David Kipen, representing the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), travelled to this year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in San Francisco to promote The Big Read, a NEA program which combats declining reading habits by enlisting members of the community to read a piece of literature simultaneously.
Previous studies, including the NEA’s “To Read or Not to Read?,” have shown rates of pleasure reading dropping among American citizens.
According to the 2007 NEA study
• 57% of all adults read a book “not required for work or school” in 2002,
• 52% of young adults, ages 18 to 24, engaged in such pleasure reading, and
• those 12th grade students who read for fun “almost every day” and those who read for fun “never or hardly ever” have a 28-point reading comprehension gap on a 500-point scale (-5.6%).
However, the authors of the 2007 study often conflate “reading” with “pleasure reading” in their presentation of the analysis to the public. “The story the data tell is simple, consistent, and alarming,” wrote author Dana Gioia, the Chairman of the NEA, in the report’s preface.
“Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years…Most alarming, both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates. These negative trends have more than literary importance.”
Arguably, however, when researchers only count pleasure reading not connected to work or school and then restrict the analysis to printed literature, they are artificially capping the recorded reading rates of the American populace.
Like Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation and a former director of Research and Analysis at the NEA, the report connected declining reading habits to internet usage. “Literary reading declined significantly in a period of rising Internet use,” wrote the NEA authors. “From 1997–2003, home Internet use soared 53 percentage points among 18- to 24- year-olds. By another estimate, the percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds with a home broadband connection climbed 25 points from 2005 to 2007.” In contrast, they report, the percentage of 18- to 24-year olds “reading literature” declined from 60% in 1982 to 43% in 2002.
Not surprisingly, Emory English professor Bauerlein is listed as a “special contributor” to the study.
Recent Big Reads in the Northeast include The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, hosted by Washington, DC’s Humanities Council; The Maltese Falcon, hosted by Jump Street in Harrisburg, PA; and The Great Gatsby, hosted by the Community Foundation of Washington County, MD.
Kipen described what he sees as the NEA’s motivations for The Big Read, saying that “we encourage these folks to form partnerships all over town so that even the non-reader or the lapsed reader—pick your euphemism—feels guilty for not reading, which is the next best thing to actually reading.”
He also pointed out some alleged “risks” of not reading, the life outcomes which correlate with lower pleasure readership:
• “less likely” to vote,
• more likely to “wind up in prison,”
• and “the likelier you are to live seven years shorter than if you do read.”
Similarly, Chairman Gioia wrote in “To Read or Not to Read,” that “At the risk of being criticized by social scientists, I suggest that since all the data demonstrate consistent and mostly linear relationships between reading and these positive results—and between poor reading and negative results—reading has played a decisive factor.”
Except that poverty, family background, and a host of other variables not caused by reading correlate with illiteracy, drug abuse, short life span and other risk factors.
“Whether or not people read, and indeed how much and how often they read, affects their lives in crucial ways,” Gioia asserted.
“We work at the sufferance of Congress and we wanted a fairly bulletproof, unimpeachable, canonical bunch of books to start with so that they would be our friends when we started to get a little frisky on them and books that might not be thought of as so canonical like, for example” Tobias Wolff’s Old School, said Kipen.
The National Endowment for the Arts received $114.7 million in the fiscal year (FY) 2008 federal budget. (The FY 2009 Budget has not yet passed). The House-passed stimulus bill, H.R. 1, would appropriate an additional $50 million for the government agency, but the Senate bill contains an amendment which would prevent stimulus funds from going to “any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.”
Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
