FWIW, a lot of people have been discussing the decline in reading skills for a long time: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/02/13/reading-anyone.

That being said, I teach English and thus have rare, direct knowledge regarding the situation. Pretty much anyone who doesn't read, at least somewhat, for pleasure (or on their own time) won't develop good reading skills: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/twilight-of-the....

IMO, too many students who dislike school and abstract symbol manipulation are funneled into college, where they fail or barely succeed (https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...). We should be working towards more apprenticeship programs: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost... that are both congruent with the labor market and with student interests.

Attempting to teach in an era of "college for all!" has shown me many of the shortcomings in that program.

> Pretty much anyone who doesn't read, at least somewhat, for pleasure (or on their own time) won't develop good reading skills

This matches my own experience. For as long as I can remember, I've read. My parents read to me as a very young child, and as I grew older, I was encouraged to read. I had access to the local public library, the Scholastic Book Club, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. By the end of middle school, I'd read every Star Wars Extended Universe book and every Pern novel published to date (and the former was not a small list, even then).

So then, come high school, everyone was tested for the new reading program that was supposed to get everyone's reading ability caught up. My test results came back as reading at above college level, no intervention needed. That surprised even me at the time. I was told I couldn't be removed from the mandatory program, but I didn't need the points either, and so I should just read whatever I wanted from the approved books list and not worry about it.

I recount this, not to toot my own horn, but to point out that by having been such a voracious reader as a youth, I probably had far more practice at reading than many of my peers. And practice is what really develops and cements a skill. All those years spent reading gave me a great deal of practice. And if someone's not reading for pleasure on their own time, as you said, they're not getting those opportunities for practice.

Reminds me at junior school in the UK me and 3 or 4 other kids where allowed to read on our own ironically one of them and I where the only two kids not entered for the 11 plus.

The problem is that real apprenticeships that lead to well-paid skilled jobs do require fairly good school results.

Apprenticeships where never for unskilled low archivers at school for example where I lived in the UK if you left school with poor results you didn't get an apprenticeships with the local engineering firms or the government - you worked in the brick pits for LBC

Well... Doesn't somebody have to work the brick pits?

I think the issue is that we haven't yet demonstrated that real, actual equal opportunity won't lead to entire graduating classes of engineers and scientists - we still have the situation where "well Billy had to move schools 13 times because his family kept getting evicted, so while he might have been smart it's the brick pits for him, just look at his grades."

> Doesn't somebody have to work the brick pits?

Probably not. Whenever wages go up enough, companies find ways to automate manual jobs.

On Market St in SF, I just walked by a cafe featuring a robot barista. Doesn't somebody have to make my latte? Turns out the answer is no.

Probably because a human barista can't make enough to pay rent and eat...

Or most people wouldn't want a latte at all if the prices were high enough to support "living wages"

Well LBC (the company the made the vast majority of the bricks in the uk) took to importing a new set of workers from a different poor country every generation.

Which is why my home town has the one of the highest diversity's in the world compared to its population.

I wouldn't want apprenticeships to be a funnel for low achievers, but the concrete focus on skill would be a lot more appealing to many of my "low achiever" peers back when I was in school than most of the courses they were required to take.

The few "shop" classes we had were usually the ones where they actually got decent grades.

Well in the UK when I left school you needed 4-5 decent O levels to get on an apprenticeship i.e. the same entry requirements for a nursing career or entry level in a Bank.

That goes the other way too: Pretty much anyone who doesn't develop good reading skills, at least somewhat, won't read for pleasure.

Past a certain age, there are no interesting things to read that are also readable for a person with weak skills. You won't find a romance novel with a vocabulary like The Cat and the Hat.

Correcting the problem is not cost-effective for a school. I did it once, for a 14-year-old I cared about. I had him read college-level science textbooks out loud. At first, I had to correct him every few words, repeatedly explaining phonetical rules and insisting on proper phrasing. ("You just blew past that comma.", or "There was no comma or period. Try again.") This tedious routine went on for several chapters. No normal school will do that for a child.

This isn't totally on topic, but when you said lots of your peers in college got stressed when required to write essays, it really reminded of my own experience.

I strongly relate to that. I never wrote a paper in school without deep stress and lots of procrastination, and I think I only wrote one paper throughout both high school and college that I was proud of, the rest were just the bare minimum of competency that I thought I could turn in without dying from shame. But contra that experience, I've always been a voracious reader of all kinds of texts.

Now that I've had a long time to look back on this (I'm about a decade older than you), I think a big part of my problem was that I never felt like I had anything to say on the topics of those assignments. I never found hidden meaning to deconstruct in the fiction I read, I just knew that I loved how the best authors constructed worlds alongside the characters who belonged in them; but that didn't seem like what I was supposed to write about. I never knew how to write about the non-fiction without just re-stating it. I never felt like I had a substantive extension to the arguments made by philosophers, economists, and political scientists, and I never felt I had the expertise to disagree with them. All of this is to say: my problem wasn't with writing per se, but with having something to write. I'm also not saying that this is a problematic approach to an education in writing, it's just that I was rubbish at it.

What finally helped me was to write a lot about things I know: emails and documents at work where I have expertise in the topics being discussed, and writing about my thoughts privately and with my family.

Maybe your peers in school were like me?

> It's just that I was rubbish at it. Glad you sorted it out.

I feel with you because this is how I experienced all of school

It's still there though, for me though the hinder lies in expectations I set for myself (most likely inherited from my parents). I always hoped I would have someone on my shoulder saying, it's ok to be rubbish, as long as you keep writing, because eventually it will be better.

What you write about is also something that I think is wrong with how it's supposed to be when I was at school. I would most likely be more adept if I was writing about something that I was really caring about, and then getting help with the constructs, identifying them and restructing the text. Not what the teacher picked out.

Maybe there's a middle ground, if the early years are all about getting _your_ flow from thought to paper is what matters, the teacher have a piece of cake hammering down the structures later on, which in turn would make it possible to take on any kind of task. I know there's some work in our schools today, but I'm not that positive about it (since they ignore spelling pretty much). It will be great to read some results from it whenever it appear though.

Most high school students, including top students, are in classes where the teacher teaches towards a test (state exam, AP test). Because the actual test follows a format you can game, so does the class. Students therefore learn to write in a format that specific teacher likes and with the right amount of fancy words. If that gets them an A, that’s all they care about. Same with books - the focus was on what we need to know from this book to pass the test.

In college it can be difficult to transition to professors that expect you to actually be able to express yourself eloquently and with creativity. Most students aren’t reading old or difficult books for fun (if any at all). It’s not surprising their level is poor.

One ultimate result of this was truly bizarre: students who couldn't write a narrative, but instead produced 5-paragraph persuasive essays.

I encountered this scoring high-stakes state tests years back; the 10th-grade students were prompted explicitly with "tell me a story about XYZ." (more verbiage omitted, but the question was clear about the requested mode). About 10% of students would write a clearly on-topic response starting from "here are 3 things about XYZ".

The state specified that those responses were to be scored "Off Mode", an invalid score which meant that the students would fail the test (and potentially fail to graduate).

The truly mindblowing part is that younger students will write you a narrative for ANYTHING given half a chance. (Think of a little kid telling you a story - "and then this happened, and then this, and then this...") These high-schoolers had literally had that instinct drummed out of them through essay-writing practice. :(

As a high school student at a relatively high-performing school, I see this all the time. Many people even skip reading the book entirely and write an essay based solely on online summaries of the book. It’s quite disappointing, as the literature we read actually holds some cultural value. For example, To Kill a Mockingbird highlights racial tensions in the 60s and Animal Farm highlights the dangers of an authoritarian society.

I also could get into studying a subject for the sole purpose of passing a test and then forgetting the content after (meaning the topic held no significance to the student). This is a huge problem in high schools all around the US.

Edit: fix mobile formatting

> It’s quite disappointing, as the literature we read actually holds some cultural value.

For me, the biggest problem is that most instructors never really mentioned this. Instead, we ended up having 50 minute discussions about why the wallpaper was yellow, or how brave and sophisticated the protagonist was for drowning herself (I hated "The Awakening.") My experience is my own, but the majority of my classmates didn't care about the reading for this very reason (and this was also at a high-performing school). If high school English literature is still being taught anything like the way it was taught to me, it should be no surprise that American students avoid the subject like the plague.

In high school I read a book or two a week, but I avoided english lit classes like the plague.

I learned far more about writing in my experience in debate than I did in any of my classes.

Learning to research a topic and write a logical argument about it is far more rewarding, and does more to develop skill, than does being assigned a book to read and writing a summary.

Writing about a single source is too easy to game, especially the classics- there's simply too much already written about them, especially when the assignment is more a summary than a thesis.

Supposed "study guides" existed back when I was in school but you had to get to a store and buy one. Today, I guess I assume that any student who doesn't want to read some book can just get whatever information they need about it, including analysis, with a few keystrokes.

To Kill A Mockingbird is set in the 1930s.

I stand corrected.

And yes, I did read the book :) Just forgot the time period.

Yes I was surprised when I did Classical studies (classics in translation) that when Thucydides was one of the set texts that I was the only one in the class that read the entire thing - plus read several other related texts.

I also read several other classical plays and not just the two that where set.

> essay based solely on online summaries of the book.

The solution is to assign books that do not have online summaries, which would be about 99% of books. Plenty to choose from!

Is that true for English language books in the age of Amazon, Goodreads, etc.?

Maybe you should read Animal Farm again. It's not so much about an authoritarian society. It's about communism, which is theoretically non-authoritarian yet never works out that way.

You would benefit from reread it, or at least the SparkNotes

He's right though, it was about how easily-corruptible/controllable communism is by a couple of bad actors.

If you think it was just about an authoritarian society, I suggest looking back at the beginning, before the pigs started changing the rules.

I agree with the first paragraph, but my experience with college professors wasn't that much different from teachers high school. School rewards playing to grading system, and grade inflation means that professors don't expect anywhere near the level writing of their peers from their students.

But much of high school education in English involves reading ye olde public domain works, and I'm not sure they're actually that helpful for reading or writing. I feel like what kids are doing is practicing how to carry the pretense of intellectualism, but in a way that they, their peers, their teachers, or anyone else around them, feels is absolutely toy and obvious.

It's one thing to begin riding with training wheels, and it's another to keep them on even past high school. For some, indefinitely.

I feel what's important for future optimism is improvement on specifically scientific literacy and observational writing, and not Catcher in the Rye type assignments where nobody, you included, is expected to believe in anything you write. I don't think that's a healthy attitude for the next generation.

There's something to be said for learning the "canon" but high school English only does that in a very superficial way under the best of circumstances. There are fairly classic books--at least some of which are admittedly more recent than ye olde public domain--which are pretty readable today. But IMO Henry James, Bronte sisters, Tolstoy, etc. are going to be a pretty tough slog for most modern readers, especially at high school age.

They're boring, too. Why not read Tolkien instead? Or Asimov? or Clancy?

Not at say 17 or 18 though

I generally enjoy reading but I had a lot of trouble with reading books in high school and it has pretty much killed my ability to read separately for about 5 years or so.

The problem, as I recall it, was twofold:

- I had no context, and no reason, to care about a particular work. It would be from some time period I know nothing about, regarding a subject I have no stake in;

- my opinion on the work was irrelevant, and the important opinion was that of literary critics. There was generally a fairly specific interpretation of the work and what it was saying, and one had to figure out what that interpretation was and arrive at it. Is it that surprising that everyone went for Sparknotes?

So it all felt rather disconnected.

In contrast, in college, I took a military simulation and gaming class. This was a programming class. But our initial assignment was to... read a few books on WW1 (i.e., Guns of August). There were lots of other materials, as well. We were engrossed in the WW1 period, which made all the reading we were doing much more relevant and interesting.

I generally found that background information, or some sort of hook (I.e., why I would care about it) is very important to my enjoyment of the book. And, over time, this also develops a sort of respect for books (and other forms of text, such as, hehe, video game lore), where even reading material from an unknown time period can be interesting.

But I am not sure why this would all be present for a high school student who's probably not getting enough sleep and has no idea who Emily Bronte is.

This is a really good point. I agree that there are much more important things to learn, and reading old material (old enough that the English is barely recognizable) isn't generally valuable. More scientific literacy would be a great start!

I remember in high school freshman year science class involved reading and reflecting on science in the news. I thought it was bullshit at the time, partially because most science journalism that I was aware of was bullshit. I do think I could have read actual scientific papers at that time. Some students would struggle, but struggle = learning, imho.

In Britain, the subject is split into "English Language" and "English Literature". The former focuses on the practical skills needed to communicate effectively, while the latter is based around the study of set texts. English Literature is entirely optional for pupils aged 14-16. Students from 16-18 have a free choice of three or four subjects, with no mandatory elements.

Some time ago I did Lang & Lit, without option to drop them. I think those who were in low[er] sets maybe just did Lang.

My eldest just took options and has both as compulsory subjects.

Also FWIW in "sixth form" (16-18) games/PE and general studies were compulsory in my high school. I had no time to fit in the general studies but was still put in for the exam. Other schools in the area didn't all do GS but lots did games.

> up to the task of writing a five paragraph essay without major stress

I'm in my late 30s and I wouldn't compose a "five paragraph essay" if my life depended on it.

Yet still (at least in my time) we were not taught what I call basic writing skills:

* how to write or respond to a friend/family/boss letter.

* how to structure sentences so they easily express what you mean.

* how to format text so it's easy to read.

I write and read lots of emails nowadays and it's quite "amazing" that people fall into two categories: they either use 100 words to express basic ideas or they do the opposite, write 3 words sentences that need 3 follow-up emails to get right.

And don't get me started on text formatting... People can't seem to express ideas without bold, colors, custom bulleted lists and emoji.

I had to peer review papers in some writing 101 class and I'd say quite a few of them were basically illiterate.

If you're interested in diving into a real experiment, over at Sweden there's a movement[0] to try to increase the vocabulary early. Teachers in lower grades are quite worried that the entry bar has been lowered over the years. I didn't find any material in English, but Google Translate at least made it somewhat readable.

This is interesting because it's focus is not the kids, but the teachers, and how they should interact, what resources they should use etc, which benefit the kids.

I'm exposed to it because I have a kid on daycare, they make a thing about having themes where they read all about certain books. And the constant mantra is to never hold back on 'advanced' words, but rather explain them and try to use them in normal conversations. The kids will pick it up, no need to be easy on them. Hopefully it will turn out for the best ;)

My dream is that we will fully enact parental support from inception until the kids are 18. From what I've read there should be actual scientific studies about it where there were massive improvements for the kids, which at least I think that would lead to _a lot_ less stress in the system in general.

[0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

I would bet 100$ that over the last 30 years, qualities such as the one you described dropped massively.

I saw an old picture of a biology note book from a junior high school kid from the 50s. It was masterful and so beautiful. Writing, phrasing, vocabulary, layout, drawing aesthetics. These are all 'useless' in our days of IoT and neural network, but to me it hints at the fact that kids before were way finer raised than today.

You're likely under the assumption that other people are like you, but a little different.

That's causing you a great deal of confusion if that's the case. People are not the same - if you look at people's height, some are 6 feet, others are 4 feet.

Our brains is made up of many many sub-fields responsible for somewhat specific tasks. While height can range from 4 feet to 6 and it's obvious, the physical size of the sub-fields in the brain can vary in size up to 10 times!! This accounts for someone not being able to sing 'happy birthday' in tune, while there existed Mozarts and Bachs. It's just not obvious that they're more than species apart in their ability to appreciate and create music.

This a long winded way of saying, look around you, people are very very different, and there is no need to try and teach a pig to sing, you'll frustrate yourself AND the pig.

The right answer is the answer everyone already knows, they're just afraid to say it in this 'equality' culture - people should stick to what they're good at, unless they themselves are motivated to do otherwise.

I didn't really learn how to write until grad school. Even though I went to a top tier public university and a highly ranked HS, it was pretty easy to get by without writing more than a couple of paragraphs.

> or anything written before 1950 This makes me wonder if this problem might at least partially be caused by American society valuing practical application and usefulness for bringing money home much higher than education as a value in itself. Short term as long term thinking probably also plays a role. What would someone read that was written before 1950 that is directly applicable and help getting a well paying job?