Chances are by late this afternoon, you’ll be full of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and pie, and the easy chair will beckon. If you’re in an educated minority, you’ll pick up a book. If you’re in the educated minority’s educated minority, it may even be a novel.
Who reads when most others have moved to televised Thanksgiving football? They are the dwindling few Americans for whom books are still a daily part of life, according to a new study from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, for the first time in modern history, fewer than half of Americans read a novel, and most of those who did were, as the euphemism goes, of a certain age.
Amongst the young, thehabit of reading is dropping faster than a pair of knickers in a game of strip poker. In 2006, the average 24-year-old spent seven to nine minutes a day reading anything, let alone “Jane Eyre.”
NEA Chairman Dana Gioia is apocalyptic about what he sees as a looming cultural catastrophe: “The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy,” he says. “To lose this human capacity — and all the diverse benefits it fosters — impoverishes both cultural and civic life.” Perhaps you don’t think literature matters much in the scheme of things; perhaps that’s why God created nonfiction. But here’s the really chilling bit: Americans are losing not only the practice of reading for pleasure, but also the ability.
From 1993 to 2003, the percentage of college graduates considered “proficient in reading prose” and therefore “capable of reading a newspaper” sank from 40 percent to 31 percent. All that expensive tuition, yet fewer than a third of supposedly educated adults could easily understand the newspaper you’re holding.
Is that a “pshaw” of disbelief I hear? Perhaps you think this NEA study is the usual alarmism from the same geezer class that deplored the advent of the telephone, the motorcar and television. Has not technology enriched us? Has not the Internet brought the world’s great store of knowledge to the fingertips of the humblest laptop user? Yes — and reading is in free fall.
Now comes Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, merging technology and literature with a device called the Kindle. He believes that like the flickering candles that illuminated the manuscripts of medieval monks, his device will reignite public passion for reading and inaugurate a new literate golden age. That’s the idea, anyway, behind a book-shaped gizmo with a long-lasting battery that will allow users to carry several novels at once. But people whose taste for serious prose has been blunted by other media will not return to Dickens or Dostoyevsky just because the words are pixellated.
There are no “benefits that have been conferred by technology for reading well,” says Sunil Iyengar, chief author of the NEA report. “There’s great stuff online, we all use it, but what we’re concerned about is sustained reading on one’s own, reading because you want to, because reading anything in a sustained manner, and the hard work and patience required, is correlated with much higher outcomes socially, economically and civically.”
Universal literacy is as important as the universal franchise. But real literacy means more than having a stumbling ability to puzzle out headlines. It involves a deeper grasp of words and meaning that allows us to comprehend the world, appreciate what came before us and intelligently consider what shape the future is taking.
A population robbed of its attention span, easily diverted and cheaply amused, is not a civilization for which we should give thanks today. The pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock left beautifully written accounts of their difficult early days on these shores. How pitiable that four centuries on, most Americans are incapable of reading them.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal.
