When I was in high school (second best academic high school in L.A. from 69 to 71 (I skipped a half a grade), in my junior year, I took one AP class; in my senior year I took two AP classes. this was considered hot shit back then. Kids are now routinely taking four A.P. classes a year. And these are not the type of A.P. classes I was taking; they're all like cram fests. It's really quite, quite horrible.
You see, education is being destroyed on both ends: for the inner city kids it's drill and kill; for the upward bound it's A.P. drill and kill. The result is that most kids come to really hate school and what passes for "learning."
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeffrey Fisher" <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2011 6:25:11 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?
On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com>wrote:
> I don't disagree that reading is good. And my anecdotal experience is with
> students who resist reading. So all of that I am on board with. Where I am
> struggling is in ascertaining to what extent "kids these days" *read less*than "kids [say] twenty years ago."
>
As a side note, the DO seem to have worse vocabularies, but again this might be a matter of where I'm teaching now, as opposed to where I was teaching 15 years ago . . .
Anyway, continuing my quest for data on reading rates, I found the following blog post on the topic from a Toronto academic: http://gamineexpedition.blogspot.com/2010/11/kids-teens-and-reading-for-fun.html
She notes several items, including the KFF study I linked above, but she also points to a very interesting 2008 Newsweek article<http://www.newsweek.com/2008/05/13/generation-r-r-is-for-reader.html>which argues that teen/Young Adult reading is actually in the midst of a boom, brought on perhaps by Harry Potter, but not reducible to the little mug (not to say, muggle, don't'cha know). One could hope for harder data from them, but it at least starts to paint a picture along the lines of what I have been thinking, which is that there still are lots and lots of teens who read a fair bit, and they read fiction, not just their textbooks.
Although, on that most dubious of topics, I note that in 2009 textbook growth was way up over basically everything else. What a frickin racket.
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