I think I’m apart of this group. The “love reading but can’t focus” group. Recently deleted everything except Substack in hopes I can gain my concentration back. Great read.
I get that it's hard to conceive of a future for literature, given the screen habits of digital natives. I'm still going to believe - naively, maybe - that the right books, given thoughtful treatment through a mix of peer discussion and personal reflection, will find an audience and resonate.
The bigger problem, as I see it, are market forces which devalue the skill-sets that reading develops. People of all generations adapt the aptitudes that they most believe will help them in their future. The fact that the younguns don't see reading's application to their future work-lives is a more existential concern; however, there is a counter-argument that humanities professors and reading aficionados alike can and should be making.
So having worked in the schools as a school psychologist for a few years, there’s also an engineered literacy crisis based on the overt lack of curriculum around the mechanics of reading in the early years. I absolutely believe smartphones have masked this problem for years, however the true problem is that children are literally not being taught how to read. The podcast Sold A Story does a really good job at revealing the intentionality behind the movement of the “whole language” approach to literacy education and the impact it is having systemically in this country.
I think I’m apart of this group. The “love reading but can’t focus” group. Recently deleted everything except Substack in hopes I can gain my concentration back. Great read.
I get that it's hard to conceive of a future for literature, given the screen habits of digital natives. I'm still going to believe - naively, maybe - that the right books, given thoughtful treatment through a mix of peer discussion and personal reflection, will find an audience and resonate.
The bigger problem, as I see it, are market forces which devalue the skill-sets that reading develops. People of all generations adapt the aptitudes that they most believe will help them in their future. The fact that the younguns don't see reading's application to their future work-lives is a more existential concern; however, there is a counter-argument that humanities professors and reading aficionados alike can and should be making.
So having worked in the schools as a school psychologist for a few years, there’s also an engineered literacy crisis based on the overt lack of curriculum around the mechanics of reading in the early years. I absolutely believe smartphones have masked this problem for years, however the true problem is that children are literally not being taught how to read. The podcast Sold A Story does a really good job at revealing the intentionality behind the movement of the “whole language” approach to literacy education and the impact it is having systemically in this country.