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Reading At Risk

For the first time in modern history, less than half of the U.S. adult population now reads literature, according to a comprehensive survey recently released by the National Endowment for the Arts.  Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America presents a detailed but bleak assessment of the decline of reading’s role in the nation’s culture and is not a report that the National Endowment for the Arts is happy to issue.

Anyone who loves literature or values the cultural, intellectual, and political importance of active and engaged literacy in American society will respond to this report with grave concern.

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Reading at Risk is not a collection of anecdotes, theories, or opinions. It is a descriptive survey of national trends in adult literary reading. Based on an enormous sample size of more than 17,000 adults, it covers most major demographic groups—providing statistical measurements by age, gender, education, income, region, race, and ethnicity. Conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census and spanning 20 years of polling, the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the data source for Reading at Risk, is as reliable and objective as any such survey can be. While not every measurement of reading was built into the study, the report provides so much data in such detail that it constitutes a comprehensive factual basis for any informed discussion of current American reading habits.

The key results of the survey are condensed in the “Executive Summary,” but the report can be further summarized in a single sentence: literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young. The concerned citizen in search of good news about American literary culture will study the pages of this report in vain.

Although the news in the report is dire, I doubt that any careful observer of contemporary American society will be greatly surprised—except perhaps by the sheer magnitude of decline. Reading at Risk merely documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted—our society’s massive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information.

Reading a book requires a degree of active attention and engagement. Indeed, reading itself is a progressive skill that depends on years of education and practice. By contrast, most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio make fewer demands on their audiences, and indeed often require no more than passive participation. Even interactive electronic media, such as video games and the Internet, foster shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification.

While oral culture has a rich immediacy that is not to be dismissed, and electronic media offer the considerable advantages of diversity and access, print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability—and the many sorts of human continuity it allows—would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment.

More than reading is at stake. As this report unambiguously demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life. The long-term implications of this study, therefore, not only affect literature but all the arts—as well as social activities such as volunteerism, philanthropy, and even political engagement.

What is to be done? There is surely no single solution to the present dilemma, just as there is no single cause. Each concerned group—writers, teachers, publishers, journalists, librarians, and legislators—will legitimately view the situation from a different perspective, and each will offer its own recommendations. The important thing now is to understand that America can no longer take active and engaged literacy for granted.

Reading is not a timeless, universal capability. Advanced literacy is a specific intellectual skill and social habit that depends on a great many educational, cultural, and economic factors. As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose.

Dana Gioia
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts


National Endowment for the Arts
webmgr@arts.endow.gov