DANA GIOIA CHAIR, NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF READING THE COMMONWEALTH June 2006 Monday April 10, 2006

Why we read… “…something that intellectuals often forget, which is that most people read to be closer to other people, to understand other people, to understand other situations. They want to read a book that other people are reading. They want to have a conversation about it. They want to be able to share and explore their experience with other people.”

“Literature awakens, enlarges, enhances and refines our humanity in a way that almost nothing else can.”

We are all reading less… To summarize, reading has declined among every group of adult Americans: every age group, educational group, income group, region and race …This has been going on for 20 years, but the trends are getting worse, and the worst declines are among younger American adults. In the last 20 years, younger American adults have gone from being the people in our society who read the most to the people who read the least. In the last 20 years, the number of adult readers in the United States has stayed the same. The number of non-readers has increased by 40 million.

Internet & Reading “I have enormous enthusiasm for much of what the Internet does, but all of the research that we have been able to use (most of it coming from Internet companies themselves) indicates that people do not read on the Internet. They take information, but in a largely non-linear fashion. They pull something from here and there. The Internet is an extraordinary, powerful tool of communication, but it does operate, cognitively, rather differently from reading – in the same way that television does from reading.”

NCLB & Reading “…What I will say is that “No Child Left Behind” has been surprisingly effective. Children involved in the program have significantly increased their reading and math scores. African-American children most of all, Hispanic children next and white children, too. The problem is that that is the most basic measurement of educational success. We need to go back to the initial legislation of “No Child Left Behind,” which identified the arts as a core component of American education at all levels. Take the success that’s been built into the reading and the math and work towards a complete education.”

What readers do… If you are a reader, you are overwhelmingly more likely to engage in positive social and civic behavior versus 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 – in some measures three times – as likely to do volunteer work or charity work.

What readers do cont’d… If you are a reader, you’re more likely to exercise, more likely to go to sports games, more likely to play amateur sports – bowling or softball – and much more likely to be aware of and involved in your own community. There is a deep and arguably statistical connection between readers and civic involvement. The kind of communities that we want to live in are, by definition, communities of readers.

What literature does… What literature does – nowhere more powerfully than in fiction (the novel and the short story) – is put us in the inner lives of other people in the daily-ness of their psychological, social, economic and imaginative existence. This makes us feel, more intensely probably than anything else, the reality of other points of view, of other lives. That is obviously in jeopardy if we now have a society in which the majority of adults are no longer reading.

Does poverty play a role? And the argument that this is a function of income – because the more education you have, the more likely you are to read; the more education you have, the higher your income is – isn’t true. The poorest group of American readers does volunteer work and charity work at twice the level of the richest non- readers.

Readers vs. Non-readers The interesting thing about people who read versus people who don’t read, is that they do exactly the same things – except that one group reads and the other one doesn’t. Readers play video games, watch television; they do these things, but they do them in a balanced way, versus people who are, increasingly, simply passive consumers of electronic entertainment.

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