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Report finds ‘shocking and dispiriting’ fall in children reading for pleasure (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M] to c/literature@beehaw.org
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Children's reading enjoyment has fallen to its lowest level in almost two decades, with just one in three young people saying that they enjoy reading in their free time, according to a new survey.

Only 34.6% of eight- to 18-year-olds surveyed by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) said that they enjoy reading in their spare time. This is the lowest level recorded by the charity since it began surveying children about their reading habits 19 years ago, representing an 8.8 percentage point drop since last year.

It is also part of a broader downward trend since 2016, when almost two in three children said that they enjoyed reading.

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[–] 7 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

I'm always interested to see exactly what is included and excluded from their definition of reading. On average, most adults actually read more today that we did in the 90s, if you're purely talking words of text consumed. Are graphic novels being included in these stats? Short stories? Social media threads? Most people even watch videos/tv/movies with subtitles they read now, which was not something that was an option before.

The actual article text never says the word "book" once, but I strongly suspect that is all that's being counted.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    As a teacher in lower secondary school, kids don't do any of that. They read physical media sporadically, and the main kind of digital media they consume is through IG and TikTok, furtherly filtered by the algorithm to appeal to their interest. The only kind of excitement I see in their eyes when talking reading is when talking manga, but even then it's mostly because they got there through anime (dubbed, so not even with subs) first. Kids don't read half as often as we did twenty years ago, and teachers get the blame for trying to push some sense in them through lecture.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The only kind of excitement I see in their eyes when talking reading is when talking manga

    I don't think you meant that manga is bad, but there is a huge variety of manga, and a lot of it is really good. But even if they just read shonen, is that a problem? They are reading for fun. It should be celebrated

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Of course I don't think manga is bad, literature Is literature after all. As I said, it's just that the interest in the material Is filtered through an appreciation of formerly consumed visual media, and even then It remains "an interest", rather than something they actively look for. Monetary factors have also to be looked in: not every country can afford to print out Shonen Jump.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    IG and TikTok videos often have captions to read so they can be watched without sound, so they're not inherently a counter to my point. But yes, it's just another "boob tube". It's not good, but it's certainly not any worse than watching tv nonstop, which is where we were in the 90s and aughts. And kids are on Discord and in text chains constantly, whereas during the pre-internet 20th century, most people called people to communicate long-distance; letters were certainly not a daily thing.

    We're about 70 years too late to stop visual media supplanting text as the main form of entertainment media, but at least the internet has brought text back in lots of ways that just didn't exist previously (especially forums and messaging).

    I remember when Harry Potter and Twilight both made headlines for both getting adults "reading again" (because they already were mostly not), but then also a bunch of people jumping in and deriding them as trash, insisting that they need to read 'real' books, and there's a bouquet of that in a lot of the discussion of social media.

    If we take away IG and TikTok and smartphones, kids aren't going to go read, they're just going to watch TV.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Ehhh, while it's true that some vids nowadays have captions, this isn't always the case. Plus, consider that a lot of content on the internet isn't necessarily in the language Kids think in (when they don't come from anglo-speaking countries). And, once again anecdotal experience but I have to factor that in, "digital natives" don't seem to communicate in written form as much as we do. Blame voice messages, I guess.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    The kinds of works that create an educated adult instead of a consumer.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    Given that there are plenty of pro-consumerism schlocky books (if not the majority, being that most are just entertainment-targeted consumer goods), and plenty of highly educational non-book texts, this doesn't really mean anything.

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