[stevewodil]

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]

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.

[brightball]

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]

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.

[threethirtytwo]

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.

[idle_zealot]

> 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.

[BeFlatXIII]

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.

[TitaRusell]

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]

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.

[DaSHacka]

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

[Telaneo]

> 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.

[amanaplanacanal]

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.

[Telaneo]

> 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.

[watwut]

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.

[1718627440]

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

Yes. (n=1)

[bgbntty2]

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.

[saltcured]

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.

[floren]

> 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

[TitaRusell]

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.

[eimrine]

> 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".

[BeFlatXIII]

Seems like a skill issue on your end.

[ThrowMeAway1618]

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