Read Online The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
Ads: Link
literature, it turned out, was much worse than trends in the other arts. From 1982 to 2002, reading rates fell through the floor. The youngest cohort suffered the biggest drop, indicating something unusual happening to young adults and their relationship to books. The numbers deserved more scrutiny, and Dana Gioia, chairman of the Endowment, ordered us to draft a separate report complete with tables and analyses.
The survey asked about voluntary reading, not reading required for work or school. We aimed to determine how people pass their leisure hours—what they want to do, not what they have to do—and we understood leisure choices as a key index of the state of the culture. The literature assigned in college courses divulges a lot about the aesthetics and ideology of the curriculum, but it doesn’t reveal the dispositions of the students, preferences that they’ll carry forward long after they’ve forgotten English 201. Young people have read literature on their own for a variety of reasons—diversion, escape, fantasy, moral instruction, peer pressure—and their likings have reflected their values and ambitions, as well as their prospects. A 14-year-old girl reading Nancy Drew in bed at night may not appear so significant a routine, but the accumulation of individual choices, the reading patterns of 60 million teens and young adults, steer the course of U.S. culture, even though they transpire outside the classroom and the workplace. A drastic shift in them is critical.
Here are the literary reader rates broken down by age:
A 17-point drop among the first group in such a basic and long-standing behavior isn’t just a youth trend. It’s an upheaval. The slide equals a 28 percent rate of decline, which cannot be interpreted as a temporary shift or as a typical drift in the ebb and flow of the leisure habits of youth. If all adults in the United States followed the same pattern, literary culture would collapse. If young adults abandoned a product in another consumer realm at the same rate, say, cell phone usage, the marketing departments at Sprint and Nokia would shudder. The youngest adults, 18- to 24-year-olds, formed the second-strongest reading group in 1982. Now they form the weakest, and the decline is accelerating: a 6.5 fall in the first decade and a 10.5 plummet in ’92-’02.
It isn’t because the contexts for reading have eroded. Some 172,000 titles were published in 2005, putting to rest the opinion that boys and girls don’t read because they can’t find any appealing contemporary literature. Young Americans have the time and money to read, and books are plentiful, free on the Internet and in the library, and 50 cents apiece for Romance and Adventure paperbacks at used bookstores. School programs and “Get Caught Reading”-type campaigns urge teens to read all the time, and students know that reading skills determine their high-stakes test scores. But the retreat from books proceeds, and for more and more teens and 20-year-olds, fiction, poetry, and drama have absolutely no existence in their lives.
None at all. To qualify as a literary reader, all a respondent had to do was scan a single poem, play, short story, or novel in the previous 12 months outside of work or school. If a young woman read a fashion magazine and it contained a three-page story about a romantic adventure, and that was the only literary encounter she had all year, she fell into the literary reading column. A young man cruising the Internet who came across some hip-hop lyrics could answer the survey question “In the last 12 months, did you read any poetry?” with a “Yes.” We accepted any work of any quality and any length in any medium—book, newspaper, magazine, blog, Web page, or music CD insert. If respondents liked graphic novels and considered them “novels, ” they could respond accordingly. James Patterson qualified just as much as Henry James, Sue Grafton as much as
The survey asked about voluntary reading, not reading required for work or school. We aimed to determine how people pass their leisure hours—what they want to do, not what they have to do—and we understood leisure choices as a key index of the state of the culture. The literature assigned in college courses divulges a lot about the aesthetics and ideology of the curriculum, but it doesn’t reveal the dispositions of the students, preferences that they’ll carry forward long after they’ve forgotten English 201. Young people have read literature on their own for a variety of reasons—diversion, escape, fantasy, moral instruction, peer pressure—and their likings have reflected their values and ambitions, as well as their prospects. A 14-year-old girl reading Nancy Drew in bed at night may not appear so significant a routine, but the accumulation of individual choices, the reading patterns of 60 million teens and young adults, steer the course of U.S. culture, even though they transpire outside the classroom and the workplace. A drastic shift in them is critical.
Here are the literary reader rates broken down by age:
A 17-point drop among the first group in such a basic and long-standing behavior isn’t just a youth trend. It’s an upheaval. The slide equals a 28 percent rate of decline, which cannot be interpreted as a temporary shift or as a typical drift in the ebb and flow of the leisure habits of youth. If all adults in the United States followed the same pattern, literary culture would collapse. If young adults abandoned a product in another consumer realm at the same rate, say, cell phone usage, the marketing departments at Sprint and Nokia would shudder. The youngest adults, 18- to 24-year-olds, formed the second-strongest reading group in 1982. Now they form the weakest, and the decline is accelerating: a 6.5 fall in the first decade and a 10.5 plummet in ’92-’02.
It isn’t because the contexts for reading have eroded. Some 172,000 titles were published in 2005, putting to rest the opinion that boys and girls don’t read because they can’t find any appealing contemporary literature. Young Americans have the time and money to read, and books are plentiful, free on the Internet and in the library, and 50 cents apiece for Romance and Adventure paperbacks at used bookstores. School programs and “Get Caught Reading”-type campaigns urge teens to read all the time, and students know that reading skills determine their high-stakes test scores. But the retreat from books proceeds, and for more and more teens and 20-year-olds, fiction, poetry, and drama have absolutely no existence in their lives.
None at all. To qualify as a literary reader, all a respondent had to do was scan a single poem, play, short story, or novel in the previous 12 months outside of work or school. If a young woman read a fashion magazine and it contained a three-page story about a romantic adventure, and that was the only literary encounter she had all year, she fell into the literary reading column. A young man cruising the Internet who came across some hip-hop lyrics could answer the survey question “In the last 12 months, did you read any poetry?” with a “Yes.” We accepted any work of any quality and any length in any medium—book, newspaper, magazine, blog, Web page, or music CD insert. If respondents liked graphic novels and considered them “novels, ” they could respond accordingly. James Patterson qualified just as much as Henry James, Sue Grafton as much as
Similar Books
It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens: Enjoying the Fruits of Middle Age
Phil Callaway, Martha O. Bolton
