- cross-posted to:
- literature@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- literature@beehaw.org
Summary
A National Literacy Trust (NLT) survey reveals that children’s enjoyment of reading is at its lowest in 19 years, with only 34.6% of eight- to 18-year-olds saying they enjoy reading in their free time.
This marks an 8.8 percentage point drop from last year, part of a declining trend since 2016.
Reading frequency has also hit a historic low, and a significant gender gap persists, with only 28.2% of boys versus 40.5% of girls enjoying reading.
The NLT calls for a government taskforce to address these declines, warning that “the futures of a generation are being put at risk.”
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Not just in the UK. In the U.S. too. We have never been able to get our daughter interested in reading. We read to her every night when she was a kid, but once she learned to read, she wasn’t interested in reading or us reading to her. She can read. She has no reading disabilities. When she’s assigned a book in school, she has no issue reading it and doing tests on it and such.
But reading just doesn’t interest her in the slightest. It breaks her librarian mother’s heart, but nothing seems to convince her.
It serves The Powers That Be for us to not like reading. We should read just enough to consume and accept contract terms. That’s it. Anything else is dangerous.
In my country, I can understand that children read less. Many don’t learn about books at home anymore, and the books we throw at the kids in school are bound to alienate kids from ever touching books again.
The reason is simple, in the time of motion picture, videogames, and music, why would somebody decide to stare at bland black text on white paper for 3 hours a day?
Reading is by far the least approachable, most time consuming and least rewarding for of self entertainment. Books where the most popular because their distribution was the easiest and the cheapest. Now distribution of digital media including movies, music and videogames has become trivial.
Books are also the easiest to create (in relative terms), meaning for every GOOD book there are 1000s of really bad ones, and it’s not readily apparent which one is which. Where as for every really good movie there are many only 10 mediocre ones.
What the article describes as “better mental health” regarding to children reading, is usually a product of the abstraction that book inherently posses. Since all you can go off when reading a novel is your own imagination and maybe some official artwork, books have the least reinforcement of social standards.
Text is a very reliable way to relais information, but when it comes to telling a story, the more senses you can captivate the more alive a story will feel. Books don’t appeal to your eyes and ears but movies do.
