National Endowment for the Arts

To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National

Consequence

Conclusions

1) Multitasking hinders comprehension2) Reflection is a skill acquired at

college 3) Reading correlates strongly with

academic success4) Newspaper circulation is on the

decline5) Literature fosters interpersonal

relationships

Critical Discourse

Alliterates: “People who have the ability to read, but who choose not to.”

a) Narrow range of critical thoughtb) Inability to separate fact from opinionc) Comprehension gapd) Distorted sense of self

Professional Impact

This is a world […] in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to the good life, in which high levels of education—a very different kind of education than most of us have had—are going to be the only security there is.

C.S. Lewis

In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself… Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Virginia Woolf

I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crown, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble--

--the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms,

‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.’