Report Shows
Big Drop in Reading in U.S.
Only 47 percent of American adults read
"literature" (poems, plays, narrative fiction) in
2002, a drop of 7 points from a decade earlier. Those reading
any book at all in 2002 fell to 57 percent, down from 61
percent.
NEA chairman Dana Gioia, himself a
poet, called the findings shocking and a reason for grave
concern.
"We have a lot of functionally
literate people who are no longer engaged readers," Gioia
said in an interview with The Associated Press. "This isn't
a case of `Johnny Can't Read,' but `Johnny Won't Read.'"
The likely culprits, according to the
report: television, movies and the Internet.
"I think what we're seeing is an
enormous cultural shift from print media to electronic media,
and the unintended consequences of that shift," Gioia said.
The decline came despite the creation
of Oprah's book club in 1996 and the Harry Potter craze that
began in the late 1990s among kids and adults alike. Reading
fell even as Barnes & Noble boasted that its superstore
empire was expanding the book market.
In 1992, 72.6 million adults in the
United States did not read a book. By 2002, that figure had
increased to 89.9 million, the NEA said.
"Whenever I hear about something
like this, I think of it as a call to arms," said Mitchell
Kaplan, president of the American Booksellers Association.
"As booksellers, we need to look into what kinds of
partnerships we can get into to encourage literacy and the
immediacy of the literary experience."
In May, the nonprofit Book Industry
Study Group reported that the number of books purchased in the
United States in 2003 fell by 23 million from the year before to
2.22 billion.
The NEA study, titled "Reading at
Risk," was based on a Census Bureau (news
- web
sites) survey of more than 17,000 adults.
The drop in reading was widespread:
among men and women, young and old, black and white, college
graduates and high school dropouts. The numbers were especially
poor among adult men, of whom only 38 percent read literature,
and Hispanics overall, for whom the percentage was 26.5.
The decline was especially great among
the youngest people surveyed, ages 18 to 24. Only 43 percent had
read any literature in 2002, down from 53 percent in 1992.
Gioia said the electronic media that
are contributing to the problem do offer possible remedies. He
praised Winfrey's use of television to promote literacy and said
he wished for a "thousand variants" of the idea.
"There's a communal aspect to
reading that has collapsed and we need to find ways to restore
it," Gioia said.
The title "Reading at Risk"
is modeled on "A Nation at Risk," a 1983 government
study that warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity in
elementary and secondary schools" and led to numerous
reforms. But Gioia avoided specific proposals in the NEA report.
"I don't believe the NEA should
tell the culture what to do," he said. "The reason we
are bringing this study out is that we consider it a crisis
situation that requires a national conversation."
