High alarm about recreational reading
On standardized tests, social media distractions, and the astonishing freefall in recreational reading among early teenagers
Scores on objective, standardized tests can be useful barometers of educational trends. At their best, they can offer warning signs about troubling shortcomings or serve as evidence of successful changes to policies and procedures. But sometimes the most important information comes from elsewhere than testing alone.
■ The National Assessment of Educational Progress contains a mixed bag of score-based data, including some good signs about 9-year-olds and some disappointing ones about 13-year-olds (whose reading scores are no better than those of their counterparts in 1971, despite the decades of research and experimentation since).
■ Here’s the fact that should resonate like a fire alarm in a concrete hallway: Only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun “almost every day”. That number has collapsed since 2012, when it was twice as high. Those who “never” read for fun has surged: While it hovered generally around 10% from 1984 to 2004, it’s been triple that figure since 2020.
■ There is no way to be sufficiently alarmed about those figures: A society that doesn’t read for fun isn’t post-literate, it’s illiterate. And to those who would say we shouldn’t worry because they’re just kids: To the contrary!
■ If there’s one thing that has always been true about 13-year-olds, it is that they are invariably searching for answers about how to define themselves: What they think, what interests them, who they want to become. And those lessons aren’t found in the 50th TikTok short of a binge session. They aren’t always found in books, but they are vastly more likely to be found somewhere in the written word -- novels, poems, magazine articles, news clippings, letters, diaries, encyclopedias, and all other forms of written words.
■ Reading isn’t just for stereotypically bookish kids: It’s also for the ones who find new hobbies and want to explore, the ones who realize their own weaknesses who want to brush up, and the ones who need safe ways to explore tough questions about self-identity.
■ Scores matter, and our social failure to get any better at improving those scores for 55 years is troubling. But the collapse in plain, simple “reading for fun” ought to be cause for enormous alarm.