It takes a while to hit you sometimes when you’re witnessing a serious, yet seemingly innocent issue. For me it took about a month for this idea to formulate fully because I hadn’t put much thought into it to actually connect the dots and realize I wasn’t witnessing isolated incidents.
But I’m beginning to wonder just how big this could be. It’s a tale we’ve all heard a million times — the dangers of technology and becoming too dependent on it.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve seen several elementary-to-middle-school age children seriously struggle to read aloud. Now that I think about it, it’s been right around 50 percent of the children I’ve seen who have struggled with it.
Also, standardized test grades for Mississippi were recently released, and after looking over the numbers a troubling trend started to surface: across every single grade, students consistently scored lower in english language arts and reading interpretation and comprehension than every other subject.
So naturally I started following the bread crumbs and wondered why was this happening? And honestly, I don’t think it has anything to do with the schools, teachers or curriculum. I believe it is a societal predicament.
Think back years ago and imagine yourself in a pediatrician’s waiting room or the airport. What do you see children doing? I see them either reading a children’s book or playing with their favorite toys.
Think about those same places in today’s world, and what do you see? More often than not, you see children playing games or watching YouTube videos on their parents’ cellphone or a tablet, or even their own.
Since the beginning of the last school year, I’ve asked 15 students some variation of what they most often do outside of school or what they most like to do outside of school for our weekly “In the halls” section. One out of those 15 said reading. Eleven of those 15 said either watching movies or Netflix or playing video games.
That’s the problem right there. Kids aren’t reading enough outside of school. We all know how hard teachers work inside the classroom to prepare their students, and they do make them read. But so many kids today aren’t realizing their potential or getting to know and love the pleasure of reading because they turn directly to technology once they leave school.
Personally I love to read. There are so many good stories out there that you can connect with on such a deeper level. It’s not just about the stories themselves but the lessons you learn within them along the way. Rarely ever do games, movies or TV shows force you to truly think and draw conclusions on your own, but books do and that’s a critical skill to learn. That’s why reading comprehension and interpretation is tested in the first place, but reading is on a severe decline.
Less than 20 percent of teenagers in the United States reported reading a book, magazine or newspaper daily, while more than 80 percent use social media every day, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. San Diego State psychology professor and author of “iGen” Jean M. Twenge, who led the study, said “the average 12th-grader reported spending approximately two hours a day texting, just over two hours a day on the internet — which included gaming — and just under two hours a day on social media. That’s a total of about six hours per day on just three digital media activities during their leisure time.”
And that trend has consistently drifted into the younger generation as well, leading to lower test scores and inevitably worse critical thinking skills. There are all sorts of great initiatives right here in Marion County to get children reading more from Vroom to the summer reading program at the Marion County-Columbia Public Library.
But it needs to extend even further than that because in reality, those programs are only reaching a small percentage of children. It needs to start at home and unplugging children from the technology they so desperately cling to. If they spent even half the time reading as they do glued to television and smart-device screens, not only would their grades begin to improve but so too would their understanding of what the world is really like. The rise in technology is crippling the nation’s youth, and there’s a simple solution: make them read to force them to learn to draw their own conclusions rather than having the world unfurl before them on shiny screens while their minds turn to Jell-O.
Reach Sports Editor Joshua Campbell at joshuacampbell@columbianprogress.com.
