Undeniably sad!
Warning: This may ruin your day!
This morning I was reading the New York Times, preparing to do my daily battle with Wordle, when I came upon an article titled, "American Children's Reading Scores Reach New Lows."
"Good grief," I thought. "Our kids need to get better at reading, not worse!"
As a former English professor, lover of literature, and avid reader, I value the ability to read above all other skills. Reading is the gateway to knowledge, to understanding, to tolerance, and to enjoyment. Thanks to my parents who were both readers and to the fact that they often took my sisters and me to the library to get books, reading became as natural to me as breathing.
My parents are gone now, but I thank them every day of my life for showing me the importance of reading. I can only hope that there are somewhere out there, parents are still passing a love of reading on to their children.
The title of the article I had glimpsed, however, suggested otherwise. "Reading Scores Reach New Lows" forecasted the gist, so I fortified myself and read on.
What the study showed
While teachers and educators hoped that the effects of the pandemic would begin to diminish and reading scores would begin to climb again, the opposite was true.
This is what the 2024 National Assessment of Education Progress reported:
The slide in achievement has only continued.
The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent."
Just as bad, the study showed that the kids who had the lowest level of achievement were reading at "historically low levels."
Wondering what "Below Basic" means?
For eighth graders, "below basic" meant that they couldn't identify the main idea of a passage or determine the different arguments presented.
The meaning of "below basic" for fourth graders meant that the students could not put events in the order of their occurrence. They also couldn't describe how a character's action affected the outcome.
Why is this happening?
How is it that one of the most powerful nations in the world with FREE education for everyone can have so many children who can't read well enough to comprehend basic meanings?
The New York Times article pointed out that even before the pandemic, reading scores of American children were falling. Add absences and school closures during the COVID epidemic, and you might expect a decline. But more than two years after the pandemic, you'd expect an uptick. Instead, scores are still sliding.
Experts suggest three contributing factors to the loss of reading ability: screen time, cell phones, and social media.
As kids spend more and more time scrolling through computer screens, texting on cell phones (in messages filled with abbreviations, emojis, and acronyms) and interacting with social media, they are spending less time doing - and learning - deep reading.
There's a huge difference between reading a book and skimming a screen for information. Reading a book involves understanding characters, motivations, and nuances of languge. Skimming a screen is based solely on finding information and speeding through text.
We all need to develop "biliterate brains" capable of quick-surface-skimming reading AND deep, thoughtful, investigative reading.
Our children aren't.
Another reason more than one-third of our children can't read...
Perhaps more telling than the children's lowered scores is that those scores mirror adult scores, which have also declined over the same period.
As the parents and grandparents of these children are streaming more movies, spending more time on their computers skimming and scrolling, and walking around with a cellphone stuck to their hand, the adults' lack of focus on reading is rubbing off on the kids.
After all, it's hard to be motivated to learn a skill if you rarely see it demonstrated.
I learned to read well because my parents modeled the behavior. My daughters are both avid readers because they watched me read. They got bedtime stories until they could read themselves, and they had access to books, both through what we bought for them and borrowing from the library.
But if almost one-quarter of the American population has NOT read or listened to a book - or even a part of it - in the past year, what hope is there for our children?
Here are other alarming facts from the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy
30 million Americans—54% of adults aged 16-74—read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
About 43 million adults, nearly one in five, read below a third-grade level, finding it difficult or impossible to fill out a job application, read a medication label, understand a news article, or read a book with their children.
64% of our nation’s fourth graders read below grade level.
I don't know about you, but it hurts my heart to think of all those people who can't sit down and enjoy a good book!
How many books did you read last year?
One study showed that the number of Americans who finished one book a year was even worse than a mere quarter of the population.
A December 2023 study by YouGov , found that a full 46 percent (out of 1500 surveyed) said they had not listened to or read a book in the past year. Twenty-seven percent reported they read 1-5 books per year. Eight percent read 6-10 books a year. There is some comfort in that 11% percent of those surveyed read more than 20 books per year.
We need more readers!
Reading has been proven to increase tolerance, enhance relationships, broaden horizons, and relieve stress. For me, it has been a way to explore the world and learn about people, cultures, and time periods that I can't visit.
An older American writer and historian named Gore Vidal once gave an interview where he said something like this:
"We have plenty of good writers. What we need is more readers!"
I wholeheartedly agree.
Weighty problems
Low literacy rates have been linked to higher population rates and a lack of "information literacy." Information literacy is the ability to access, comprehend, evaluate, and then utilize that information. People who don't read well, can't make informed decisions.
The ability to read - and read beyond the basic levels - is important to a nation's health. Literacy Pittsburgh suggests this:
Low or declining literacy can result in a limited ability to retain and understand essential information, higher unemployment rates, lower income, lower-quality jobs, and reduced access to lifelong learning and professional development. It can also begin a cycle of illiteracy as families place little value on education and reading, which leads to intergenerational transmission of low literacy and self-esteem.
Maybe being a powerful nation is WHY we aren't reading so well...
It's possible, perhaps, that because books are abundant here, they aren't seen as valuable or important. Because of our affluence, 98% of people in America own cell phones. That's 331 million people who spend time scrolling, taking selfies, posting about themselves, and sharing what others put out there.
In her Nobel Lecture of 2007 writes, Doris Lessing writes:
"How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this Internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging, etc.?”
Like Lessing, I wonder about the effect of a digital information age when we take tiny bites of content quickly - like fish snapping at a speck of food on the top of the water - never diving deeper or getting more than a morsel of information. I ask myself...
What would happen if the time we spend on social media, posting selfies, and playing games was spent reading books? Would we change the future by producing more educated, thinking individuals? Is the internet — unlike the printing press — making us dumber?
The bigger question
I am heartbroken that so many people - adults, teenagers, and kids - are missing out on the joy and enrichment that books bring. It doesn't matter to me HOW we read - whether hard-copy print or digital e-readers. It just matters to me that our nation can read well enough to comprehend MORE than the mere basic meaning. So much depth exists in literature: emotional meanings, innuendos, descriptions, differing viewpoints, and complex events that teach us about people, history, and the world at large - but only if we read well enough to understand.
The teachers of America have a gargantuan task teaching children to read in an era where many adults don't value reading - other than the ability to read a text message.
But the even bigger question, and the one that makes me undeniably sad, is this:
What happens to a country when its population stops reading? Does the country gradually decline when the majority of reading happens only on the screens of our phones and on social media platforms?
If our children can't read, don't read, or won't read, what happens to the future?
I too, read the New York Times article. I joined a book club recently, the only male, and learned that most of us have close family members that fall into the 0-5 books per year. What will happen to the vocabulary of our young ones. There are so many words that better describe a sight, smell, action, or belief. My wife and I recently were on a 9 day cruise. I was happy to see so many men reading books. There is hope, but setting the example is key. Thank you for sharing your insight to this dilemma.
Not only does this make me sad, it makes me MAD! Broiling,rolling, red-hot angry. And it's scary. I had no idea it was so bad. Thank you for writing this.