Young people don’t read anymore.

Young people don’t read anymore.

Of course young people read. They read a lot. As Amelia Hall Sorrell and Peggy F. Hopper explain, teenagers constantly read what is available to them through the different forms of technology that continue to evolve.45 But when people think that young people today read less, it’s not about reading online content or text messages, it’s about reading books.§

In 2010, Reader’s Digest in the United Kingdom conducted a survey on the reading habits of some 2,000 adults and 700 children.46 The results revealed that one in five children hardly ever reads a book, one in three never reads a book, and one in 20 has never read a book. These figures support a perception that many people seem to have; namely, that young people and children don’t read anymore, and certainly not for pleasure. But is a survey in a popular monthly magazine a reliable source for such a sweeping claim?

Perhaps more scientifically gathered data could tell us more. A 2007 report, To Read or Not to Read, describes a significant decline in reading by youngsters in the United States in the previous 20 years.47 The study compared data from 1982 and 2002, and found that less than one-third of the 13-year-olds were daily readers. The percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure doubled over the same 20-year period. Yet the amount they read for school or homework stayed the same. However, these data are already quite old and stem from the beginnings of the digital era.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) looks not only at learning results but also at the learning behavior of the respondents. In 2011, PISA published a report analyzing the pleasure reading of young people.48 This study found that, on average, two out of three students read every day for pleasure. It also noted that the percentage of students who reported that they read for enjoyment daily dropped in the majority of OECD countries between 2000 and 2009, but in some countries that proportion increased. In the United States, the average remained the same. Boys and girls from families with a higher socioeconomic status read more than young people from families with a lower socioeconomic status; moreover, the gap between the two has increased between 2000 and 2009.

In 2012, Stage of Life polled teenagers about their reading habits and found that 77.7 percent of them read at least one extra book per month for personal pleasure beyond what is required for school. Nearly a quarter (24.5 percent) read five or more books per month outside of school. These figures are much higher than the PISA figures, but this probably is due to the way the teenagers were selected.49

In the United States, the Pew Research Center examined the reading habits of the American audience in 2012, youth included.50 Book readers under the age of 30 consumed an average of 13 books in the previous 12 months and a median of six books; in other words, half of book readers in that age cohort had read fewer than six, and half had read more than six.

Still, even in these digital times, libraries remain important to many American youngsters.** Pew found that in the 12 months before the survey in 2013, 53 percent of Americans aged 16 and older had visited a library or bookmobile, 25 percent had visited a library website, and 13 percent had used a handheld device such as a smartphone or tablet computer to access a library website.

To sum all this up, young people are still doing a lot of reading, and these statistics make clear that many of them are reading for pleasure. However, we need to be careful about making too many sweeping assertions, since the reading figures in many countries are falling. Even so, we know that reading continues to be important: both reading by young people themselves and parents reading to their children.
 

Though there is good empirical proof out there refuting these myths, they persist. Why? Anthropologists tell us that myths function in culture and society to express, enhance, and codify belief, while language historians51 attribute their persistence to increased, almost unlimited, information availability. Our society serves up so much instant and pervasive information, which we fail to examine discerningly, that we end up circulating and strengthening myths through repetition and enhancement.

This vicious cycle is compounded by what journalist Farhad Manjoo discusses in True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.52 Self-styled experts (educational charlatans) publish anything they want and come at us from all directions, in every medium, without any “check” on their expertise. The “real danger of living in the age of Photoshop isn’t the proliferation of fake photos,” Manjoo writes. “Rather, it’s that true photos will be ignored as phonies.”

In education, how do we combat this? In our view, there is only one answer: the educational sciences must be driven by theories and theory development, and not by simple observations and conclusions. Strong empirical data must come from experiments set up according to good research methodologies (i.e., randomized control trials, real control conditions, samples large and representative enough to justify implementation decisions, etc.) rather than legends and hype. Only after these evidence-informed methods are slowly but surely tested in real-life settings can we think about large-scale implementation.

Finally, teachers, administrators, and politicians must learn to become knowledgeable and aware consumers. To that end, we suggest keeping in mind the following: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.