I really hate to contradict myself, even an earlier self, but I must admit that the prevalence of screens in the lives of younger generations has had a disturbing impact on the ability to read effectively. Of course, a huge portion of the culpability is a direct result of the inanity of no child left behind and other educational atrocities we have inflicted upon our children.
Competition for scores makes no sense in the collegial and highly social setting of education. It's as if we told doctors that we would pay them according to how many of their patients recovered (or survive,) so that they would hide the secrets to their success in order to can earn more money by letting the patients of their competitors die.
I can give my 40 year younger self a pat on the back for having recognized the stupidity of competitive based education and standardized testing abused as a measure of teacher and school effectiveness; which greatly contributed to the inability of our younger generations to read it understand lengthy and complex texts.
Still, I think screens are playing a part in all of this.
>Educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core "emphasized informational texts and standardized tests for over two decades," said The Atlantic. As a result, teachers shifted from reading books to short passages, "mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests." Shifting toward truncated reading was meant to help train kids to better synthesize information from texts, Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, said to the outlet. But in doing so, we’ve "sacrificed young people's ability to grapple with long-form texts in general."<
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