As John Brummett is off today, we offer readers a classic column from Bradley Gitz. The original version of this column was published Dec. 2, 2007.Evidence that reading is becoming unfashionable continues to accumulate, and with it a growing likelihood that we are moving toward a post-literate society.
A National Endowment for the Arts report on the reading habits of young people found that fewer than one in three 13-year-olds, roughly one in five 17-year-olds and only about half of those between 18 and 24 read for pleasure.
In a fashion suggestive of cause and effect, the study also revealed that young people don’t understand much of what little they do read. The number of high school seniors who can read at the official proficiency level is now down to 30 percent, reflecting a drop of 13 percent in the space of 15 years.
Conclusion: The TV and video games are winning, and by large margins. The average person now spends roughly 20 times more time watching television than reading.
Judging how bad this all is requires some historical perspective. After all, the knowledge that most young people don’t read much loses some of its depressant effect when realizing that most people, young and old alike, have never read much.
A huge percentage of Americans a century or so ago actually were functionally illiterate, to the extent of being unable to sign their own names, let alone comprehend Dante or Shakespeare. That America enjoyed a tremendous increase in power and wealth, with a dazzling array of scientific breakthroughs when so many of our citizens marked the spot with an X, tells us that it is at least possible for a nation to prosper over time without lots of reading taking place.
While literacy is certainly more important in today’s knowledge-based society than it was in rural America circa 1880, the more important consideration is not really how much or how well the average person reads, but how much and what the supposedly educated among us read.
The salt of the earth provide a foundation of common sense, decency and courage, but it is the so-called elites who ultimately get elected to high office, become CEOs and win Nobel prizes. It is the quality of their leadership that determines whether our nation succeeds or fails in the Information Age.
But there is bad news on that front as well. According to the NEA study, two-thirds of college seniors either never read for pleasure or read for pleasure less than an hour per week, which might as well be never. The percentage of those with a bachelor’s degree with the ability to read prose at a proficient level is just 31 percent, representing a 24 percent decline since 1992. The percentage for those with graduate education able to read at such a level is not much better: just 41 percent.
“College attendance no longer guarantees active reading habits,” the authors of the report noted in dry understatement. And since reading is an activity that most college-educated people have been led to believe is important, one can assume a certain over-reporting of reading levels that makes the actual picture even bleaker.Again, some caveats are in order, most obviously that a far larger percentage of young people go to college these days than in the past.
Indeed, most of today’s college students wouldn’t have had the credentials to be admitted to the nearest college or university 60 years ago. Because the college educational experience isn’t what it used to be and a degree doesn’t mean what it once meant, it shouldn’t surprise us that college students today don’t read as much and aren’t as literate in general as the less-numerous college students of their great-grandfathers’ day.
But it is still difficult to explain why levels of reading continue to fall year after year among college students and the college-educated when young people have been going to college in massive numbers since at least the 1960s. Something is happening apart from the masses going to university, and that something appears to be highly destructive to our nation’s civic and political life.
As the NEA report made clear, those who don’t read don’t do much else that suggests a mind at work either, including going to museums, plays or concerts. They are much less likely to exercise, play sports or do much of anything outdoors and participate much less in civic or charitable activities, including voting.
Critics often complain that America now has a bumper-sticker form of politics. But maybe a bumper sticker is all most Americans will soon be able to read.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 12/17/2013