On the Importance of Reading
THE COMMONWEALTH
June 2006
DANA GIOIA Chair, National Endowment for the Arts
On the Importance of Reading
Gioia warns that as increasing numbers of Americans put down their books, they also invest less in the nation’s civic and cultural life. In a program moderated by writer Jewelle Gomez, Gioia calls for a revival in reading, beginning in the schools.
Monday April 10, 2006
E
very 10 years the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) does a survey among American households. It’s the largest of its kind in the world. We take 17,000 households, which the U.S. Census Bureau matches to reflect the total American population as of the previous year’s census. We interview those people in their homes – a very extensive interview about their participation in arts and civics activities – and we follow up with other phone interviews. This allows us to judge in an objective way (the error rate is about two-tenths of 1 percent – about 20 times the size of your normal national poll) how the arts are doing. We did this a few years ago. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to find what we found. To summarize, reading has declined among every group of adult Americans:
book, magazine, newspaper or online. If you carry a poem in your wallet and you look at it once a year, we count you. If you have just finished Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in German for the third time, or you’ve read one page of a Harlequin Romance and given up because it’s too hard, we count you as equals. We are very egalitarian! What you see for the first time in American history is that less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature. I’m going to talk about what the causes of the problem are, and then I’ll talk about the consequences and the solutions. To go into the data a little big further, we see that we’re producing the first generation of educated people, in some cases college graduates, who no longer become lifelong readers. This is disturbing for reasons above and
June 2006
DANA GIOIA Chair, National Endowment for the Arts
On the Importance of Reading
Gioia warns that as increasing numbers of Americans put down their books, they also invest less in the nation’s civic and cultural life. In a program moderated by writer Jewelle Gomez, Gioia calls for a revival in reading, beginning in the schools.
Monday April 10, 2006
E
very 10 years the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) does a survey among American households. It’s the largest of its kind in the world. We take 17,000 households, which the U.S. Census Bureau matches to reflect the total American population as of the previous year’s census. We interview those people in their homes – a very extensive interview about their participation in arts and civics activities – and we follow up with other phone interviews. This allows us to judge in an objective way (the error rate is about two-tenths of 1 percent – about 20 times the size of your normal national poll) how the arts are doing. We did this a few years ago. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to find what we found. To summarize, reading has declined among every group of adult Americans:
book, magazine, newspaper or online. If you carry a poem in your wallet and you look at it once a year, we count you. If you have just finished Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in German for the third time, or you’ve read one page of a Harlequin Romance and given up because it’s too hard, we count you as equals. We are very egalitarian! What you see for the first time in American history is that less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature. I’m going to talk about what the causes of the problem are, and then I’ll talk about the consequences and the solutions. To go into the data a little big further, we see that we’re producing the first generation of educated people, in some cases college graduates, who no longer become lifelong readers. This is disturbing for reasons above and