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Paul Wilkinson 🧢's avatar

Kois minimizes the use of screens as a factor. His 30% statistic seems low—it is three years old and covers nine-year-olds, while 11-, 12-, and 13-year-olds are getting phones at much higher rates in middle school, where much of the reading decline is happening. Additionally, 8- and 9-year-olds are likely to have non-phone screens at home and in vehicles. The children who are more likely to get phones sooner are the ones who would have been the more prolific readers in the past, since screen adoption correlates with socioeconomic status, which in turn correlates with reading volume. Quite simply, it IS screens. More accurately, it is the algorithms running the screens, generating more dopamine, with which black text on white paper cannot compete. Screens are shortening attention spans and impairing thinking, which Jonathan Haidt proves beyond reasonable doubt in "The Anxious Generation," despite a campaign to discredit him by magical thinkers hoping to find ways to absolve themselves from the damage screens have done. I have had the honor and privilege to teach perhaps 400 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders during the past three years. My observational and analytical skills were honed over 35 years in journalism, politics, law, policy, pre-screen pervasiveness teaching, and data analysis before that. I guarantee you the answer for the decline in reading books is crystal clear: screens, screens, screens. (The answer, by the way, can't be to simply ban screens in certain situations. That alone won't bring back reading. The answer is probably to defeat frivolous algorithms with better algorithms, using AI, to provide even more "stimulation and solace" than books yielded when kids read them in the past. If families and schools do this right, the vast wasteland of algorithmic screen content can and will be replaced with "texts" -- interactive within guardrails -- that will get kids back to reading. For the first hint of optimism, see the Khanmigo version of GPT-4 and Sal Khan's new book about how AI can be used to play off of kids' natural curiosity. We don't know exactly what this might look like, but the history of better and healthier technology replacing worse and unhealthier technology is convincing. The important thing, as a former colleague once said, is not how that happens, but that it happens.)

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Charlie Euchner's avatar

I occasionally teach teachers about writing. In one session, during a break, someone proudly told me she just started as English department chair at her middle school. "Wow," I said. "So what novels are kids reading these days?"

"Well, we actually don't read novels -- not whole novels. We give them stories and sometimes selections from novels."

I was not a precocious leader as a child. But I learned to love reading in English classes with long lists of novels, most in the 200-page range but many 300 or 400 pages.

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