Literary reading appealing again

Young Americans don’t like books. They’d rather blog and game and video and text and chat than curl up in a chair for an hour with a novel. Literature and history and civics are for school, not leisure. Off-campus, it’s an iPod-listening, cellphone-speaking, social networking world.

A report from the National Endowment for the Arts released Monday, however, offers significant evidence to the contrary, showing that old-style literary reading may not be so passe among the young as assumed. Back in 2004, the NEA released “Reading at Risk,” a survey demonstrating that the rate of 18- to 24-year-olds who read a work of literature on their own in the preceding 12 months was only 43 percent. The questionnaire accepted any novel, short story, poem or play of any length or quality through any venue, including the Internet. Furthermore, that low figure marked a decline of 17 points since 1982. The rate of 18- to 24-year-olds who read a book, any book, went from 59 percent in 1992 to 52 percent in 2002. For all too many of them, literature and books meant nothing more than a classroom assignment.

“Reading at Risk” became one of the central culture stories of 2004, with more than 1,000 stories and commentaries on the report appearing in the months after its release. In response, the Arts Endowment developed a follow-up survey conducted with the U.S. Census Bureau in May 2008, and entitled “Reading on the Rise.” The new data is in, and at a time in which the book industry is reeling, remedial reading course enrollments are swelling, and teens are spending nine hours per week on social networking, the results are striking.

NEA Chairman Dana Gioia announced in the report, “For the first time in over a quarter-century, our survey shows that literary reading has risen among adult Americans.” Groups in nearly every demographic —- racial, age, income, educational —- increased their literary reading. The sharpest rise came among those very 18- to 24-year-olds wrapped in a screen world. Young readers, who suffered a 20 percent decline in 2002, showed an astonishing 21 percent rise in 2008 (all adults had a 7 percent increase).

To anybody who believes that a literate and literary adult citizenry is essential to a vibrant culture and a vigilant democracy, these trends are heartening. What has caused them?

No doubt, the variables are many, and some inscrutable. Still, we may reasonably point to the alarm raised by studies and findings in recent years regarding the literary health of the United States. “Reading at Risk” is only one of many notices that questioned the condition of reading among the young. In spite of all the public school investment in reading in the wake of No Child Left Behind, for example, reading scores for high school seniors remain at dismaying levels (only 40 percent reached “proficiency” in 2005). A report from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that the rate of college graduates who achieved “proficiency” went from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003.

Many programs have followed the declines and contributed to a sense of urgency. Public schools now set reading assignments for vacation periods, and colleges ask entering freshman to read selected works over the summer before they arrive on campus. The NEA itself sponsors programs to boost literary reading such as Poetry Out Loud, a recitation contest that has collected more than 400,000 high school student participants since 2005, and The Big Read, a community reading program that claims 650,000 child participants since 2006.

The degree to which those reports and activities have boosted literary reading is an open question, and the new NEA report does contain a troubling statistic on book reading in general, which continues to decline. But the reversal of literary reading is cause for optimism. It demonstrates that while powerful social forces push teens away from the printed page, their influence is not irresistible. That is the lesson of “Reading on the Rise:” Steady encouragement from parents, teachers, and other mentors —- “Let’s look at this poem” and “You gotta read this book, it’s great” —- can, indeed, work.

> Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. He was director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts 2003-05.