I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but that gets ignored).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
reading and writing are corrupting your ability to remember everything you need to know!!
A.k.a: no trustable source.
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
You've misunderstood the purpose.
Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.
You need the question before you can find the answer.
I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...
Have you been around kids recently? I think we all know what they're doing on the phone, and it's not The Great Gatsby.
The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.
many of my college students feel like they've already lost at life. between ai, the economy, job prospects, etc. i am sure high schoolers are feeling the same way, which certainly isn't going to make them more eager.
unsupp0rted•40m ago
saidnooneever•23m ago
sph•5m ago
To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.