Symposium: To Read or Not To Read

Editors’ Note: Only a few years ago the National Endowment for the Arts released a study showing a serious decline in the reading of literature in America. The percentage of the population that had read even a page of poetry, drama, or fiction for pleasure in a single year had dropped below 50 percent for the first time in modern history. Now the NEA has released a new study about reading in general. To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence, based on data from “large, national studies conducted on a regular basis by U.S. federal agencies, supplemented by academic, foundation, and business surveys,” as NEA chairman Dana Gioia explains in the preface, tells a story that is “simple, consistent, and alarming.”¹Americans are reading less; comprehension is eroding; and the consequences of these