Decline of Reading in America

Reading has declined over the past twenty years among Americans in every age group, educational group, income level, region, and race. Even today, it continues to suffer with the worst declines being among younger adults. In the last twenty years, younger American adults have gone from being the people in our society who read the most to the people who read the least. With the largest declines being in the age group 18 to 24 and primarily being the worst among men. Only about one third of adult males are doing what is referred to as "literary reading." For the first time in American history, less than half of the U.S. adult population is reading literature. In the opening sentences to Randy Pausch's book The Last Lecture, Randy asks a very thought provoking question; "What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?" (Pausch, 3) The legacy of the most revolutionary figures of the past is slowly becoming a fading memory. Who will remember them and their lessons if no one is reading and interpreting their material? To better clarify America's decline of literary readying and the impact it is having on today's society, it must be broken down into three sections: Establishing the causes of the problem, what consequences these problems bring about, and the solution. Literature awakens, enlarges, enhances and refines us in a way that almost nothing else can. Randy Pausch refers to a childhood memory when he says "The instinct in our house was never to sit around like slobs and wonder. We knew a better way: Open the encyclopedia. Open the dictionary. Open your mind." (Pausch, 22) By nature, we as humans have a tendency to be consumed by our own egos. What literature does is put us as readers in the shoes of other people in all facets of their lives. This makes us feel the reality of someone else's point of view. Like an underlying message of a crazy action in which "crazy uncle Randy" dumps a full can of soda onto the cloth seats of a brand new car in front of his niece and nephew simply to bring attention to a lesson that "people are more important than things. Even a pristine gem like my new convertible, was just a thing." (Pausch, 70)

Something seems to happen with readers that does not happen with people that do not read. If you are a reader, you are more likely to engage in positive social and civic behavior as opposed to non-readers. If you read, you're 300 percent more likely to go to the theater and museums, 200 percent more likely to go to the movies, and over twice as likely to do volunteer work or charity work. It is often argued that this also depends on a person's income because it is thought that the more education you have, the more likely you are to read and the more education you have, the higher your income is. When in reality that thought has been found to be untrue. The poorest group of American readers does volunteer and charity work twice as often as the richest non-readers. If you are a reader, you're more likely to exercise, more likely to go to sports games, more likely to play amateur sports, and much more likely to be involved in your own community. (Reading At Risk, 9)

So how did all this happen? First off something isn't happening in schools. Somehow, we are not connecting reading with the idea of pleasure and the sense that reading is a necessary to a life of self-realization, of exploring who you are and what your individual potential is. Randy Pausch compares growing the mind to going to the gym; "A professor's job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror." (Pausch, 113) It seems school's today are trying to focus on producing entry