Category: Reading

Reading Matters, Redux

I am an avid reader, devouring books at an even more rapid rate now that I’m retired. I have read before sleep since I was a little girl, and now I have the luxury of reading during the day as well. Books sustain me, they entertain me, they show me new worlds and new worldviews. I cannot imagine a life without reading.

Sadly, I have become a unicorn. Last September I blogged about the dramatic decrease in reading. The stats are compelling. The data from the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2022

Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), shows the regression of reading as a pastime.

(www.arts.gov)

This fiction-reading rate was the lowest in the history of the SPPA, a survey that goes back more than three decades. Daily reading for pleasure in the US has experienced a sustained decline, dropping 40% over the past two decades. (Ibid.)

Those stats are skewed, though, because they offer an average rather than a mean, so heavy readers skew the percentage upward. Consider these stats:

  • 40% of Americans don’t read a single book per year.
  • 27% of Americans read no more than four books per year [even when digital, audio, and print formats are included].
  • The median American read two books in 2025. The average reader clocked in with eight. To put it starkly? 19% of American adults did 82% of the country’s reading. (https://lithub.com)

Students don’t read for fun as much as they used to, either.

(www.the74million.org)

On March 19, 2026, my favorite Chicago Tribune columnist, Heidi Stevens, made yet another argument for reading: “Books are little empathy gardens, feeding and growing the stuff that makes us feel, makes us care, makes us human.” (www.chicagotribune.com) She references neuroscience at Emory University (https://esciencecommons.blogspot.com) to support this claim. She reminds us that books are a way to walk in someone else’s shoes, to imagine their lives and learn to care about them.

In a new study from the University of Florida and University College London, experts affirm this value of reading: “Reading for pleasure has long been recognized not just as a tool for education, but as a means of supporting mental health, empathy, creativity and lifelong learning.” (https://news.ufl.edu)

Stevens acknowledges that current English curricula may not be designed to foster a love of reading, and I agree. We need to meet students where they are before we can lead them to the texts we so value. We should include more appealing choices because we have never needed to encourage reading more than we do now, in this time of division and lack of empathy. Stevens writes,

Because empathy doesn’t just seem like the best way forward right now. It seems like the only way.

What better way to pivot and heal from a chapter like the one we’re in now, a chapter marked by constant cruelty and chronic chaos? What better way to recoil, reflexively, from the next leader who comes along behaving like the one we have now? (Ibid.)

Last September, I wrote, “Reading well develops critical thinking skills, grows vocabulary, and makes us better writers. It introduces us to wider worlds and other ways of being. It helps us figure out who we are and what we believe. Why would we settle for less?” All of that is true. Let’s add a piece that’s more critical now than ever, though: let’s read widely so we may rediscover our shared humanity and rebuild an inclusive and welcoming society.

Reading Matters

American students can’t read well. That news, supported by data from the National Annual Assessment of Progress, should worry all of us. These test scores, the first since before the pandemic, show a stark decline that had begun even before the pandemic. We can’t blame Covid alone. Students are struggling, and their lack of adequate reading skills may limit their ability to function as adults in our society. This national snapshot cuts “across demographic divides of race, class and sex,” despite progress in the science or early reading teaching. (nytimes.com)

I am both saddened by these findings and concerned about their long-term impact on both students and on society as a whole. The New York Times article cited above acknowledges the likely role of technologies that have replaced reading time, including teens’ use of screen time for social media and videos. I believe the shift from paper to screens, from books to messaging, videos, and chats – that this paradigm shift is indeed one factor.

I do not believe it is the only factor. If we fail to recognize some of the additional forces at play, we will be even less successful at bringing students back to reading. We need to ask ourselves how the following patterns impact this issue:

  • How many kids grow up in a home with books, without adults who read to them?
  • How many kids even see the adults in their lives reading?
  • Given our tendency to overschedule kids with playdates, schooling, organized sports, etc., from a very early age, how many kids have the time and energy to indulge in reading for pleasure?
  • Given the shortened attention spans of kids identified by research, how might we support their making the effort that reading requires?
  • Does increased use of short texts in place of longer works in schools mean that students don’t build the habit of sustained reading?
  • Does the pressure of short, single, right answers in our test-driven curriculum push for superficial focus?
  • How much choice do we allow students in their reading, so that they find something compelling to push them to finish?
  • Given that television shows and movies require less active engagement, what are we doing to show the pay-off of the greater effort that reading requires?
  • Does the overscheduling of our older students, given their involvement in extracurricular activities and/or employment, preclude time for independent reading?

Until we acknowledge the variety of factors at play and find a consensus on how to support reading, we are destined to have a less literate work force and citizenry. That matters. I believe that readers not only find a source of pleasure and relaxation, but they discover a window into other worlds, ways to learn about more than our immediate present, and ways to tackle the big questions like what it means to be a good citizen or a collaborative worker.

There are solutions already available and more that we can generate. In thirty years, Dolly Parton’s amazing Imagination Library program has given over 270 million free, age-appropriate books to families, providing homes without books a shot. Project Head Start, whose funding has been under attack by the current administration, provides reading experiences to preschoolers who may not have them at home. School can reconsider how they structure reading assignments and—perhaps even more important—how they ask students to engage with their reading. Meaningful discussions about big ideas in the text seem far more effective than worksheets and busywork. We can stop using multiple choice and short answer tests that belie the importance of the content of books, instead helping students make meaningful connections. We can consciously teach students to expand their attention span by building it up slowly, incrementally, and purposefully. Our sons went to Montessori schools and a progressive public school, all of which included a period of “silent sustained reading.” Our children grew to love that time and continued to choose to read at home. Schools can also lessen their focus on academic achievement as early as kindergarten and offer more time for less structured play and for free reading. And other educators and parents, wiser than I, can offer additional strategies to help our children read widely and well.

Today we picked up a book on hold at our local library, and we were behind a mom whose toddler was returning a pile of children’s books. I told her about the research and complimented her on raising a reader. He then looked up and said, “I can’t read myself yet. But I’m practicing.”  She thanked us as they walked off hand in hand. Wouldn’t we wish that for every child?

Reading well develops critical thinking skills, grows vocabulary, and makes us better writers. It introduces us to wider worlds and other ways of being. It helps us figure out who we are and what we believe. Why would we settle for less?