Washington, DC — Today, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announces the release of To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence, a new and comprehensive analysis of reading patterns in the United States. To Read or Not To Read gathers statistics from more than 40 studies on the reading habits and skills of children, teenagers, and adults. The compendium reveals recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society.
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Among the key findings:
Americans are reading less – teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.
- Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.1
- On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.
In August I created my blog at the encouragement of a successful published novelist. She said I should create a “presence” on the web which would serve as a starting point for marketing my book once it was published. I’m a long way from finished with revisions on the book, but Oh. My. Gosh. I’ve had almost 2500 hits on my blog in just over three months. Which means PEOPLE ARE READING what I write. So now I don’t consider the blog as a start-up marketing tool. Maybe it will be one day. For now, it’s a valuable creative nonfiction venue.
I’m reading.
I think its sadly true though – people are reading less. I notice that young folks are reading less when I thought it was just the opposite. I find that technical people read technical stuff (work related to programming etc.) instead of reading for pleasure or for insight.
As a school librarian in an all boys school, I see my students reading all the time. They just read different things than adults want them to read. They read magazines, newspapers, graphic novels and on the Internet.
Why thirty, forty or fifty-year old adults expect teenagers to have the same reading habits of themselves is beyond me.
Reading is reading. Just because someone isn’t reading “angst” literature doesn’t mean that their reading doesn’t count.