Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
nbcnews.com89 points by freejoe76 a day ago
89 points by freejoe76 a day ago
It's worse than this.
I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos?
I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.
Reading/writing is a much more dense and navigable way of taking in and recording information than speech. Efficient use of AI requires being very good at reading quickly and having the comprehension skills to pick up on nuances that suggest a hole in the AI's work.
In a world where AI is empowering existing experts while risking junior hiring, the young should be aiming to be competitive with those experts, not aiming below even current juniors. If, as a human, you're just acting as a glorified harness around an LLM, you're more replaceable.
My pen weighs in at 10g in my backpack and is capable of durably recording information for thousands of years. No battery to charge, cheap, and plentiful.
In my opinion it is. Reading can convey information faster than even sped up videos, is easier to skim, and has high precision.
Im not saying it is the best for everyone, but it has been proven repeatedly to beat out any other method in the majority of the population. Plus its time stability and storage is much easier and reliable.
It also could have other side benefits like focus or perhaps something like visual acuity, much like how writing by hand can develop good hand-eye coordination. If someone struggled to write with a pencil for example I would be very wary about handing them sharp tools or knives.
The point is that "doing hard things" is required to be a successful adult. Meanwhile, the bar for what constitutes a "hard thing" is dropping fast.
When I used to read for pleasure, I did it because it was pleasurable. Not because it would be the hard thing. It was fun and easy.
What this particular chain of thoughts shows is that adults don't read for pleasure either, they associate it with an uncomfortable hard thing one should to do "build character".
This is conflating hard with unpleasant. A child just learning to read is going to find it hard to do, yet through adults pushing them to do the hard thing, they learn to read and sometimes begin to find it to be pleasurable. Building most skills is hard, yet that doesn't exclude taking pleasure in it. Many of us taught ourselves to code, the fact that we enjoyed it doesn't mean it wasn't also hard.
We've all learned the lesson that sometimes you have to struggle through something hard, to be able to access better pleasure.
Everything is easy when you've done a lot of it, that's how the brain works.
I mean it’s obviously not just that otherwise we’d make every kid play the original Donkey Kong and call that a success
The original donkey kong is pretty difficult compared to some of the wide-audience games that have been coming out. As far as I can tell, if the audience of a particular franchise includes younger generations as a majority or near-majority, the difficulty plummets. I don't think "plummets" is even that sensational. See pokemon, kingdom hearts, mario games, final fantasy games. Some franchises and genres have survived but not all of them.
I might be missing some other reasons why this could be happening, like increases in game balance and coordination.
Play Mario Odyssey for an hour or two then play Super Mario Bros 1, 2, or 3 as one startling example.
This has been tested: human instructor vs video, and the human instruction provides measurably better outcomes by an order of magnitude
I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
> these days
Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.
For what it’s worth I think people have always been this way. I used to read during recess when I was in middle school. I usually could not wait to get back to my books. But the other kids saw this as profoundly antisocial. I wasn’t being antisocial exactly; I was pretty shy and had a very active imagination. Amusingly, the school bullies misinterpreted my bookishness as weakness. That changed when I (accidentally) knocked out a kid’s front teeth during a fight. I felt terrible about it but the bullying stopped immediately.
This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.
Herd mentality, anti-intellectual culture, poor reading skills, and ADHD are widespread issues. Those mothers sound lame, and ultimately the joke's on them. Reading is awesome, and making fun of someone for it just shows what basic bitches they are.
I’m 65. I’m pretty sure I heard plenty of snide “nose buried in a book” cracks when i was growing up.
It's not that there's social pressure specifically against reading. Just that there's social pressure to conform, and most people aren't reading.
This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure.
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
One thing that helped in our house was making books unavoidable. We keep paperbacks lying around in every room. It sounds silly, but there’s a kind of “cover gravity” and guilt that pulls the kids ( and me) back into a book when a book is just sitting there gathering dust.
My parents had a rule where the default answer when I asked them to buy me things was no—except for books. Combined with the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere and did not have cable TV, books were by far the most appealing thing around.
It's not necessarily that simple. Both I and my wife read, almost every week I read my daughter passages I've come across in my books, we have bookshelves in every room. We read to our younger children and they enjoy being read to.
I told my daughter that when I was her age I liked to read Animorphs, and girls were reading Babysitter's Club. She brought home these books from the school library and... they were graphic novels.
Apparently the school library is stocked with comic books and the kids can just read those instead of real books. And comic books don't have descriptions of scenes, they have almost no internal monologue or exposition, no symbolism or (literary) imagery, they really can't teach reading comprehension.
FWIW my son went through the same sort of thing during emerging literacy and it drove me kind of crazy. He started with simple texts, then started coming home with “graphic novels”. I just let him do it. He was stuck on those for a bit, started getting interested in World Record books (which, again, lots of pictures and not much writing), and then…read a Roald Dahl book a day for two weeks. For whatever reason, the switch flipped.
Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.
Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.
> Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.
I logged in especially to second what lukewrites has said.
My kids both started on and enjoyed graphic novels, then progressed to reading chapter books without pictures etc, I'd say in part because of the graphic novels.
Anecdote: waiting for my childs parent-teacher interview in the library of a mid-range highschool in a large city, I casually asked the row of student facilitators how much they used the (pretty substantial) library. They all said, with emphasis, that they'd never used the library once, not even for a single book. Overhearing this a teacher looked at me and shook his head with resignation.
Did you ask them how much they read as ebooks? Libby is very popular.
Is libby very popular among young school children? Based on surveys asking how often kids read per week I would figure ebook reading is also down. They don't usually ask about the format.
Speaking for my own personal experience. I graduated from high school in the mid-2000s. I had any passion, joy and desire for reading crushed out of me through my school years. Between being forced to read books/topics at school I had zero interest in, my parents forcing me to read hours a day after school, writing and presenting book reports, Accelerated Reader tests and who knows what else, I haven't causally picked up a book to read in... a very long time. Thanks to a friend, I have just now picked up audiobooks as a way to potentially reintroduce books to my life.
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
Reader here, about 50 books a year.
There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.
My kids a bit young for reading HP on their own, but it’s our bedtime book series every night. Over the past year or so we’ve (I’ve) read HP before bed. We just started book the Order of the Phoenix.
Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.
I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.
Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.
I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.
So how much of this is a consequence of small children being taught to guess instead of to actually read? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_cueing
I wonder how much of the problem is the books they're given to read.
Modern kids / YA fiction seems so blah.
When I first got a portable computer I basically immediately stooped reading. Like twelve years back. It only got worse when I got sufficient smart phone. I read basically daily before.
I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.
Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.
It's the damn phone.
Recommendations? What are you reading?
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
I love history and biography. Robert Caro' biography of LBJ. I also loved Don Quixote. The Iliad.
LotR is an oldie but goodie! I finally dug it out and read it this past month and it was quite enjoyable. I had tried back in high school but was kind of bored with the frilly language and songs and gave up. But this time around in my 40s, having read lots more books since then and developed a stronger vocabulary and reading stamina (e.g. I've read and enjoyed Stormlight Archive twice, which is 4x the length), it was actually pretty quick and easy, and I regret not having done it earlier. I paid a lot of attention to the journey and all the cardinal directions and feel like my sense of direction improved actually. And I'd always liked the movies but the books are so much better! It feels like a book from a strange almost-on-the-spectrum nerd who also spend time on the front lines in World War 1. I think these days the nerdy authors I like and the people who are grunts in the military are almost distinct circles, so maybe unlikely to get quite the same book in terms of the lore but also the realistic emotional punches.
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
I read the Wheel of Time series. It's all I read. It took about 18 months. It's great, though. I'm sad it's over, and I'm going to miss the characters.
Just did the bobiverse series after furiously consuming all the dungeon crawler carl and now I am starting Red Rising.
Really loved The Hyperion Cantos and The Forever War.
For a shorter classic I found Robur the Conqueror highly entertaining.
They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...
PISA does not measure reading for pleasure, it measures reading for factual information. There are questions about reading graphs, figuring out information only indirectly mentioned, that sort of thing. It does not care whether you get emotionally invested in this or that character or story.
Reading for pleasure is only loosely related to that.
The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
So you need to look at complete data. This will give you that: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/reading/scores-pe...
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
2012 is pretty much the year smartphone addiction began approaching critical mass
Possibly (probably?) a coincidence, but it did look like broad changes to how reading was taught started to land in 2010-2012: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/common-standards-dr...
The real culprit is probably more in line with far more alternatives to reading for entertainment.
Not a rigorous response, but Minecraft.
Kids were playing a ton of online games before Minecraft.
Yes and no
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
The release of the Xbox coincided with what I viewed as a big jump in video game players. Even the biggest athletic jocks played a ton of Halo. And then not long after that saw much older people start playing games like CoD:MW as after work entertainment instead of just tv.
I would say the Xbox 360 is when it really started to take off, personally
Halo 2 was when many people started gaming
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
> ...someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Did it work? :)
we have phones and tables to blame. The less of those, the more of reading.
*proceeds to shake fist at table.
"Damn you four legged abomination; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee"
Do internet comments count as reading?
Thanks now I'm imagining HN as an endless torrent of TikTok videos, where it's an AI voice reading the comments.
I don't know if kids are even reading comments. There's another perfectly good video with just a quick swipe.
Why is reading for pleasure always placed on some sort of pedestal? I would argue that what is being consumed is more important than the medium of consumption.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
Quality of what's produced in that medium might be one thing. People reading for pleasure are usually reading works published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality. Sure, it might be "trashy" novels relative to literature, but at least there's a floor to the quality level or else it just doesn't get published.
But with the advent of other forms of media, more easily produced and consumed, the quality of what is being consumed is lower than the quality of pleasure reading. Combine that with the firehose rate at which it's being consumed and pleasure reading seems better than it might once have.
I am not reading either for pleasure. I am reading so much during my daily life (Documentation, coding, manuals, logs) that reading for pleasure sounds like a bad joke.
This is why I prefer audibooks piped through my whole house sonos. It allows me to consume long form while walking around the house completing various projects. Reading isn't a chore, but the thing I engage in while doing chores.
That difference is like comparing taking a piss and having sex. While you use the same body part the experiences are not at all alike.
The thing with analogies, we can make them go either way.
It's like having sex after a whole day of sex work. Exhausting.
Have you never read a good book you can't put down?
I can empathize with the commenter you're replying to. I still read for pleasure and have to read constantly for work of course. On some days, I feel like I can't. It is like exercising the same muscle every day which will lead to injury in a short amount of time. Switching to audiobooks or just taking a break does resolve that.
From what I am seeing around me though, reading for pleasure or even to gain knowledge has decreased a lot. I noticed it in adults first and this is being reflected in their children.
In the olden days you could not stop some children from reading, and parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. For many, school holidays was when a lot of reading happened. Lord of the Rings would need a summer, and much literature was required to be part of the 'in group'. This would start at a young age, much like how eight year old kids need Roblox to be part of the 'in group', there was a time when it would be something such as reading everything by Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien or, more recently, J K Rowling was important, with each age group reading their own thing, not prescribed by adults.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
Many people worry about children not reading enough but when you look at the parents they're all on their phones.
Monkey see monkey do. If you want kids to read habitually then you need to read habitually.
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Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
> Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.
>If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
My memory is that the only things better than reading are doing it yourself, and writing about it.
My personal assumption has been that 'pleasure', at least partially, includes expected practical returns. I'd also guess that's at least partially true for kids: "my parents told me if I read a lot, I'll be smart when I grow up", etc.
We generally worry less if we see utility in it, and if we have people to share our hobby with. I think it's reasonable to say there's few hobbies out there without real world utility.
Listening to podcast is not easier then reading. It requires constant attention and does not really allow you to take a break without loosing on. In a lot of ways it is harder and more tiresome. You are free to do some other easy thing while doing it, it can be more engaging due to voices and sounds, but it does not take less effort then reading.
I suppose this varies depending on what type of material is covered in the podcast. We typically assume it contains surface-level content, as their primary purpose is entertainment, but the answer would probably change if we were talking about a lecture.
Reading for pleasure does not imply reading difficult in depth content. Reading for pleasure was reading with entertainment as a primary purpose.
Both reading and podcasts cover range of difficulties and topics.
> I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure"
It looks to me far away over there in the "what's my profit in reading" direction I'm afraid.
Fair enough :-) Do you have a theory for why we view reading, even in terms of pleasure, as favorable? I imagine it's because we see some utility in it over other activities.
Reading causes your brain to hallucinate. Visualization is a muscle: reading is the weights at the gym.
I used to read a ton of fiction as a kid, and continued into my late 30s. My reading for pleasure has dropped precipitously of late though, in large part because it gives less dopamine than other things I can do that also make the "productivity" centers of my brain light up. I still read a lot, but it's skewed towards geopolitics, economics and analyses, and most if it is short-form.
imho its the screen vs no screen that is the problem. Its better to have one thing for a task . for example one notebook one alarm one instrument one book etc. Our brain aint made to have so many thing cramped in one device. I think when i open a screen my brain sees all the functions of the device and cant focus well. But if I read a book my brain knowes this is the book about this and that and nothing else.