Why do kids stop reading as they get older?

You're goddamn right. It seems like school, while supposed to spark an interest in reading, does the exact opposite.

>mfw assigned six books about racism and sexism in highschool
>didn't read a single one and passed with As because of the vocab I obtained from real books I read instead
It really killed my desire for going to university in an artistic field though, because from that point I felt certain I would be assaulted by endless political horseshit. If I were forced to listen to one more lecture about class consciousness I think I would finally snap

>used to enjoy film and literature a lot as a kid
>could enjoy things from an entirely organic space, was a naturally talented writer too, always got good grades in English, especially for creative writing
>10th grade
>start learning about literary conventions and tropes, spend pretty much the whole year on these subjects
>learn to mentally splice up everything I viewed/read and can't properly be emersed into anything anymore
>start viewing every form of art or entertainment from these fields as either hackneyed or nothing more than a construct designed to elicit a response from me like all the adults I hated when I was growing up
>pretty much dead inside now, lust to write is gone, talent has gone with it

How do I erase my school years from my memory

Is it too late? I'm only 18. I need to go back.

takes too much time and concentration compared to other stuff like tvs and vidya

read good books and stop caring about convention they tought you, if you are naturally talented as you say the important things will bleed through

"Normie" culture.

This is not the main factor though. The main factor today is smartphones and computers. It's really as simple as that

People who don't read wouldn't read even without smartphones or computers.

when you have a full time job, you want to relax when you get home. watch TV or vidya. reading just takes too much mental energy after an 8 hour workday - hell, most people are now at the office for 8.5 or 9 hours. and that doesn't even factor in commuting time

Read books that aren't shit. Yes, I'm sure Joyce was thinking about hard about literature tropes when he wrote Finnegans Wake.

I disagree. Also gonna add television to that

Global literacy was a mistake. I solemnly believe that. Bad books are intellectual poison, and even if someone read a good book their pleb brains couldn't interpret it correctly, and so crazy ideas like postmodernism is borne. Without global literacy, you have people who dedicate their lives to literacy which births better books, better interpretations thus intellectual nourishment. Bring back oral tradition. Those who aren't wasting their time reading the likes of YA novels will be able to spend it in more useful areas like cleaning the trash which pollutes our planet.

Actually living as "a productive adult" (wagecucking, raising kids, paying bills) is a huge time suck which obliges more people to get more "pure entertainment value" out of their now-more-limited free time, which they readily get today on their portable telephones and their screens. Ironically, they still spend plenty of time /actually reading/ in the use of these devices, but it's idle chit-chat and media trash that they don't have to think very hard about.

When you are younger and have fewer responsibilities, you are better able (and, assuming good parentage, encouraged) to experiment with using your free time in more constructive and less "instant gratification"-tier ways by doing things like reading books, building some project, etc. People still have a general sense that reading is something that "should" be happening in society but as productive adults, they no longer have anything to prove on this score, and are free not to do so if they do not really want to. And, generally, they don't really want to.

I myself spent a long swath of my twenties (maybe 4-5 years) working long hours in a factory, unwinding on the internet at home afterwards, and almost never reading a single book-length work during this interval. You don't want to fucking actively consume information after having spent so much of the day actively consuming and acting upon information, however menial. I felt rather dirty about it but happily I've been reading regularly again over the past few years - an extended period of self-funded, patrician NEET-dom allowed me the free time mentioned above to rediscover reading (and writing) for pleasure.

Harry Potter led to no reading.

It's all you fucking do in College. I finished in STEM and I still couldn't get away from that shit. You get sick of it after spending years reading material for your classes so I don't blame them. I recently got back into it and I'm 26.

This is worth mentioning too. I think that a certain resentment and burnout towards reading must be common among duller undergrads who succeed to get the employability-proof, so that once they are really free of the need to read for a time, then of course they won't, if they don't want to.

Smartphones and social media

masturbation

Social media and video games

What do you mean by read? The physical activity of holding the book and reading or so you mean the act of learning new things from the content in it? It's an important distinction I finished HS in 2013 but I hadn't read a single thing on my own since 2006. In 2012 I got into a class about a political subject that interested me but other than that I dropped reading until this month in this year. I do not have the space or dexterity with my own hands to hold a big ass book. Not to mention lighting is a problem. I got a tablet with some Antiglare and started reading again from there. Really it's about time more than anything. I wouldn't expect neets to understand though.

Formalism should enhance your enjoyment, not diminish it.

I think there is too much emphasis on the grades, and not the content. I'm not saying we should get rid of grades, but they shouldn't be the major concern. I hated the classes were the teacher/professor would dictate constantly how we need to note this and that. I didn't get much during the class, but afterwards when I reflected on the class I realized how great some works were. If the teacher/professor changed the focus to content I would have learned so much more. One of my favorite professors was for anthropolgy (I know a communist course) and he focused more on content, and I remember so much , and got so much out of it

Read interesting books of criticism like Auerbach's Mimesis, Umberto Eco's analyses, the essays of Simon Leys, the works of George Steiner or all of Borges' writings on Literature to help counter your teacher's memes.

This is bullshit. It's an excuse for people that are too ignorant, too lazy or too stupid to read or to look for books that might interest them. It's the same shit as 'I don't read much because I don't have time'.

Grades are a horrible thing. I am greatly mourning the loss of a professor who cared little for grades. I've heard stories of him increasing a student's grade after drinking with them at a local bar, claiming it to be 'participation'. My second language courses also worked this way: if the professor sees that is effectively 'coming into' the language, then most small vocabulary or grammar mistakes are ignored. There is no need to 'force' learning, which is important in learning a language. Forced learning leads to very awkward language skills, Chinese students for example. Subtlety is lost. Nothing is learned. They, in general, refuse to voluntarily speak English. Of course, the most popular of fields are those that favor this sort of 'forced learning'. Here, it's the social sciences. Most prominently, physical education and psychology. They are totally impotent! Even on the doctorate level, there is no room for action. Research, what they rely upon, is inherently impotent. Impotency is rewarded.

not really, if schools turns anyone off of reading its because of what said. most people probably just figure that there aren't any legitimately interesting books that aren't 'childish'. Boys should read shit like Defoe, Steinbeck, Melville, and Junger in school. Homer/Shakespeare/Cervantes etc. could be tackled in the fourth year. They shouldn't be reading Zora Hurston or pussy ass Stephen Crane.

you are like a little baby. it gets MUCH worse from here.

totally separate issue

this

television replaces reading genreshit (see: bodice-rippers and detective stories etc. of the 19th c.), not literary fiction. Kino viewing has assuredly been used as a substitute for reading literary fiction though.

>Global literacy was a mistake
this also

Precisely.

It's not saying you don't read books or trying to make an excuse for that.

It's saying that you didn't read books PREVIOUSLY because of school, which isn't bullshit because I fucking lived through the nightmare that were my literature classes. I remember absolutely nothing from them except that they were hell.
I'm getting into literature on my own volition, reading shit I want to read.
It can't be bullshit if so many people are saying it affected them in that way.

When you grow up and have responsibilities, you have less time for fun stuff. And that's assuming you find reading enjoyable and can balance it against say, social activities, film/TV, games, other hobbies, etc. It's like, I'm into Amateur Radio, I got licensed several years ago and have a full shortwave radio station, but I've only made about 25 contacts and that was in the first year of having shortwave permissions, because school and work so on just make me feel too tired to devote effort to it outside of checking in to the local emergency nets every week. More relaxing to play a video game or read a book in the evening, but a lot of the time I just go to sleep instead.

One thing I learned recently is that the book "The Centurions" was apparently responsible for starting a literary Renaissance in post-war France because at the time close to 40% of adults had never read a book. (No I don't know what metric the French paper used for that, I assume something like "read a book outside of school-work or for their job")

Why do people act like reading is natural and something everyone should innately want to do?
Written language is relatively new and even for most of history most people couldn't even read.
Ever consider most people don't like reading because humans never evolved to particularly care? It's just another form of entertainment and in the modern era there's a lot of other forms of entertainment that have more immediate gratification.

>It's just another form of entertainment
Actually triggered me. what the fuck dude

Do you honestly think philosophizing is an intellectual activity and not just another form of entertainment?

No, I think literature is more than just entertainment. As any art, really.

Which is for enteirnament.

No.

Well what is it for then.

I remember as a kid my school had this program where at some point in the day the kids were forced to stop whatever they were doing and read a book for 30 minutes. No matter what class you were in, even the fucking gym class. It could either a book you got from the library, or one from a small shelf in the classroom.

I absolutely despised reading as a kid. I never read a book for fun until I was 19.

I do agree, but how is someone reading your job application suppose to be compare you to someone else. The grades are needed, they may not be the best system, but it's currently the best we have. That's why the focus shouldn't be on grades, because it removes the value of content

>I've heard stories of him increasing a student's grade after drinking with them at a local bar, claiming it to be 'participation'.
Yeah, that's definitely a better system. Pic related, an even better system.

fpbp and most people don't read for fun as kids, but only when required

I'm 19 and in the same boat.

I wish I could write stupid shit and have fun doing it without being overly critical of myself again.

By that logic nobody should enjoy exercise because we were forced to run laps and do jumping jacks in P.E.

Youre an idiot.
Everyone enjoyed that.

>caring about job applications
Fuck off, Kumar.

Because I'd rather play Mother 2 and smoke some fags than sit through a book to be le smart cool adult

Life is massive, and, as long as you pay attention, you can learn everything you're supposed to by doing whatever makes you happy in the moment.

My schools were great because we always had 30-60 minutes a day of quiet unstructured reading time where you could read any non picture book you wanted. The school library had a great selection of YA books from Sci-Fi and Fantasy to the girly series. Lots of interesting nonfiction and biographies of interesting people too.

We learned to read for fun and we all got into different book series we obsessed over. It worked because kids could read whatever was personally interesting to them.

American schools largely draw from the same cannon which is now boring and outdated. Every American student will be assigned some Shakespeare, the standard American authors (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain), and maybe some "boring" English authors like Dickins and Austen. None of these books are immediately appealing to most modern readers and they're the same books your parents and grandparents read. American English classes are too standardized. I think they should allow students more room to pick the books they want to read instead of assigning the same fucking books every year. This is in conjunction with the culture of instant gratification and social media but I think the underlying problem is the way school is set up.

This guy gets it.

I only started reading for pleasure with 22 years old anyway.

>Guys I know how I'll become knowledgeable and wise, I'll spend my life indulging in my base passions!

>He hasn't read Siddartha

>shittfarta

it gets in the way of their snapchat and facebook time

Honestly, they should be starting with the Greeks. The Iliad and the Odyssey are both action-packed for teens that can't sit through a more subdued book and have literary value as the precursors to literature as a whole.

This is what you get when the federal government takes over education. Everything needs to be standardized and uniform. Kids in Georgia need to read the same exact books as the kids in New York. I don't know why liberals have such a hard on for the Department of Education. Its been a disaster.

If anyone's interested, here's a timeline of standardized testing in America. It seems like the major issue is, how do you properly assess individual intelligence on the mass scale? John Dewey criticized this route of testing in 1922, but ephiciancy prevailed.

nea.org/home/66139.htm

>Why do kids stop reading as they get older?
Only in America. Americans are scum of the earth.

I honestly can't tell if you're joking