not unusual for high schoolers to have to read at least two books per semester. Here's the problem though: It's just too easy to... you know... not do it. Teachers have no way of reliably telling the difference between those students who complete their reading assignments honestly and those who make due with summaries and AI assistance. Don't ask me how I know ;-)

mmooss12• 7 months ago

Interesting. Would you share with us their English names and what they're about?

171862744020• 7 months ago

I will only do things from memory, you can use Google yourself.

* Die Vorstadtkrokodile

"The suburb crocodiles", which is also how the youth gang in the book is called. Boy wants to be part of the gang, which has idiotic tests of courage. Plot twist is that the guy who refused to do this idiotic tests ends up being the tough guy. I don't remember if this was the main character or not. Ends up saving some other boy in a wheelchair, I think while they play in a collapsing old industrial building.

* Faust I

Maybe the most famous German book from v.Goethe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust,_Part_One Old professor Faust makes a deal with the devil that he can take his soul, if he is able to provide him with true joy. Professor gets young again, parties, seduces a flawless faithful girl, makes her kill her mother, she ends up in prison being pregnant, devil proposes to save here if she ditches god, she refuses. Faust flees, huge cliff hanger until v.Goethe gets to write Faust II at the end of his live.

* Antigone

Famous greek drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone

* Die Räuber

Famous play from the other famous German poet Schiller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robbers

* Hamlet

Shakespeare, original available in English

* Der Besuch der alten Dame

"The visit of the old Lady" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit_(play) The old (now rich) lady visits her home town, which has seen better times and demands the death of her youth lover for a huge amount of money for the town. In the beginning all swear loyalty to the guy, in the end all demand his death, inviting the international press. In between the slow transition is described being framed by the protagonists as the most ethical thing ever.

* Im Westen nichts Neues

"No news from the West (front)" describes the trauma of soldiers in the first world war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front

* Woyzeck

Soldier Woyzeck gets exploited by both his superior and his doctor. The doctor puts him on a only beans diet, he becomes crazy. The doctor comments his mental struggles with "Very interesting, very good, should also try this ..." Ends up killing his spouse due to jealousy and later maybe himself. Never got completed by the original author, and the order of the acts is disputed, which makes for a quite different ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck

amanaplanacanal4• 7 months ago

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.

apparent4• 7 months ago

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.

techjamie• 7 months ago

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.

lelanthran9• 7 months ago

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.

I've read a lot on this; it's "phonetics" vs "look-see".

For a really depressing read, read "Why Johnny can't read", then the sequel "Why Johnny still can't read", and then look at the dates of those two essays.

We already knew decades ago that some methods never worked in the past, and don't work now, but we still hope that they will work in the future, so we keep them around because there are powerful and mostly invisible (to the parents) interests in keeping these discredited methods around.

mmooss12• 7 months ago

Can't parents have their child read to themselves at home?

Cornbilly2• 7 months ago

Who is "they"?

apparent4• 7 months ago

The first two are HS staff. The third is the students.

koinedad• 7 months ago

My kids read tons of books. But we homeschool and actual books are the main course of our education.

sixtram• 7 months ago

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.

quasigod• 7 months ago

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.

Aerroon4• 7 months ago

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?

dybber• 7 months ago

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.

trueismywork• 7 months ago

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.

tstrimple• 7 months ago

If by summer reading assignments, are you referring to Scholastic summer reading programs? I quite enjoyed those as the available options for reading were very wide and I could always get some new Goosebumps books from the book fairs. But those are parent initiated, not something the school assigns. They can't really assign anything over the summer as they have no authority to do so outside of some IEP designed to get a particular student back on track.

charles_f• 7 months ago

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?

physicsguy• 7 months ago

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.

rawgabbit2• 7 months ago

You should be thankful. I had to read the whole canon of Shakespeare and hated it. I learned about the great vowel shift and more about English trivia than I cared to know.

https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/l...

credit_guy• 7 months ago

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...

j7ake2• 7 months ago

Literature is like classical music. One can argue Beethovens 9th symphony is one of the greatest pieces of music of all time, but that doesn’t mean we all have time to sit through 70 minutes a day listening to it.

I bet important people don’t even have time to sit and watch a full movie.

mmooss12• 7 months ago

You can learn far more from art than from anything else, if you try. Should important people go to religious services? Without that at arts, where do they get deep, full thoughtful perspectives on the world?

phil21• 7 months ago

Modern society has gotten so “efficient” and expectations so insane that yeah, anyone at that level of a professional career - especially with a family - I would in no way expect to have time to read anything. Every last inch of their life is going to be hyperscheduled to oblivion.

We have systematically removed any chance for “unproductive” downtime for any high performers if they want to continue to be seen as a high performer.

Not surprising in the least to me, and society as a whole is worse off because of it. Good luck when this person needs to make a hugely impactful and thoughtful decision for society while in their position of power.

chung8123• 7 months ago

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.

BigParm• 7 months ago

Most books could and should be condensed by about 100x. Poor communication skills and zero respect for people's time.

kccoder• 7 months ago

Lord of the rings: A human-like individual leaves his house to drop a ring in some lava.

prennert• 7 months ago

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.

nothercastle2• 7 months ago

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.

pineappletooth• 7 months ago

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.

eudamoniac6• 7 months ago

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.

tsoukase• 7 months ago

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.

Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

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