Counterpoint: The Decline of Reading in the U.S. Damages Our Intellectual Life.

By: Kramer, Otis, Wagner, Geraldine, Points of View: Decline of Reading, 3/1/2016
Database Points of View Reference Center
For the first time in modern history, less than half of the adult population now reads
literature, and these trends reflect a larger decline in other sorts of reading. 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.
This statement, from the introduction to a 2004 report by the National Education
Association, sums up the facts and sends a wake up call for the decline of reading.
Before the digital age, most people looked to fiction (literature) for entertainment and
knowledge. That time seems to be passing with the introduction and spread of
alternatives that now include videos downloadable over the Internet on demand, DVDs,
computer games, and hand-held devices that can play music and videos, connect to the
internet, make phone calls and exchange messages and photos.
In some cases, book categories are migrating online. Reference books--like
encyclopedias--are a prime example. These have always been books that people use to
look up facts, not to be read from start to finish. Fifty years ago, families bought an
encyclopedia to help their children with schoolwork. Today parents pay for an Internet
connection knowing that online encyclopedias will play a similar role.
In 2006, people between the ages of 15 and 24, voluntarily read only about seven
minutes a day during the week and 10 minutes a day on weekends, but they watched
TV about 2.5 hours a day. Among people from 35 to 44 years old, voluntary reading
averaged only 12 minutes a day. The most avid readers are those 65 years and older,
who averaged only about an hour a day.
The number of people reading books is about the same, around 100 million; however,
the landmark 2004 study by the National Education Association reported sales figures
from major publishers showing that book sales are basically flat. As the population
increases, the number of people reading for pleasure remains about the same; thus, the
percentage of readers is in decline, even though the actual number of Americans who
read literature has remained about the same over the past two decades.
Americans are not just reading less, they are reading less well when they do read.
Between 1992 and 2005, the percentage of 12th graders who read at the proficient level
declined from 40% to 35%. Any decline in reading ability indicates a corresponding
decline in overall academic accomplishment.

Therefore, on one level, the question, is reading in decline? is the wrong question.
Clearly people continue to read just like they continue to talk, even when that means
exchanging written messages over cell phones, or on Internet chat services. The issue
is not whether people read less for leisure, but what the implications for society might be
of these well-documented trends of reading for information rather than for leisure and
stimulation of the imagination, and of reading less proficiently.
What other changes in American culture and politics can be attributed to the long-past
substitution of a television set for time spent with a good novel?
What perhaps is the difference between reading Shakespeares play Much Ado About
Nothing and watching the film version on a DVD playing on your laptop or iPod?
One key difference lies in the imagination. Think about the fictional characters in a novel
or play. Do they resemble someone you know? How do their voices sound? What does
the great English country house where the novel takes place, look like?
Pleasure readers must actively engage their minds in imagining these important details
while reading a book. The words on the pages of every copy of a novel are identical, but
the characters that inhabit the imagination of the reader are unique. Reading a book is
emphatically not the same as watching a movie based on that book.
As the NEA reported: The accelerating declines in literary reading among all
demographic groups of American adults indicate an imminent cultural crisis.... (U)nless
some effective solution is found literary culture, and literacy in general, will continue to
worsen.