When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the US, which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services.
Most school systems accidentally make reading a dreadful activity as the texts are tied to rote learning of facts and events for exam purposes
The big five publishers don’t seem to care about declining reading rates and continue to put out the same five or six types of books bc they don’t know how to market anything else
Ebooks don’t retail for competitive prices, both compared to hard copy books and to other media
Agreed, school curriculums are currently designed so teachers have to teach to a test, and are evaluated on how their students score in these standardized tests, so there’s no time to actually dive deep into things or engender a curiosity in reading deeply for pleasure.
Like in this article that explains how high school students these days aren’t even assigned a whole book to read like back in my days, just excerpts to analyze and target specific curriculum standards. It’s so sad and disheartening, they don’t even get time to finish or appreciate a whole book, just a piece of it out of context. And just the barrage of short stories they don’t even get to fully digest before they have to move on to the next one.
And then there’s the rise of digital reading and its effect on comprehension and reading for pleasure. And the rise of book bans driving kids away from the library. It all paints a very depressing picture.