Ill literarcy.(Culture And Society)

Ill Literacy

National Endowment for the Arts, "Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," Research Division Report #46, June 2004 (arts.gov)

Conservatives looking for further evidence of cultural decline will find more grist for the mill in the National Endowment for the Arts' 2004 study, "Reading At Risk," which gauges the reading habits of Americans from 1982 to 2002. With a sample size of more than 17,000 people, the study was "one of the most comprehensive polls of art and literature consumption ever conducted." The central question of the survey asked if a person, over the last 12 months, read any part of any novel, short story, poem, or play--excluding material required for work or school. Reading the first three pages of a Harlequin romance would be enough to count the person as a literary reader. Despite these lax requirements, the results are not encouraging.

The main finding of the 20-year survey is that the proportion of Americans reading literature has declined from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 46.7 percent in 2002. This is not ...