Nearly half of adults in Europe and the U.S. haven’t read a book in the past year or two - so what’s keeping us from reading? Johnny Lumley analyses the challenges to reading for pleasure.
Across the globe, the rate at which people read for pleasure has been increasingly declining, as Eurostat reports in 2022, 47.2% of EU citizens did not read any books in the past two years. This phenomenon is also taking place in the US: in 2023, as reported by Statista, 46% of US citizens have not read a book in any format in the past year. The most common reasons as to why people no longer seem to have time for reading are attributed to a lack of time, a struggle to focus, and the distraction of social media.
This is all the more relatable when viewed through the lens of student life, where there is a seemingly endless stream of assigned readings that students are expected not only to complete, but to understand and critically engage with. For many students, this constant workload can feel overwhelming, making it difficult to give each text the level of attention it demands.
This struggle has been noticeable even within prestigious American universities, as Professor of Humanities Nicholas Dames for Columbia University reports a growing concern of students' inability to keep up with assigned readings, this being the case despite no major changes to the curriculum that would justify the level of difficulty faced now compared to previous years. So if this struggle to read is seen at all levels of educational attainment, what is then the root cause?
Returning to the question of why people seem to have less time for reading, what seems to be the most obvious answer is the growing prevalence of social media within our daily lives. The in-between moments where you may have been able to get a few pages in as you wait for something have now been replaced with time spent on the phone. While this may be true to some degree, I don't believe that before the advent of smart mobile phones and social media, everyone was an avid bookworm; however, in a straight race of the amount of engagement that a screen and a book will provide, the phone will always win out.
Still, it’s pretty safe to say we are all collectively aware of the misery that being chronically online is causing us - psychologically, in how it reshapes the way we engage with the world and with one another, and even physically, through things like blue light exposure. So why are, then, even college students, despite the demands of higher education, regardless of the institution, still struggling to read? Is it emblematic of a problem of how reading is taught in the first place?
This brings us to an interesting debate between the different methods used to teach children how to read. The two primary schools of thought are the phonics and whole-word approaches. Now, I’m sure that the Irish people reading this article are more than familiar with the old Jolly Phonics books and the colourful accompanying illustrations, which served as our collective basic introduction to reading. These illustrations weren’t just to keep the young audience engaged, as phonics encourages students to break down words into individual sounds, and then incorporate these sounds into the whole word. This style is found to be an especially effective strategy to establish the foundational elements of reading. The second school of thought is the whole word approach, which instead sees reading as a natural process that encourages students to learn the context and meaning of words within a sentence, students determining unknown words using context clues, and to learn how to read in a naturalistic, context-driven environment.
If the very systems that we use to teach reading are flawed and don’t encourage some children to read for leisure outside of the school context, it is no wonder that once out of the context of school, we are instead opting for the more stimulating and convenient option of the phone.
While both methods undoubtedly have their merits, there has been considerable debate on which system is superior - this debate being known as the reading wars. The concern is that the whole language approach, which was once the dominant school of thought, has fundamental weaknesses that may have detrimental consequences on the educational development of children. The whole word approach, in its use of context clues and other known words to determine an unknown word, does not have a strong enough phonics-based foundation for reading, which can lead to children being unable to decipher unknown words, making reading a frustrating and time-consuming process. Reading as a whole becomes a chore, turning it into something that the child would be less likely to willingly engage with outside the classroom.
In relation to the previously mentioned statistic, this relatively unknown debate may shed some light on the emerging epidemic that reading is facing. If the very systems that we use to teach reading are flawed and don’t encourage some children to read for leisure outside of the school context, it is no wonder that once out of the context of school, we are instead opting for the more stimulating and convenient option of the phone.
While this may all seem like doom and gloom, as though we are watching the extinction of literature in real time, a positive trend can also be perceived within the aforementioned Eurostat statistic: for the last few years, one of the largest proportions of those reading for pleasure is the younger generation. This could be for any number of reasons, such as a change in education systems over time that blends both phonics and the whole word approach. But, the more optimistic conclusion is that the younger generation, having grown up and intimately knowing the effects of technology and social media, is attempting to break away from the pervasive cycles of doom scrolling, for what they feel is a more beneficial use of time.