Getting up a tad bit earlier than usual on this beautiful after Thanksgiving Saturday morning, reading my news articles, I ran across a rather disturbing article. Americans are reading less.
Here is the link to CBS News where I read the study and below are some excerpts:
(CBS/AP) The latest National Endowment for the Arts report draws on a variety of sources, public and private, and essentially reaches one conclusion:
Americans are reading a lot less.
That's according to a 99-page study, "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence," released Monday by the National Endowment for the Arts as a follow-up to a 2004 NEA survey, "Reading at Risk," that found an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year.
The new study examined data on everything from how many 9-year-olds read every day for "fun" (54 percent) to the percentage of high school graduates deemed by employers as "deficient" in writing in English (72 percent).
"I've done a lot of work in statistics in my career and I've never seen a situation where so much data was pulled from so many places and absolutely everything is so consistent," NEA chairman Dana Gioia said.
The report by the NEA, a taxpayer-funded independent federal agency, is based on reading trends data collected from more than 40 sources, including other federal agencies, universities, foundations, and associations.
On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.
Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.
Gioia called the decline in reading "perhaps the most important socio-economic issue in the United States," and called for changes "in the way we're educating kids, especially in high school and college. We need to reconnect reading with pleasure and enlightenment."
"`To Read or Not to Read' suggests we are losing the majority of the new generation," Gioia said. "The majority of young Americans will not realize their individual, economic or social potential."
What can we do to help this very unsatisfying situation? My instantaneous response is parents are ultimately responsible for their children's reading habits. Next would be the educational process where kids love to read what is appealing to them. Sometimes we put pressure on our children to act and or think like adults in their reading. Asking to understand and enjoy subjects they do not have a clue as to ascertaining there meaning. I can see clearly the overall picture, but cannot focus on how to remedy the individual position. As we bloggers read and write we must help others to appreciate and take pleasure in reading!
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