A newsletter by a political scientist has some worrying observations about how young people consume information:
In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the kids don’t read. In time surveys, they report spending just 14 percent of an hour — eight point four minutes! — reading for personal interest a day.
Basing instructional interventions by contrast with “the way you read a magazine?” You may as well be talking about the way you read cuneiform.
The causes of this decline are manifold and I’m sure there’s a scholarly literature. My concerns are more immediate. I have to teach classes, and yet every year I share less of a common reading background — not just substance, but even the idea of reading periodicals — with my students than the last year.
The effects of this are profound. I used to base my US Foreign Policy class in part around reading and engaging with a single nonfiction book; once, a student told me it was the only time she had ever read a nonfiction book cover to cover. I cut out the book during pandemic because the course reading load, which hadn’t changed otherwise, seemed too much for the emergency. I’m not reinstating it because I heard loud and clear that the downsized reading load was still too much for students. Colleagues at other institutions report similar trends.