Reading What We Sow

The press is abuzz with news that Americans of every demographic group are reading less than we did in past years. (WSJ , NYT, Chronicle of Higher Education [$].) As demonstrated in "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," released yesterday by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and based on information gathered by the Census Bureau in 2002, the number of readers of literature declined some 14 percent between 1982 and 2002. The data were gathered by the Census Bureau in those years as well as in 1992, which allowed researchers to determine that the slide in readership accelerated during the 1990s.

There is much in the report to lament, but little to surprise. (It’s available in both hard copy and PDF from the Endowment.) I don’t mean that as a cynical jab at the intelligence of my fellow Americans, a la Michael Moore’s smarmy depiction of us as stupid and unread. To boot, I’m not thinking of our predilection for the practical arts (I’ve written on that here), nor of the encroachment of electronic entertainment or hyperactive lifestyles into our reading time. Others have already commented on those matters.

But what can we expect when we offer our youth tepid, politically correct, bowdlerized texts in lieu of robust literature that portrays life as it’s really lived? When that less enlightened NEA, the National Education Association, flexes its muscles not to enforce high standards for teachers or to insist on merit pay, but to defeat every attempt at meaningful reform lest its membership find itself facing the demands of the marketplace? When teachers’ unions work to lower the intellectual threshold for entry while raising the bureaucratic hoops through which any prospective teacher must jump, should we be shocked, shocked! to find that students leave school less likely to care about reading than did their forebears?

The sorry state of affairs in K-12 education, and in the education of future teachers by colleges of education, is well documented. Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, among others, have done superb work on the decline of public education. The problem isn’t so difficult to understand, I think, as it will be to solve. Politicizing and dumbing down public education has deprived children of the opportunity to begin a lifelong habit of personal enrichment and instead instilled in them a false belief that books are boring, the environment’s in dire straits, and discerning right from wrong too difficult for even the greatest minds.

That’s a danger, for if children aren’t exposed to the wonder of literature, with its power to expand intellectual horizons and develop the moral imagination, they’ll be forced to postpone discovery of its wonders until adulthood. That’s not an impossible feat, of course, but it’s surely less likely to occur after graduation, when the practical arts do indeed occupy our attention, and for understandable reasons. The NEA (the one that actually wants children to read) has done a great service in releasing “Reading at Risk.” But rather than wringing our hands, we’d do better to demand a thorough reformation of our public schools.