Edited: Athenian Abroad kindly pointed out that I referred back to the previous “the sky is falling” report by the NEA, which was issued in 2002. The latest report can be accessed here.
The National Endowment for the Arts is supposed to promote the arts, of course, so one is unsurprised to find them arguing that people need to, you know, spend more time doing artsy things. Especially those damn philistine kids with their PSPs and their Intertubes.
What’s unfortunate is that their advocacy piece is being taken as objective proof that “Americans don’t read.”
It actually says no such thing. What the NEA is looking at, primarily, is the rate of reading a particular class of writing: novels, short stories, plays and poems. Not nonfiction books. Not magazines. Not blogs. (Manga or comic books? Who knows if the NEA knows these exists, or considers them to be “reading”?) It also doesn’t look at the quality of any of these categories of books–we have no idea of people are putting aside the latest Left Behind novel in favor of watching the History Channel, or not getting around to a new Rita Mae Brown anthropomorphic cat mystery because they’re busy reading Glenn Greenwald.
Their excuse for dividing the reading world up into literary and printed books vs. everything else is: “Because a large population survey such as Reading at Risk can’t distinguish too many subgenres or levels of quality and still keep the responses reliable and distinct.”
Right. Add “nonfiction” or “online materials” in there and you might as well be doing primitive sympathetic-magic rituals instead of statistical analysis.
Is there a literacy crisis in America? If there were, you couldn’t tell from this report, which might as well be subtitled Why The NEA Needs A Bigger Budget. Nothing wrong with helping the NEA, but couldn’t they achieve the same result without the Chicken Little act?
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Minor source nit: the table at Feministe isn’t from Reading At Risk (2002) but from a later report, To Read or Not To Read (2007):
http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html
The table gives figures for reading “books in general,” not limited to “literary reading” as in the 2002 report. Of course, “books in general” does exclude periodicals and online material.
For extra entertainment, check out the sidebar on newspapers vs. the internet on pp. 52-53.
It does say something that I erroneously thought this report referred to the LAST time we had a Solemn Warning issued about how kids these days, they just don’t read like we did.
Check out slacktivist (http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/) for a deconstruction/evisceration of the left behind books, done by someone who was raised evangelical. The posts are collected on the right sidebar, I think. (He’s reading it and reporting on it, page by page, so we don’t have to.)
Yes, there’s an eerie sameness about the reports. I wonder if one can subscribe, like the “Solemn Warning of Dire Emergency of the Month Club”. Or perhaps “Kids These Days Weekly”.