There are more divisions than just “data” vs “vibes.” After all, even in the natural sciences, the best data is useless without an explanation/hypothesis that can never just be reduced to the data. Precisely what is thrown out in the decline of reading is familiarity with the centuries of hard-won Enlightenment knowledge, especially concerning the stakes of education, which isn’t just vibes and that ought precisely drive our further data-driven insight into these questions.

Second best, however, I’d take the “vibes” of a random teacher over the religion-based decision making that seems to be on the rise in the US. “Data-driven” religiously motivated educational policy is the worst of all possible worlds.

I would push back on that. I think often people's "vibes" are a lot closer to reality than extremely gamed metrics

Vibes can be data. Take for instance the economy. All of these things like the GDP, employment figures, and so are supposed to be objective measurements. But precisely because of this they've been gamed to the point of absolute meaninglessness. Recent news regarding jobs numbers over the past 4 years emphasize this to the point of absurdity. All good numbers go up, all bad numbers go down. How's the economy doing? *shrug*

By contrast poll people on their 'vibes' of the economy and you'd suddenly get some real and meaningful data that can't really be gamed beyond outright lying about the results. You'd of course have things like people wearing rose colored glasses with regards to the economy when 'their side' is in power, but that doesn't really change the validity of their opinion. And those opinions, as an aggregate, can really provide a lot of really valuable information.

It depends. Not all good things are legible and easy to put into a spreadsheet.

Blind data-driven decisions destroy all illegible good in this world that can't be boiled down to some number going up. And there's a lot of it.

Does it? How do you know?

One of those inconvenient facts: kids who will be successful in life learn to read at home before starting formal schooling, and they have an adult who reads with them three or more times a week; kids who don't get that at home are much more likely to remain illiterate or to read at well below their grade level. It's inconvenient because there isn't anything anyone except the parent(s) can do about it, and the parent has already made that choice by the time the kid gets to school.

It's funny you say that, because the Tyrant of Jupiter series was written by Piers Anthony, whom I understand to be considered nowadays as problematic and misogynistic. The misogyny shows through, especially in a scene where the main male protagonist is making back room military deals with a woman, and the method of negotiation is, to be rather explicit, a martial grappling match, in the nude, in a zero-G bubble, where the protagonist wins the rounds by physically subduing his woman counterpart and achieving PIV penetration before they separate and go again.

I was alive in that time and girls did not like those books, at all (of course WOMEN may be a different story). They liked Harry Potter, and LOTR after the movies came out because Orlando Bloom.

A mother I know said the same thing about reading assignments at school, that they're all for girls now.

Having a female protagonist doesn't necessarily mean boys can't enjoy a book, of course. I (a boy) enjoyed Nancy Drew just as much as The Hardy Boys when I was young. But I suspect modern writings with girl protagonists are more focused on targeting girls than on making good stories that happen to feature girls, and may not be as universally enjoyable.

I have a 12 year old daughter and 10 year old son. My daughter has been reading voraciously since about 9 years old. This past summer she plowed through several 800-1000 page books.

My son is not nearly as voracious as she is, but has, in the past 6 months started to really value his reading time, enough that he gets upset when things interfere with it. Also, he now goes out and researches books to read (often via YouTube during his Youtube time). I think what got him here was consistency.

We've read to them every night until they were in second grade and then required them to read overnight. It took a while to take hold with both, but once it did they dove in and now really value it.

As for what he is reading - Diary of a wimpy kid series, Percy Jackson, Mysterious Benedict Society are the current favorites.

These are fairly current: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Rider. Aimed at teenage boys although I only know about them cos our daughter loved 'em.

I think this is probably very genre specific. I suspect the nonfiction and realistic fiction boy/manly/macho genres(outdoors, machines, fighting, and the like) may have been especially cannibalized by games/video. I don't recall seeing any of this stuff on my last trip to a physical bookstore. But on the fantasy/geeky side there are more great options than there have ever been, and, as a girldad, I can tell you that female main characters are tough to find.

I would recommend the website Royalroad https://www.royalroad.com/home. It has a ton of stories by amateur authors. They're not enriching, deep, or social commentary. It's a modern version of pulp magazines, in the vein of Conan the Barbarian with worse writing, but in the end those were published in a paid magazine, while this is a free website accessible to all.

While they're not high quality, with a couple of exceptions, they're very fun to read, and in my opinion, while you can spend your time reading only high quality books, it's nice to just have what is essentially the fast food of fiction as well. Reading is a habit, and creating it by focusing on something like this, can still allow you to read something with depth and quality later on.

There's a big market for this for girls and for women in any book store, but for the most part, you can't find the same for men.

If you want specific recommendations you can check around /r/rational on reddit, since they tend to cover some of the better stories from that site.

I have both (10-13ish) and both read almost constantly. Our son is the older one, read early and also very quickly, and that's set a tone for his siblings who now read a lot as well. Neither in that 10-13 age bracket above has trouble finding novels they enjoy from fantasy or adventure settings. There was an earlier period where we asked friends' teenagers to suggest book series, but these days our children seem to find their own novels during library sessions incorporated into their schooling.

I have daughters that love nancy drew novels, read to them before bed, currently on book 28.

for a boy the Hardy boys is the equivalent..

Also depends on the age but other good ones are:

Artemis Fowl Alex Rider Berenstain Bears