NEA: People are Reading Less
Front page news on The Boston Globe (so it must be true): People are reading less. David Mehegan tells us about a National Endowment for the Arts study about reading habits (.pdf) indicating the decline in people reading for pleasure continues. It seems that if children don’t read for pleasure, they don’t magically start the habit as adults.
One of the points Mehegan brings out is how surveyed college students don’t read for pleasure. When I was in college and graduate school, I read all the time, but just not “for pleasure.” Thinking about that point made me wonder how the question was posed to students. Since I majored in a language, acted on stage in theatre for two years, and took lots of humanities courses, I read many works some people would call literature. Would I have considered that academic work to be reading “for pleasure?” No, but it’s reading that’s just as important as if I had been reading the same works at my leisure. What little spare time I had usually went into taking a break from the (text)books.
A related point I wonder about is whether many of the age groups surveyed might have more choices for activities than kids twenty or thirty years ago. With the growth of after-school activities, athletics, arts, public transportation, computers, the Internet, etc., do kids have more options for things to do than go directly home after school and read? Especially knowing how important certain activities can be for college applications, are kids reading less because they have less time they would otherwise spend reading? Mehegan lists a bunch of activities kids are doing at the beginning of the article, but I’d like more details about how it all balances out. I should probably read the NEA report, eh? (In my spare time …)
Addendum 11/20: Like I wrote a while ago when I reported another survey about reading, I wonder whether online sources count or if the researchers only asked about books.
