DANA GIOIA CHAIR, NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTSON THE IMPORTANCE OF READING

THE COMMONWEALTH June 2006Monday April 10, 2006

Why we read…

“…something that intellectuals often forget,

which is that most people read to be closer

to other people, to understand other

people, to understand other situations. They

want to read a book that other people are

reading. They want to have a conversation

about it. They want to be able to share and

explore their experience with other people.”

“Literature awakens, enlarges,

enhances and refines our

humanity in a way that almost

nothing else can.”

We are all reading less…

To summarize, reading has declined among every group of adult

Americans: every age group, educational group, income group,

region and race …This has been going on for 20 years, but the

trends are getting worse, and the worst declines are among

younger American adults. In the last 20 years, younger

American adults have gone from being the people in our society

who read the most to the people who read the least.

In the last 20 years, the number of adult readers in the United

States has stayed the same. The number of non-readers has

increased by 40 million.

Internet & Reading

“I have enormous enthusiasm for much of what the

Internet does, but all of the research that we have

been able to use (most of it coming from Internet

companies themselves) indicates that people do not

read on the Internet. They take information, but in a

largely non-linear fashion. They pull something from

here and there. The Internet is an extraordinary,

powerful tool of communication, but it does operate,

cognitively, rather differently from reading – in the

same way that television does from reading.”

NCLB & Reading

“…What I will say is that “No Child Left Behind” has been

surprisingly effective. Children involved in the program have

significantly increased their reading and math scores. African-

American children most of all, Hispanic children next and white

children, too. The problem is that that is the most basic

measurement of educational success. We need to go back to

the initial legislation of “No Child Left Behind,” which identified

the arts as a core component of American education at all

levels. Take the success that’s been built into the reading and

the math and work towards a complete education.”

What readers do…

If you are a reader, you are overwhelmingly

more likely to engage in positive social and

civic behavior versus non-readers. If you

read, you’re 300 percent more likely to go

to the theater and museums, 200 percent

more likely to go to the movies, and over

twice – in some measures three times – as

likely to do volunteer work or charity work.

What readers do cont’d…

If you are a reader, you’re more likely to exercise,

more likely to go to sports games, more likely to

play amateur sports – bowling or softball – and

much more likely to be aware of and involved in

your own community. There is a deep and

arguably statistical connection between readers

and civic involvement. The kind of communities

that we want to live in are, by definition,

communities of readers.

What literature does…

What literature does – nowhere more powerfully than

in fiction (the novel and the short story) – is put us in

the inner lives of other people in the daily-ness of

their psychological, social, economic and imaginative

existence. This makes us feel, more intensely

probably than anything else, the reality of other

points of view, of other lives. That is obviously in

jeopardy if we now have a society in which the

majority of adults are no longer reading.

Does poverty play a role?

And the argument that this is a function of

income – because the more education you

have, the more likely you are to read; the more

education you have, the higher your income is

– isn’t true. The poorest group of American

readers does volunteer work and charity work

at twice the level of the richest non-readers.

Readers vs. Non-readers

The interesting thing about people who read

versus people who don’t read, is that they do

exactly the same things – except that one group

reads and the other one doesn’t. Readers play

video games, watch television; they do these

things, but they do them in a balanced way,

versus people who are, increasingly, simply

passive consumers of electronic entertainment.

READ THE FULL TEXT HERE-

http://readingprograms.org/documents/on-the-importance-of-reading.pdf