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submitted 11 hours ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/literature@beehaw.org

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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[-] iagomago@feddit.it 4 points 6 hours ago

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.

[-] Vodulas@beehaw.org 1 points 4 hours ago

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

[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

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.

this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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