Over the course of two generations, from 1984 to 2023, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun on their own time has nearly quadrupled, from just 8% to 31%.
During that time, the percentage of middle-schoolers who read for fun “almost every day” has fallen by double digits, according to surveys conducted for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test widely known as “the nation’s report card”: In 1984, 35% of middle school kids read for fun almost every day. By 2023, it was just 14%.
The phenomenon is part of a larger shift away from reading, research suggests. A new study from the University of Florida and University College London found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped more than 40% among all age groups over the last two decades, “a sustained, steady decline” of about 3% per year.
Findings like these have sparked fears that, after more than a century of steadily expanding literacy, reading is devolving into an act relegated to a small group of elites, a “reading class” that enjoys books while the rest of us see them as, in the words of scholar Wendy Griswold, “an increasingly arcane hobby.”
It’s a strange and thorny problem that in some sense seems contradictory: If you followed around a young person for a day, you’d likely see that she is reading constantly, but often in tiny fragments. In addition to school assignments, she’s taking in a ton of atomized content: alerts, text messages, memes and social media posts. All those bits add up for sure — one study found that the typical American reads the equivalent of a slim novel every day — but it isn’t the same as sitting down to read a book.
For many young people, school is what gets in the way of books.
Julia Goggin, 15, grew up reading books and loving them. She consumed the first few Harry Potter books unassisted in second grade and finished the series by fourth grade. She read a lot in middle school.
In high school? Not so much.
Like Baez, she’s heavily scheduled, running cross country in the fall and track and field in the winter. She’s in her school’s theater group, which means after-school rehearsals. Then homework. All of it leaves little time for reading anything aside from school assignments.
“If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore,” she said. “Because school isn’t fun.”
I keep reading theses kinds of assessments and no one seems to acknowledge that opening a book and reading it is actually kinda hard. Reading long form is incredibly high effort.
It’s not just that reading is high effort, it’s that the effort is often unrewarded. If a piece of narrative art takes several times the energy to consume, if it’s not several times the quality of a more accessible form it’s a waste of time and energy. Everyone understands this intuitively.
“If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore,” she said. “Because school isn’t fun.”
Yeah, part of the reason I didn’t read so much - I just really didn’t want to read whatever books they required.
School should be more free-form
It’s only now as an adult and after a lot of effort that I can read for enjoyment again. School completely ruined reading for me.
Because there are more and better quality video content (TV, movies, etc) that is more accessible than the 1980s.
Like basically every time someone asks “Why do we not have <this aspect of what we consider a good life>?”, the answer is ultimately capitalism.
Sorry for the question, but I don’t get it. How is capitalism related to more scholastic duties and the spreading of atomized reading usually on the Internet?
Why do kids get so insanely overscheduled with schoolwork and extracurriculars? So that they can look better on college applications and get into the best school possible. Why do kids need to go to the best school possible? So that they can hopefully get a job that pays them well enough to survive in this ridiculous capitalist society, in which the cost of living steadily rises, employee benefits increasingly vanish, and wages don’t keep up with inflation.
Their childhoods are being sacrificed in hopes that they can make it in adulthood.
It’s crazy how much kids now are over provisioned for their time. My partner teaches HS, and the kids are clearly terrified that they’ll be destitute as adults if they don’t prepare early. It’s crazy how badly capitalism is screwing us.
My take is that “Media” gets more money for negative stories and what’s the point of reading a big book if the world being shown to you is ending?
