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Report finds ‘shocking and dispiriting’ fall in children reading for pleasure
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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Literature
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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.
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
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.
Not a kid anymore, but I'm guilty as charged when it comes to manga. It's the only thing I'll read now aside from random stuff on the web
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.
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.