Mark Bauerlein
Director of Research for the National Endowment for the Arts
How did you come to work for the National Endowments for the Arts (NEA)?
I came to the Endowment at Chairman Dana Gioia's invitation. He had read a book of mine a few years earlier–Literary Criticism: An Autopsy–and called me about it soon after. We struck up a distant acquaintance–he was in Northern California, I was in Atlanta–and when he assembled his team at the Endowment once he was appointed Chairman, he thought I was a good fit for the Director of the Office of Research and Analysis. I've been at it for many months now, managing different research projects in process and profiting from an extraordinary staff. We've produced studies on how the U.S. funds the arts, trends in artist employment, the arts in the GDP, and audience participation in different art forms. Our goal in the Office is to provide arts organizations, education leaders, foundations, and politicians with reliable empirical data on the arts in American life. The arts and literature have lost their social standing and moral meaning in American life, we all know that, but we don't see clearly the consequences–cultural, economic, political–of the decline. Our research reports aim to provide a beginning, gathering solid statistical evidence that others may build upon.
Why did the NEA launch the Reading at Risk survey?
Every ten years, the Arts Endowment conducts the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). The SPPA asks adult Americans if and how often they engage in a variety of arts activities–listen to opera, attend the theatre, visit a museum, among other things, including reading fiction, poetry, or drama. The Endowment designs the questionnaire, then contracts with the Census Bureau to obtain a sample and implement it. With a 70 percent response rate, more than 17,000 respondents, household visits followed up by phone interviews, and a standard error of less than one-half percentage point, the SPPA is the largest, most accurate arts participation survey there is.
The last SPPA was executed in 2002. When the findings came in and we compared them to those in 1982 and 1992, we found that most activities had dipped a point or two. But the literary reading numbers were anomalous. From 1982 to 2002, literary reading fell 10 percentage points, a loss of 20 million potential readers. A severe drop like that in such a longstanding and fundamental human behavior cried out for elaboration. So, Chairman Gioia asked the research office to issue the reading segment of the SPPA as a separate, expanded report. The findings of Reading at Risk signify a deep shift in U.S. culture and society, and as a public agency the Endowment is duty-bound to disseminate them as widely as possible.
What did the Reading at Risk survey reveal about young people's and adults' reading habits?
The Endowment broke down the findings into several age groups. The youngest cohort–18-24-year-olds–underwent the steepest decline of all, 17 percentage points (59 percent to 42 percent). In 1982, they ranked as one of the most active reading groups. Today, only the 75-and-Older cohort reads less literature than young adults. Young adults also showed the steepest decline in overall book reading–books on any subject–falling from 59 percent to 51 percent in the last decade. That young people at a time of crucial intellectual and emotional development choose not to read in their leisure time a single poem, play, short story, or novel, or any book at all, for that matter, is a strange and troubling development. Many young people love to read, and curling up with a book at home or in the library is a perpetual joy. But for a growing portion of them, reading is a pointless activity.
A new study from Kaiser Foundation explains one reason for the decline of reading among young adults. It measured the media usage by children and teens and found that they spend about 8 hours per day consuming some kind of media–television, Internet, videogames, etc. No generation in human history has been so connected, with so many media streams available 24/7 in the home, in the car, in the woods, anywhere. They have an iPod chock full of tunes and a Blackberry in their pocket, a personal email account and a library of DVDs. And the multi-stream technology lets them consume that 8 hours of media in only 6 hours of time, often using two or three connections at once–surfing the Internet with the television running. Simply on the basis of overcrowding, literary and book reading are bound to slide.
But there is another reason why poems, stories, plays, and books in general struggle to compete with digital dimensions. In a word, they take too much mental work relative to the other activities. Reading literature, even popular genres such as romance novels, asks readers to visualize settings, keep track of plot, flesh out characters, and register nuances of language. Movies and television shows save them from much of that labor. Videogames pretty much eliminate it. Digital entertainments–at least the ones to which young people gravitate–involve either passive absorption or sensory overload. Even Instant Messaging and chat rooms, which I have heard educators praise as ingenious forms of literacy, bring reading and writing down to casual, slipshod levels. The superficiality of screen habits was demonstrated a few years ago in a study by Sun Microsystems. Researchers aimed to determine how people take in information on Web sites, mainly in order to improve Web page design. The title of the report was "How Users Read on the Web," and the first sentence was "They don't." Only 16 percent of the subjects read linearly, word-by-word. The rest scanned the page, picking up images and keywords, jumping from phrase to phrase. This is one kind of literacy, to be sure, useful for quick information retrieval, but it doesn't lend itself to the analysis and reflection upon texts. For individuals who grow up in this "hot medium" environment, the imaginative efforts of reading aren't a pleasure. They're a burden.
Are there any distinct differences between people who read on a regular basis and those who do not?
Obviously, readers do better in school than nonreaders, and in an Information Economy they perform better in the workplace. In behavioral terms, though, Reading at Risk showed some interesting correlations between literary reading and various civic and social activities. We found that literary readers were 2-4 times more likely than nonreaders to do volunteer and charity work, visit a museum, or attend a sporting event. The correlation even held across incomes. That is, people who make less than $20,000 per year and read literature are much more likely to do charity work than are people who make more than $75,000 per year and do not read literature. This is just a correlation, of course, and we don't know its causes, but the fact that literary reading lines up with a set of activities we wish to foster suggests a value in literary reading that transcends the simple experience itself.
Did you find any of the Reading at Risk findings surprising?
We were, in fact, surprised at one aspect of the findings: the degree of decline. Everybody knows that literary culture has deteriorated in recent decades. Teachers and employers increasingly complain about the writing skills of high school and college graduates. Publishers have seen sales of adult fiction inch downward, while poetry occupies a marginal place in contemporary life. Newspapers have trimmed their book review sections, and late night talk shows on the networks rarely host an author–the opposite was the case in the Johnny Carson days. But to discover that 28 percent of young adults have dropped out of the reader category was a shock. With education rates and income rising during the 80s and 90s, one would expect reading to rise accordingly, or at least to hold its own. But not so. Reading rates dropped for every demographic of young adults, no matter what the gender, race, income, education level, and region. Moreover, the rate of decline almost tripled from one decade to the next–5 percent in 1982-1992 and 14 percent in 1992-2002. At first, we thought that young people merely shifted their reading material from literature to nonfiction or various digital texts. But book reading in general also fell precipitously, and when the Bureau of Labor Statistics asked 15-24-year-olds how many minutes of leisure time they devote to reading activities of any kind, they came up with a meager 8 minutes per day.
Do your experiences as a college professor teaching literature contradict or confirm the Reading at Risk findings concerning young adults?
Reading at Risk fully confirms what I've seen in my own classrooms and what other English professors across the country say. One would have to search far and wide to find a teacher who thinks that student reading and writing skills have improved in recent years. Everybody I know groans about students coming into college without being able to comprehend a poem, or even read it aloud competently. Several of them have said that it is getting harder to assign novels more than 200 pages long. Students simply don't have the disposition to complete it. Their lives are so filled with interruptions–cell phones, e-mails, sports activities, and so on–that taking three hours to sit in a chair and read through a novel is a foreign experience. The discourse that surrounds them is so flat and conventional that a dense text with nuances of meaning only irritates them.
One would add to the declining verbal skills a declining interest. Most students don't see the point of reading literature. It doesn't fit their career goals, it doesn't make money, it doesn't help them win friends, it doesn't enhance their daily contacts. A Brookings Institution study of U.S. and foreign high school students found that the former rates sports and employment much higher than academic achievement, whereas the opposite was the case for the latter group. "How does Pope's Dunciad help me reach my goals?" they ask, and teachers haven't supplied a ready affirmative answer.
We bandy the term literature about quite freely. What is "literature?" Does it have the same meaning and effect on people's lives that it has had in previous centuries? Should it?
In our survey of reading, we defined literature as novels, short stories, poems, and plays. These are the most commonly understood categories of creative writing, and in a large population survey such as Reading at Risk, one must ask clear and simple questions to ensure the reliability of responses. The term literature has a complex history, however, and its extension to other forms of writing, essays and political tracts, for example, was customary from the Renaissance up through the 19th century. We retain some of that usage in statements such as "The scientific literature on the subject . . ." To obtain a more complete picture of literary reading, researchers should include categories of literary nonfiction such as memoir and biography. We aim to do so in future surveys.
Does literature have the same "meaning and effect on people's lives that it has had in pervious centuries?" Indeed, no. In recent years, literature has diminished in its cultural meaning and purpose. Up until, I would say, the middle of the 20th century, literature was taken as one of the essential elements of an adult citizen's formation. Reading the ancient works of tragedy, epic, biography, and ethics was part of growing up, of acquiring wisdom, taste, and moral understanding. Not only schoolteachers, writers, and thinkers, but also politicians, journalists, military leaders, and scientists were expected to have passed through the refining crucible of Plutarch, Virgil, Dante and the rest. Without a reservoir of literary experience to draw from, individuals in power were thought to be more or less deficient in facing the complications of public life.
But with the rise of radio, television, videogames, Sony Walkman, etc.–call it the conquest of culture by mass entertainment–literature has lost its formative role. It has become but one diversion among many others, and because literature often requires more cognitive labor from readers than does screen media from viewers, it is losing out to them. How much better it would be if young people's judgment and sensibility were shaped less by music videos and The Matrix than by Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
Why should we, as a democratic nation, be concerned about the reading abilities and habits of our citizens, both children and adults?
Because reading is the prerequisite of full citizenship, The Founding Fathers, as well as the 4th century Athenians, knew that democracy thrives only if the citizenry is informed, active, and jealous of its prerogatives. If people don't read newspapers and history books, they don't understand the issues being decided in the halls of power. If they skip literature, they miss out on the values and narratives that shape the national identity. Without a critical audience among the populace, government is inclined to decay. Take, for instance, the recent decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. There were heated debates in Congress and in the press about the best response to terrorism, but one doubts how far they penetrated the younger citizenry. Around the same time, National Geographic conducted its geographic literacy survey, and 18-24-year-old Americans performed dismally. Only 15 percent of them could locate Afghanistan, Israel, or Iraq on a map. The consequences of their ignorance are immediate. Not knowing the borders of the Middle East nations, they don't have the knowledge to make a sound judgment about the war efforts one way or another. The same could be said for discussions of social security, tax rates, and environmental regulations.
What happens now? What is the NEA doing with the findings from the Reading at Risk survey? Will there be any follow-up events, projects, conferences, workshops, campaigns, further studies?
The Endowment is working on several initiatives to address literary reading, but I can't outline them until we issue official descriptions of the programs. I can say, however, that the Endowment isn't equipped to address the reading declines in a substantive fashion. We are a small agency with a limited budget, so our attempts to improve access to great art and literature have to be tactical. We look for occasions and programs that will serve a representative function, offering models for other agencies and foundations to replicate. We also search for ways to catalyze the national discussion of art and culture, Reading at Risk being a prime example. When we published the report and released it in a gathering at the New York Public Library in July 2004, a flood of commentaries and news stories followed soon after. At this point, some 700 commentaries and stories have appeared, and the basic findings of the report are now part of the regular terrain of the literary and publishing worlds. Discussion was strong and widespread, and most of the responses took the findings at face value. The state of literary reading and book reading in general became a topic in the leading magazines and newspapers, and we've been fielding weekly solicitations and suggestions ever since.
Where can our readers find information concerning the Reading at Risk study?
The report may be downloaded at: http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf
Also, concerned parties may contact the Endowment research office to request printed copies of the report. Our communications phone number is 202-682-5533.
Obviously, there is connection between children developing literacy skills and good reading habits, and later, as adults, having a positive involvement with literature. What do you think needs to be done to get more kids reading great books so that they will become adults who read great books?
This is a tough question. I'm not a child development expert, and my teaching has only extended to the high school senior level. It is said that if students have not formed strong reading habits by 3rd or 4th grade, they probably never will. I also know that the amount and quality of reading material in the home is one of the best predictors of a young person's academic achievement. How to change the reading culture of individual homes, not to mention the elementary school classroom, though, is a task for others to answer.
Do you think that electronic publishing will change what we traditionally refer to as literature?
Do you remember the late-90s, when Internet pundits were predicting the end of the book–and the "paperless office?" I recall an article by a distinguished professor of literature claiming that literary scholarship and teaching will be fundamentally altered within a few years, and that a new age–the Electronic Age–is upon us. Well, that hasn't happened yet, and I am suspicious of revolutionary enthusiasms that seem to be motivated more by wish fulfillment than fact. But one can't predict what will happen when the rising generation matures into the age cohort that buys most of the books. How will the first generation raised on Google and Grand Theft Auto regard literature in 20 years' time? Will they make e-books finally go mainstream? Will older literary forms that require sustained attention (epics, complex dramas) drop out of sight, excepting those few book lovers who will end up meeting in cells to share their inspiration? Unclear.
In his book The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts states that reading a book is a very different, and more enriching experience, than reading text in an electronic format. He believes that reading literature in a book format promotes individual critical and creative thinking in a way no other media can. Do you agree?
We have not yet built up a body of research to document the cognitive and intellectual effects of a life filled with electronic media. Kaiser Foundation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for Education Statistics are beginning to compile data on basic usage rates and trends, but longitudinal studies are still in the future. As a matter of opinion, however, I agree with Birkerts that screens do not inculcate analytic and reflective habits, at least not to the extent that books do. Compare the kind of prose young people exchange on e-mail–the solecisms, the punctuation, the clichés–with the kind of prose they write on paper. The latter isn't much better, but it is better. Walk into a library and compare the reading habits of young people sitting at computer stations with the habits of those browsing in the stacks. The former is quick, superficial, and diversionary. The latter is slow and deliberative. I'm not sure whether that amounts to a qualitative difference, but some kind of difference exists. Teachers might explore it with a few experiments. Ask one group of students to investigate a subject using the Internet, and ask another group to investigate it using books. Which one would produce a stronger report? I know many educators fulminate about the wonders of Internet research, but I wonder how many of them would lay a bet on the former group.
Do you think that television and newer electronic media cultivate critical and creative thinking? Can electronic media be used to connect children and adults to great books?
Much of the material on television and the Internet provides serious, informative material for study and enlightenment. But those programs and sites tend not to attract many young viewers. Let's be honest. Most of them prefer MTV, ESPN, E!, Halo 2, and their e-mail buddies. A survey of Internet usage among young adults found that only 11 percent of them log on for news and information. When they do use the Internet for school, they want the requested material quick and easy. For those people who grew up developing strong reading habits and analytic skills, the Internet is a wonderful tool for finding information, but they know that it isn't a means of building knowledge. Knowledge requires a deeper, wider, slower engagement with a subject. Young people who grow up regarding the Internet as equivalent to a library or a bookstore don't know the difference. And so I am skeptical of whether the Internet can be used as a bridge to lead youth to more serious reading.
Are critical and creative thinking skills necessary for survival in the 21st century?
Here is what a recent story in Wired Magazine had to say about 21st century work skills. The Information Age that arrived twenty years ago saved the American economy from slipping as manufacturing jobs migrated beyond American borders. But soon the Information economy jobs will decline as well. In the coming years, Asian outsourcing shall take over many of the professional tasks that go with "linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs," including accounting, legal advice, and hi-tech work. Added to that, automation will come to dominate the financial world, as will computer programming. "To flourish in this age," the article concludes, "we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are ëhigh concept' and ëhigh touch.'" Successful workers in the "Conceptual Age" will possess the ability "to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing." I'm not so sure of the "touchy" language of this prediction, but there may be some truth to the general drift toward more creative talents needed in a society ever more automated and compartmentalized.
As a person who has shared his love of literature with young adults, what do you think needs to be done nationally to promote reading?
I'm not sure about solutions, and I think that a commitment to any plan in advance must hold off until the outcomes are in. What we need to do is run a few model programs on a limited basis and see what happens.
But to test some ideas we must first recognize the problems. Reading begins in the home, and children need to be raised in a culture of reading. The health and educational benefits have been proven time and again, but too many pressures push books out of children's lives. The proliferation of digital technologies in bedrooms, the spread of single parentage–which leads the parent to use the screen as a babysitter–longer commuting times, a youth culture in which books are rarely seen or heard–all of them conspire to diminish the minutes devoted to reading.
The classroom, too, needs to change. I am not an expert here, but I've been told that, for a variety of reasons, fewer and fewer minutes in the school day are devoted to reading and books. Added to that, the textbooks that students are assigned are often dreadfully dull and watery, and peer pressure steers kids away from books, especially boys–"Nerd!" Most teachers understand these resistances and strive mightily to overcome them, but the education leadership isn't so committed to verbal development. A recent article by the President of the National Council of Teachers of English chided people for worrying so much about the verbal deficiencies of students. "They have sophisticated viewer literacies," he claimed, highlighting their video savvy and Internet conventions. He even asserted that young people "are inventing new forms of literature"–hypertext, "animated print," etc.–from which we old-fashioned adults can profit. But the empirical evidence doesn't back such sanguine pronouncements. Every survey of college teachers and managers in corporate and manufacturing firms has respondents deploring the poor reading and writing skills of recent graduates. If young people have developed newer, more visual literacies, those forms seem to lack the rudiments of grammar and expression, and they haven't raised the students' comprehension of complex texts.
Finally, the youth culture young people consume makes no room for books. In videogames, hip hop lyrics, music video, television shows, and movies, books hardly exist. After thousands of days immersed in the cacophony of youth culture, many a 17-year-old regards the idea of taking an hour of leisure time to read a book as downright weird. If a few television shows set book reading in a "cool" light, or made a plot turn upon the contents of a book, we might see a spike in reading. I've heard that in the old television show from the 70s, Happy Days, when Fonzie got a library card, requests for library cards shot upward across the country.
Is there a connection between reading literature and writing well?
I think there is, but I don't know of any solid evidence to support it–or refute it. One thing that troubles me is the increasing use of informational text in the classroom. Because of the emphasis on workforce development in the schools, many English curriculum designers are bringing more business communication into the lesson plan, operating on the assumption that students should study what they will work on in later years. But this is to overlook the developmental aspect of education. Who knows but that in order for students in 10th Grade to become proficient in business communication seven years later, they will develop their verbal skills most effectively by reading texts that bring all the equipment of diction, metaphor, irony, rhythm, and subordination to bear. Apart from the cultural inheritance that comes with reading literature, such texts may promote a verbal facility that students may apply to informational texts, legal documents, journalistic texts, etc. I doubt whether studying informational texts yields the same flexibility.
Why do you think many men and boys in our nation do not read literature? Do you think there are societal and cultural circumstances that contribute to men's not reading literature that are particularly American in nature?
Long ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained about a "damned mob of scribbling women," novelists whose works sold so much better than did his own. His remark demonstrates the extent that women writers and women readers prevailed in the literary world, and puts today's gender gap in reading in historical perspective. The gender gap is getting worse, however. Reading at Risk tabulated reading among men and women and found that among young readers the gender gap doubled in a mere ten years. Increasingly, boys don't read, a trend that is reflected in the growing gender gap in general academic achievement. By the time they graduate from high school, girls have exceeded boys in almost every academic category, and colleges and universities find it difficult to keep their admissions class at less than 60 percent female. The discrepancy looks even worse when we see that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, males aged 15-24 enjoy a full hour more leisure time per day than do females the same age.
Is it video games, an industry that has soared in the last five years, and which boys play more than twice as often as girls do? Is literary reading coded among teens as feminine? Are the novels and short stories placed on the high school syllabus more oriented toward female interests than male interests?
Why should a love of language be nurtured–even celebrated?
Here we take our answer from the wisdom and works of the past. Enlightenment philosophers believed that language was one of the means by which we realize our humanity. Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed, "The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language." The brilliant anti-communist George Orwell diagnosed the strategies of totalitarianism as, in part, a dishonest use of words. One could go on citing thinkers who interpret a culture's language as the index of its moral state. No civilization achieves greatness if its language doesn't rise with its other works and values.
Do you have a favorite poet? A favorite author?
Many favorites, in both categories. I can always go back to Milton and read Paradise Lost in short snatches before I go to bed–is there a more revealing dramatization of political chicanery and manipulative speech than the debate in Hell between the fallen angels? And, I keep going back to King Lear, The Divine Comedy, and Walden. The same goes for Wordsworth, especially The Prelude, and the lyrics of Emily Dickinson. I also admit to a sneaking enjoyment of odd detective stories from Poe onward.
Were you a voracious reader as a young person? What were your favorite books?
I wasn't a great student–I graduated high school with barely a B average and I took five years to finish college–but I always read like crazy. I remember a baseball book from my early teens entitled Ball Four by Jim Bouton, which came awhile after the Hardy Boys mysteries, a funny collection of stories called Double Trouble for Rupert, and an anthology of Greek and Norse mythology containing stories of Pygmalion, Siegfried, and Midas. In late adolescence I read Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, Camus' The Stranger, and Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and all three sunk in deep.
Do you remember the first day you visited a library?
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, the kind of neighborhood that was all residential. No nearby library, museum, concert space, or lecture hall. Without a car, you were stuck. Once I got to college I studied in the library all the time, but I don't think I really appreciated the public library as a special place until a few years ago. I started frequenting the Atlanta downtown library, using the archives to research a book on the Atlanta riots of 1906. While there, I began browsing the stacks and observing the patrons. Many people came in, I noticed, to check out movies, use the Internet terminals, and get out of the cold or the heat. But others used it to obtain tax forms, find a quiet corner to read, and check out the latest best sellers without having to shell out the money for cloth editions. The experience made me realize the public meaning of the library system, which is quite different from the nature of the university library. Leading American patriots from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Carnegie to Laura Bush understand that the library is one of the central institutions of democracy. Every local citizen has borrowing rights to all the information and knowledge and literature that he needs to participate in the body politic.
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