Anchorage Daily News

Reading may be fundamental, but there are a lot fewer people doing it these days. The National Endowment for the Arts released this week the results of a major study, "To Read or Not to Read," which tracks data on national literacy drawn from a number of federal agencies and universities, including the National Center for Education Statistics, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, and others. The new study is a more comprehensive follow-up to NEA's 2004 study "Reading at Risk," which itself drew on a 1982 study. So the longitudinal trends are meaningful, and on their face they're alarming.

The study's definition of literacy is not complicated. In context, it refers to reading and writing at a level adequate for communication, or at a level that lets one understand and communicate ideas in a literate society, so as to take part in that society. The NEA set out to determine who reads regularly, or at all, and who reads anything not specifically required by their job, and how often.

Most Americans are literate, over 90 percent. But over the last 25 years there has been a steady decline in the amount of reading by teenagers and adults, including college students and college graduates. And as students read less, they read and write more poorly. Nearly half of Americans age 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure, nor do over 40 percent of Americans age 18 to 44. Just over half of 9-year-olds, on the other hand, read something for pleasure every day. When they hit their teens, though, many quit reading anything for pleasure. Annual average spending on books is down from $33 in 1999 to $27 in 2004. Generally, women and girls read better than men and boys.

Not reading well has consequences. Predictably, poor readers have a much higher high school dropout rate than proficient readers. This manifests itself in the marketplace. Seventy-two percent of employers report the inability to write adequately as the most important deficiency in new hires who are high school graduates, 63 percent the inability to read adequately. Proficient readers have incomes nearly four times as great as those with below basic reading skills, and twice as much as poor readers. Proficient readers volunteer in their communities more, and vote more often. Poor reading skills are endemic in prison populations. The NEA did not reference its data for income or other environmental conditions, but a close relationship between poverty and poor reading skills would come as no surprise.

It has been axiomatic in American culture that the political and economic health of American democracy depends on an educated, informed populace with easy access to a free press, a proposition that generated the No Child Left Behind legislation. That reform does not seem yet to have had any significant impact on the reading decline, according to a new report from the National Assessment of Education Progress, also released this week. The results of the assessment for fourth- and eighth-grade readers are mixed.

But is the proposition valid? Is the decline in reading damaging the American economy and American democracy? The answers may not be obvious. Despite employers' reports, non-readers are getting jobs. Moreover, several university studies (UC Berkeley; U Michigan) recently found that many jobs in the $30,000-$40,000 range require no college, or a year of technical training, at a community college or trade school. Television and the Internet are major consumers of modern time, some of which might have been spent reading. On the other hand, increasing material is being read on the Internet. The relationship of the Internet to reading is not yet clear.

What seems clearer is that reading and writing facility increasingly distinguishes an information class from an underclass, with implications for income attainment and civic engagement. At the same time, non-literary communication forms, primarily video and music, are much more the language of culture for many, especially younger, Americans than is reading. Fewer Americans recognize such names as Faulkner, Bellow, Mailer and Wolf than know Bono, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Howard Stern.

Culture is dynamic, constantly changing. Just where this latest change is taking us is still obscure.

Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

ADVERTISEMENT