People rarely read whole books anymore. I know very few adults in my life who read books, lots of people are put off by reading in school and never give it a try in their adult life.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
Required reading in school killed my interest in reading. When I graduated I was very happy that I wouldn't have to read books ever again.
It took me about 5 years or so until anime and manga got me to try another fiction book. That eventually led to reading more books. But when school was done I really did think that I wasn't going to touch a (fiction) book again.
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It makes me wonder if kids in the future will have "required reading" where they have to play certain old video games. Will that make them hate video games?
In our local highschool (near Copenhagen, Denmark) they have scheduled reading time for all pupils while in school - weekly as part of their normal schoolday. That is, instead of normal class everyone needs to bring a book of their own choosing and read in it. No phones allowed during this time, so they can either read or stare out the window. The local library helps them find books of their own interest.
The idea is to get them find genres and books they like and find joy reading it, while not taking time out of their free time.
Ironically this wouldn't work for me because I do almost all of my reading on my phone these days. It has become the main use of my phone at this point.
It is a good idea though, as long as they can find things they want to read. I've been sucked into the "bleeding edge" of reading (web novels), so it can be a bit more challenging to find things I really want to read. They are still out there though. Eg The Martian and Project Hail Mary (the former actually started as a web novel) .
If by summer reading assignments, are you referring to Scholastic summer reading programs? I quite enjoyed those as the available options for reading were very wide and I could always get some new Goosebumps books from the book fairs. But those are parent initiated, not something the school assigns. They can't really assign anything over the summer as they have no authority to do so outside of some IEP designed to get a particular student back on track.
I did my PhD, and so I am not averse to reading. But its nowadays rare to find books that have value in being read completely. Most of the time, I would rather read a blog post or a paper, books are often outdated by the time they are published. Books are limited to scenarios where looking at a complete scene of something frozen in time is still instructive.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.