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When my kids reached summer camp age, the plan was always to send them to the camp I attended, Northland – B’nai Brith in Algonquin Park, three hours north of Toronto. Canadian canoe trips and color wars (technically colour wars) worked for the eldest, Leo. But by the time Hal was old enough, Covid had closed the border. So Hal and then Zev were hustled off to Tamarack, Northland’s sister camp across the water in Michigan. By then, Leo had graduated to shorter specialty camps, of which America has plenty.
So Leo never attended Tamarack. But in our family’s longest running con, he puts on a show to convince Hal and Zev that he did. Whenever they mention Tamarack, Leo chimes in with a relevant “memory” of the place. And while they don’t remember going to camp with Leo, they also don’t remember that he didn’t attend before they started. So Leo’s “memory” prompts Hal and Zev to begin grilling Leo about camp. And Leo responds with information gleaned from camp letters, photos, stories, and by just making stuff up.
Q. What’s the DeRoy cheer?
[DeRoy is a boys village at Tamarack. Leo knows because he’s heard Zev do it.]
A. Aleph bet gimmel dalet, DeRoy is really solid
Izzy Ozzy Jacob Sam, we’re the boys who need no ham
Matzah matzah that’s our cry, matzah matzah ‘til we die
Sing this song with all our might, DeRoy DeRoy fight fight fight
Q. In DeRoy, how much free time did we get after lunch?
A. Enough to play a game of basketball.
Q. When you exit the dining hall, do you make a left or a right to get to DeRoy?
A. Left.
Q. Wrong!
A. No. As a joke on our counselors, we’d turn left and go the long way around the lake.
Q. Who was your counselor?
A. Yossi. He was in the IDF.
Hal knows the truth and plays along. But at the end of every parley, Zev inevitably bursts out with: “What? How do you know that?!?”
The most remarkable thing about this long con isn’t Leo’s persistence in keeping it going for five years, but rather the younger kids’ patience in asking question after question, particularly after getting answers that are pretty much nonsense. But then again, they’re used to nonsense. They’ve had phones for nearly as long as they’ve been going to camp and their preferred away-from-camp activity is scrolling through videos on their TikTok or YouTube feeds.
***
If you have a school-age son, you probably know what kind of videos I’m talking about. Usually an influencer or creator – often a group of them, often in baseball caps, often worn backwards (it’s always young men) – yelling about something, often a videogame. Occasionally Hal and Zev happen upon a video that could be classified as educational, recounting a historical event or remarking on a strange phenomenon, typically narrated at what sounds like 1.25x speed with no pauses between sentences – cacophony to the adult ear.
Although it’s annoying, there may be a silver lining: training them to be more patient. They wait for ads to play as videos start. And they wait for the good stuff: the most entertaining part, the loudest yelling, or – hopefully – the part where they actually learn something. And when they’re trying to solve a problem on their computer – often in a game, often Minecraft – they’re equally adept at finding and watching a “how to” video where the teacher/gamer walks them through the solution step-by-step. Although it can be slow going, I haven’t noticed much fast forwarding. They’ve learned to sit and watch.
I’m pretty sure there are transferable skills here. It was evident when Hal and Zev would sit for hours building complex Lego sets, following the manual one frame at a time across hundreds of steps. And now when they assemble their own Ikea desks and chairs. It’s more procedural than passive and it demonstrates patience that seems next-level to me.
TikTok learning is a return to the oral tradition where content is absorbed linearly, in real time – or 1.25x time. It’s as though Gen Z is sitting around waiting for Homer to get to the good part. Except Homer is wearing a backwards baseball cap, yelling about Minecraft, and asking his audience to smash the like button. And so they duly wait. They wait because the next section or vignette might be better. Meaning hopefully emerging over time. Despite digital technology, it’s very human. But you know what else was very human? Hunting and gathering.
***
With the rise of TikTok and YouTube, the percentage of 13-year-olds who report reading for fun “almost every day” has been cut in half in a decade. And only 11% of high school seniors say they read at least six books per year. At home, when kids pick up a book, it’s more likely to be manga: visual, linear manga. Parents aren’t exactly role modeling good reading behavior and may be reading less to their kids. Meanwhile, at school, teachers report that students aren’t doing the assigned reading. Average NAEP reading scores are at 30-year lows. And the steepest declines in reading skills among adults can be found among 20-somethings. In many parts of the country, over half of high school graduates are only capable of the most rudimentary reading tasks.
Our reading woes can’t just be about attention span. Gen Z has attention aplenty for video. But reading requires different muscles (an appropriate construct given complaints about lack of reading endurance). While TikTok learning is linear, reading is dynamic. Good readers scan text, skip ahead, go back a few paragraphs or pages, and nimbly pick out relevant sections. While reading develops cognitive agency by building a path through ideas, video dictates its own. Video is also slower and more time consuming. It’s always faster to read a video transcript. Video is notoriously hard to search and use without one. Video inflates thought; reading compresses it. Reading respects our time; video consumes it.
The TikTok tradeoff is dynamic scanning, selecting, and constructing in return for patience, credulity, and willingness to follow direction. Although this makes for good running jokes, it’s a poor bargain. Teachers are reporting that, to take notes in class, students increasingly require “specific instruction on what to write down and how to organize it.” And to complete assignments, students are asking for full roadmaps, sometimes requesting feedback after each paragraph.
It’s particularly disconcerting given that they’re growing up with AI. Harnessing AI requires more perspicacity than patience, more logic than Lego. Learners and workers need to figure out how to ask the right questions, which can mean inputting specific instructions, context, and format of the desired output, or employing techniques like chain-of-thought prompting. Mastering prompt engineering is like learning a new language; there’s no comprehensive “how to” video. AI also requires more critical thinking than credulity in evaluating whether output is helpful or hokum. ChatGPT’s own prompt bar warns it “can make mistakes. Check important info.” So while employers may value workers who patiently follow directions, productivity will suffer if reading is supplanted by TikTok learning. There’s also a nontrivial risk that ungoverned AI returns our kids or our kids’ kids to hunter-gatherer status.
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Unfortunately, schools aren’t doing enough to counteract the TikTok trend. In elementary education, many students have suffered from unscientific reading strategies. And in middle and high schools, teachers are assigning more excerpts and shorter texts, in so doing crowding out whole books and resulting in less overall reading. But classrooms aren’t the likely locus of the behavioral change we need. To compete with video, reading has got to be fun. And fun won’t start in the classroom. Enter K-12’s unsung hero: the school librarian.
School librarians – and public librarians – are charged with fostering a culture of reading and are evaluated, in part, on circulation. But in the age of TikTok and YouTube, it’s no longer enough to make books available and let students loose. It’s also not particularly effective to assign books and/or quiz students on the books they borrowed. That’s not fun.
The good news is that we’re seeing the emergence of gamified reading engagement platforms that boost reading by making it fun. Beanstack allows librarians to create seasonal or themed reading challenges, “Battle of the Books” reading competitions, Bingo challenges, and summer reading competitions with all the features of the games kids are used to watching backwards-baseball-cap-wearing guys scream about on YouTube e.g., badges, leaderboards, streaks. It may sound silly, but there's no point wishing we could turn back the clock; we need to meet today’s kids where they are. Moreover, these platforms don’t care what you read, but simply that you read: students choose the books they like. And to keep it fun, there aren’t quizzes. Instead, once they log a book as read, Beanstack’s AI companion Benny the Bean engages readers in open-ended chats about the book.
According to librarians, the circulation impact of these new platforms can be dramatic. Students respond to gamified engagement by marching their way through dozens – and in many cases hundreds – of books. And to ensure that students aren’t gaming the game, the Beanstack platform produces reports from Benny’s chats on whether students actually read the books they marked completed.
The direction of travel in school literacy is clear: replace legacy quiz-based reading software with new free-choice reading engagement platforms. This is the best way to get kids to fall in love with reading before they fall for TikTok and YouTube. And if they don’t forget their first love, states, districts, and schools will have two high-class problems: figuring out how to schedule more student time with librarians and finding the dollars to increase library budgets and grow collections.
***
We haven’t lost reading. We’ve traded it for the time being for procedural patience. And that’s more dangerous than any of us would like to admit. Because if our kids are going to successfully navigate AI, they’ll need fewer skills like following directions to assemble furniture and more skills like skepticism and the ability to ask better questions than the last person. Moreover, if they’re waiting patiently for the next clip, they’re easy to entertain and easy to mislead.
There’s no silver bullet. We need parents to read more, teachers to assign more books, and new school library reading engagement strategies. Books are behind in the count, digitally disadvantaged, and it should be all-hands-on-deck to inculcate a love of reading. The alternative is a return to some kind of techno-prehistory. And no adult has the patience for that.
TikTok and YouTube are an even longer con than Leo’s camp schtick. While patience is undoubtedly a virtue, we want our kids to be patient not because they’ve been trained by algorithms to wait, but because they've learned from books, teachers, and parents that some things are worth waiting for. In the meantime, we can at least be thankful that video has bolstered patience. If we can reinstate reading to its rightful childhood position, our kids will need to be patient as they wait for the books they want to borrow; some other kid will have checked them out.