What the Kids Are Reading
January 18, 2022 3:45 PM   Subscribe

What the Kids Are Reading. Paul Musgrave provides some data on how college students live in a different media world from their instructors - according to BLS surveys, average daily time spent reading for personal interest in this age group is less than 10 minutes. "I’ve started doing more direct reading instruction, including exercises to help students identify the thesis of a given reading and to teach the conventions of different forms of writing. This may seem basic, but it really isn’t: even within the kinds of general-interest readings I assign, the conventions of longform journalism, opinion writing, analytical essays, and straight news stories are as different as lyric poetry and free verse. And if you don’t know what’s going on, you really can’t read these, even if you can put every word and sentence together."

Musgrave anticipates the dismissive Plato quote:
(By the way, it’s easy to dismiss complaints of this kind with the fake Plato quote—and it is fake—decrying the supposedly worse manners of kids today. “Ah,” says the wise man, “the old have always complained about the young.” Yeah, but in this case we’re talking about a pretty rapid shift taking place over a few years backed up by statistical evidence, so I’m pretty sure that this, unlike the fake Plato quote, is real.)
posted by russilwvong (29 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
I told one of my UGs to go and read the energy section of the last week of issues of the Financial Times today.

It was that or speak to him f2f.
posted by biffa at 4:06 PM on January 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


according to BLS surveys, average daily time spent reading for personal interest in this age group is less than 10 minutes.

According to the same survey (included in the post) average daily time spent reading for personal interest is less than 15 minutes for every age group between 20 and 55, so if there's a problem with reading, it's not just a problem with the kids.
posted by escabeche at 4:07 PM on January 18, 2022 [33 favorites]


Wow. Fascinating and kind of depressing. I'm glad this professor is at least trying to engage with students where they are. But--and maybe this is just my GenX brain--how can you get people to engage with so many of the big concepts that are shaping their lives without asking them to understand complex texts and analyses?
posted by rpfields at 4:08 PM on January 18, 2022


The whole idea that the young people are digital natives is short-sighted: yes, sure, they can navigate whatever is the social media du jour, but they struggle just as much as every other generation to understand how trustworthy a given source is.
posted by nushustu at 4:20 PM on January 18, 2022 [10 favorites]


I was in college 20 years ago & when I was working as a writing tutor it was really that my job was teaching people how to read something for meaning, first, and then how to come up with something to say about it, and then how to structure that into a paper. The people I was tutoring, a mix of working adults & 18 year olds, didn't show up at college knowing how to do this, and it seemed like anyone actually teaching them how to do it wasn't part of the plan, unless the plan was just for me specifically to show up & intuit what kind of help they needed & then provide it. Not much of a plan.

Similarly when I was in high school I participated in a program that drove high schoolers in vans to elementary schools to tutor kids and I noticed the same thing, that the plan for teaching these kids to read was for this untrained fellow child to do it for free after school once a week, or fuck it, they're poor, who cares.

I think maybe professors are just now noticing it but it's been going on for at least this long.
posted by bleep at 4:24 PM on January 18, 2022 [30 favorites]


* Oh and by the way, nobody taught this to me either, I had to either figure it or die homeless, as per what my through-the-roof anxiety told me, so I did, and that allowed me to help others.
posted by bleep at 4:37 PM on January 18, 2022 [4 favorites]


A lot of the social media stuff is still reading text, but he does have a point that the conventions of one or another text media are very different. And can have a huge impact on how you interpret what you're reading.
posted by RobotHero at 4:54 PM on January 18, 2022 [7 favorites]


I want to feel like I’m inducting students into the adult world, a world of The New Yorker and Journal of Conflict Resolution and distinctions between the news and opinion sections of The Wall Street Journal—the advanced version of the print culture I was raised in that the Internet has expanded, deepened, and mostly improved since I was young. But I also worry that I’m just teaching people how to use cuneiform when the printing press has been invented, and that all of the knowledge I have about how to engage with texts and the institutions that produce them is a wasting asset in a world of algorithmic curation of videos and social media.

I basically disagree, I don't think universities should be indoctrinating students on how to read things correctly, to "identify the thesis". Identifying the thesis is not a basic task, it is an ideological one, an exercise in performing one's class (in this case the college students' induction into a particular class niche). What universities ought to be for is to teach students how to read and write critically, and nowhere does the author show understanding of this important distinction. The conventions of news v.s. opinion pieces should not be "taught" as the author thinks it should be; the conventions should be challenged and opened to intellectual inquiry. That's what good academics do, and so that's what academics need to be teaching the undergrads. In fact once you teach students to consider all discourses as deeply politicized, then they naturally become much more interested in understanding how language and rhetoric function. I'm pretty sure that people who teach reading and writing in other departments would disagree with this politics professor. People who are alienated from the "institutions that produce" texts will not feel especially motivated to merely read them "for meaning", and young people today are deeply politically alienated.
posted by polymodus at 5:01 PM on January 18, 2022 [12 favorites]


the fake Plato quote

A little known fact about Plato is that he died by being slowly boiled in a kettle. Philosophers, it seems, reason that, when you heat cold water up by one degree, it is not made into hot water by that, so, as you heat the pot, they just tread water, making objections and challenging you with paradoxes, until they boil alive.
posted by thelonius at 5:26 PM on January 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


LOL young people are reading more now than in 2004 (a year after the survey was introduced, I can't find the 2003 data) and older people are reading less (with the possible exception of 75+ as they match 2004's 65+ and the data wasn't broken out higher than that) .

15 to 19 years
2020: 0.14
2004*: 0.12/0.13**

*combined 15-24 because they broke it up less granularly back then
**weekday/weekend because they split it up that way back then instead of overall time

20 to 24 years
2020: 0.20
2004: 0.12/0.13

*combined 15-24 because they broke it up less granularly back then

25 to 34 years
2020: 0.19
2004: 0.16/0.17

35 to 44 years
2020: 0.20
2004: 0.22/0.30

45 to 54 years
2020: 0.23
2004: 0.30/0.47

55 to 64 years
2020: 0.29
2004: 0.53/0.66

65 to 74 years
2020: 0.72
2004*: 0.95

*all of 65+ because they broke it up less granularly back then

75 years and older
2020: 0.95
2004*: 0.95

*all of 65+ because they broke it up less granularly back then

In 2020 "the kids" also spent way less time watching TV than older folks (15-19 = 2.54, 20-24 = 2.38 vs 55 and up = 3.46 and above, with the 75+ folks--the highest readers--at a whopping 5.20); younger folks do spend more time playing video games/using the computer but spend less total time on video games/computer/TV combined than 65+ people.

Oh, but he's talking about a longer timescale than that, you say? This decline has been going on for the last 20 years? Awesome! We have data on that too. How much were kids (6-17) reading in the 80s?

9.8 minutes a day.

The kids aren't alright but it's sure isn't because they're reading less than he did at their age.
posted by brook horse at 5:31 PM on January 18, 2022 [23 favorites]


I don't think universities should be indoctrinating students on how to read things correctly, to "identify the thesis". Identifying the thesis is not a basic task, it is an ideological one, an exercise in performing one's class (in this case the college students' induction into a particular class niche). What universities ought to be for is to teach students how to read and write critically

You can't read something critically without identifying the thesis.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 5:42 PM on January 18, 2022 [34 favorites]


Yeah, identifying the thesis just means being able to say “X claims that Y”. Determining whether X has made a good supporting argument for Y, or whether they’re making a whole bunch of assumptions (class-based or otherwise) that maybe X themself isn’t even fully aware of, deciding if the fundamental framing of the piece of writing was okay or flawed (and if so, how), critiquing how the form of writing chosen also subtly conveys something like class privilege or lack thereof, etc. … all of that is also important, of course. Just being able to understand what another person is saying or what their main point is is kind of a fundamental communication skill in any area of communication, though.
posted by eviemath at 6:01 PM on January 18, 2022 [12 favorites]


Polymodus—I don't think that's fair about the level of critical reading Musgrave is talking about; the difference between identifying-a-thesis in a text and ability-to-deconstruct a text is a literacy skill as well as an ideological project, the second builds on the first. An ability to distinguish (say) a paid advertisement from a fan review from a sponsored review from an independent opinion article, is an adult literacy fundamental and a life skill. And consider how much effort outlets in the internet age go into blurring those categories!

The shift that isn't being discussed is what these outlets actually do; and the reason young people have no reason to self-induct into a textual culture led by broadsheet newspapers and periodicals is that those outlets have themselves altered over the last thirty years. It's not just that the job ads and classifieds aren't in it anymore. A broadsheet newspaper from thirty years ago was fundamentally different in content and purpose—there was far more straight printing of announcements, and wire news about events, since it was understood that edition might be one of only one or two news sources (radio bulletin? television news?) a person might consume each day, and they had to compete only with each other, rather than with a gigantic Internet of textual attention. And at an ideological level (because yes these are ideological objects) it also gate-kept what was news and what was not. The internet has absolutely mugged broadsheets of those public-newsletter functions.

If what you want to know is immediate news, rather than content from the capital N Newspaper—information like 'what are the covid case numbers like near me', 'what happened in the cricket Test yesterday', 'what do the reviewers think about the album my favourite band released', or 'has the war everyone's talking about started yet?'—there are just better and more immediate sources to go to now.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:05 PM on January 18, 2022 [8 favorites]


Personally, I think that the decline of TV-watching is at least as interesting as the (supposed, because I'm not totally convinced) decline of reading. It's not likely to get as much attention, because it doesn't lend itself as neatly to narratives about what's the matter with kids today, but it's really a sea change in how people consume media. The young people I know pretty much never watch network television, with the partial exception of sports. And I think that college teachers tend to fetishize the written word a bit, but the truth is that college has always been as much about speaking and listening as it's been about reading. So did students who grew up watching the nightly news, with its presumption of authority and universality, respond to a college lecture differently than students who grew up watching YouTubers, whom they know are just random people who they were seeing because some arbitrary algorithm stuck it on their feed? Do students respond to recorded online lectures, which are more like the YouTube and TikTok videos they consume, differently than an in-person lecture? Does it change their perception of the lecture when profs try to make recorded lectures interesting by using props, effects, and other stuff that they're boring from YouTube and TikTok?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:08 PM on January 18, 2022 [11 favorites]


young people today are deeply politically alienated.

I genuinely don’t even know where to start with that statement but I tried saying it aloud with a straight face while looking in a mirror to mixed effect.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:10 PM on January 18, 2022 [12 favorites]


The conventions of news v.s. opinion pieces should not be "taught" as the author thinks it should be; the conventions should be challenged and opened to intellectual inquiry.

Going back to when I was in college in the early 2000s, most of the media literacy education I've been exposed to has been a little too hung up on classifying anything written non-judgmentally in the passive voice as objective and everything else as opinion.

Under this rubric, it's impossible for a well-researched, experienced, passionate blogger to offer anything more than an "opinion" and the most wishy-washy, noncommittal, both-sides-have-an-equally-valid-point is automatically "news".

It wasn't until I took a few sociology classes that I was challenged to be more critical about everything and to to understand rhetoric and that there's always a point of view to examine.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:36 PM on January 18, 2022 [10 favorites]


Another note—it'd be fascinating to expand a study like this in terms of its definition of 'reading', to take account of the absolute golden age, of quality and breadth, of podcasts and audio content we are living in. If I were to make a generalisation about how young people experience modern literary and current affairs culture: I would say it goes in through their earholes.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:39 PM on January 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


Truck driver, "its just my job to deliver these boxes, not make sure they have parachutes in them."
Ground Crew, "its my job to load the boxes of parachutes on the plane, not check whats in them."
Flight instructor, "its my job to push the students out the door, its their responsibility to use the parachutes they should have been provided previously"

Repeat for every skill/grade level.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 8:32 PM on January 18, 2022 [8 favorites]


The article is asking a question, not making a value judgement on "kids these days" as such. If one takes as a given that there is some need for teaching young people, that no matter how "alright" the young might be relying on intuitive understanding alone isn't sufficient, then asking how one teaches in an era of such massive changes in media is best accomplished seems necessary.

The piece doesn't offer a definitive answer, it just lays out the basis of concern over why past methods may no longer be adequate for the new environment, even as there is also need to be able to engage with media from the past to understand how and why we've reached this point, among other things.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:41 PM on January 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


I remember going along to a course the institution I worked for was teaching on critical reading, because even though I wasn't an academic, it was open "to all staff" and I had professional development time to burn.

Part of it was reading and understanding the argument being made "correctly", and what it involved was teasing out and making explicit the arguments that were not being fully stated because they were assumed. From there, we re-constituted the argument into its components, and identified its unspoken assumptions and places where its claims don't relate to its evidence.

The example articles we were given to practice this on were, quite deliberately, articles we were likely to agree with. They were very persuasive at first! That persuasion turned out to be based, almost entirely, on just asserting things the audience was likely to accept without evidence. (The one I had did manage to mount a reasonable argument in parts, with evidence that led to statements that led to substantive claims, but its big conclusion was entirely unsupported by any of the claims made.) It was quite an informative session; not only did I learn how to take an article and extract its argument (I've found online videos are, on average, more poorly argued than print) but I also learned that just because I agree with something does not mean that it's based on reality.
posted by Merus at 12:14 AM on January 19, 2022 [12 favorites]


Polymodus—I don't think that's fair about the level of critical reading Musgrave is talking about; the difference between identifying-a-thesis in a text and ability-to-deconstruct a text is a literacy skill as well as an ideological project, the second builds on the first.

In college the first serious writing class I took basically showed me that no text has an identifiable thesis. There was never a step of "What do you think the thesis of this chapter is?", or "What do you think the author is trying to say here?" that preceded some notion of advanced critique. I think that education changed my outlook on these matters forever.

From a different lens, Musgrave is uncritical about pedagogy itself. There's no actual scientific proof that the way humans perform cognition of texts is some kind of two-step process. Identifying "the" thesis, or identifying an ad, is actually not hard. Pedagogues who think students have a hard time with this do not understand that their teaching theory is conflating these apparently basic skills with the thesis that teachers want to hear, or the political implications of an advert, etc. Once a student figures out that this stuff is actually about articulating political discourse, then they'll actually start to think and write meaningful things. Naturally.
posted by polymodus at 1:30 AM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]


You can't read something critically without identifying the thesis.

A thesis is an abstraction of a textual object, so the moment you formulate the thesis (which in a room with 3 academics there will be 6 disagreements on what the author's point really is), you are already conducting critique by choosing an abstraction. There is no neutral prior, and the very presupposition that this is true is itself one particular theory and school of thought of literary discourse. But if you attend to these other schools of thought (in particular, but not limited to, the people who came up with the term "critical", such as in a Rhetoric department), you would not be so quick to assume that.
posted by polymodus at 2:30 AM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


A thesis is an abstraction of a textual object, so the moment you formulate the thesis (which in a room with 3 academics there will be 6 disagreements on what the author's point really is), you are already conducting critique by choosing an abstraction. There is no neutral prior, and the very presupposition that this is true is itself one particular theory and school of thought of literary discourse. But if you attend to these other schools of thought (in particular, but not limited to, the people who came up with the term "critical", such as in a Rhetoric department), you would not be so quick to assume that.

So would it be fair then to conclude that the thesis of this comment is that we are all just howling into the wind: that no true understanding of other human beings is possible, and thus we do not owe each other any moral or ethical consideration (complete Randianism), because to each of us no other human is a true, fully actualized person?
posted by eviemath at 3:29 AM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]


And maybe not all writing is that deep? Being able to read something like a newspaper op-ed piece and identify what ax(es) are being ground surely counts as identifying a thesis, and would seldom invite years of academic arguments.
posted by mubba at 4:10 AM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]


^ strongly nodding my head along to that

my take from polymodus's assertions is.. I don't know.. they're describing something that seems a little more advanced, to put it one way
posted by elkevelvet at 7:46 AM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


"...if you watched the nightly news broadcasts and read Time, or even US News, you were keeping up pretty well."

I see a red flag waving when someone thinks they are well-informed because they keep up with the latest corporate propaganda. "I'm well-informed because I watch Fox News every night," is laughable of course. But keep in mind that basically all mainstream news gave constant coverage to Trump. You can say this nazi tabloid candidate got serious news coverage because of his popularity (for, uh, saying Obama was from Kenya?) but it's just as easy to say the reverse. I'm not sure what principles or legacy gives all these reputable newspapers and news networks their esteemed reputation. I think it's that, just like with Trump, we just assume the rich organizations headed by tall white guys are the most qualified.

To this day, if you go to NYT's 2016 election results page, it shows wrong numbers for the election: 306 vs 232. Wikipedia (heh, remember the moral panic over Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that *gasp* anyone can edit?), faithless electors made the actual result 304 to 227 (it has a footnote that the 306 vs 232 is the state-by-state pledged totals). I would object, but I'm no longer so naive to believe that the actual number of votes is all that important in elections.

CNN's web page for the 2016 election results is broken and displays a blank page. I guess it isn't profitable to maintain it.

These are my thoughts from just the first paragraph of the article. You don't notice gate-keeping when your path isn't blocked by a gate.

"Higher-class types listened to NPR, watched PBS, and read major national newspapers (the Wall Street Journal had good circulation [...] Lower-class types, well, they still got the news, but radio played a much bigger role, relative to other sources."

OH WE DON'T HAVE TIME TO, well, UNPACK THIS NPR TOTE BAG OF CLASSISM RIGHT HERE.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:06 AM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]


high class == NPR
lower class == radio
where is my monocle, I want to look rich
posted by StarkRoads at 9:13 AM on January 19, 2022


The author was describing how different demographic groups got their news back in the day. He was neither being classist, nor did he appear to be idealizing the news that any particular group received.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:56 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


Aw, I love you guys.
posted by aquanaut at 5:59 PM on January 19, 2022


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