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> Society has long preached that things like reading books is great for kids

Wasn't always the case, Plato felt it would dull your memory.

"They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

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Plato was probably right. As access to information has become ubiquitous, we increasingly don't need to rely on our memories. Ancient scholars would be able to recite long passages from memory. The printing press made that unnecessary if you could access a book. Now Google has made even books obsolete for some types of information. The internet is the world's memory.

What Plato missed was that our ability to do higher order reasoning and synthesis has grown by leaps with books and now the internet. That's a pretty good trade-off for losing some memory.

'Recite long passages from memory' is still entirely a thing when there's a practical reason (actors in stage plays) or somebody's just really into something (see people who can quote literally everything in several movies from memory). It's just no longer the first step that comes before anything else.

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