Free The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein

includes other data comparisons that echo the implication that leisure reading is a significant factor in academic progress. The report relates reading for school and reading for fun to test scores, and a consistent pattern appears.
    • 17-year-olds who read for fun almost every day scored 305
    • 17-year-olds who read for fun once or twice a week scored 288
    • 17-year-olds who read more than 20 pages per day for class scored 297
    • 17-year-olds who read 16-20 pages per day for class scored 293
     
     
    The more kids read out of school and in school, the higher their scores. Observe, too, that the test score differences between heavy and light out-of-class readers exceed the differences between heavy and light in-class readers. The gap between the highest and next-highest out-of-class readers is 17 points, while the gap between the highest and next-highest in-class readers is only four points. The results also set the gap between the highest and lowest out-of-class readers at 37 points, and between the highest and lowest in-class readers at 29 points. Because the measurements of reading for school and reading for fun don’t use precisely the same scale (pages read vs. frequency of reading), we can’t draw hard-and-fast conclusions about their respective effects on reading scores. But these discrepancies indicate that leisure reading does have substantial influence on school performance, much more than one would assume after listening to public and professional discourse about reading scores, which tend to focus on the classroom and the curriculum, not on the leisure lives of teens.
     
     
    Yet another high school project providing reading data is the annual High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE), housed at Indiana University. With a sample size of 80,000 high school students in all four grades, HSSSE boasts one of the largest national databases gauging school experiences and academic habits. It asks students about sports, clubs, homework, coursework, and leisure activities including reading. In 2005 one question asked, “About how much reading do you do in a typical 7-day week?” Fully 77 percent said that they spend three hours or less per week on “personal reading. ” In 2006, the question changed slightly, but showed equally abysmal results. About one in six students logged zero hours of “Reading for self” per week, while 40 percent scored less than an hour. Only 5 percent surpassed 10 hours. When it came to “Reading/ studying for class,” only 2 percent exceeded 10 hours, and 55 percent came in at one hour or less. More than half the high school student body, then, spend few moments reading because they have to or because they want to.
     
     
    Another segment of the survey, one querying attitudes, helps explain why. Once again, time and money play no part in the withdrawal. Fully 45 percent of the students just don’t think leisure reading is important (“a little” or “not at all”). Unconvinced of what adult readers feel deep in their hearts and know from long experience, nearly half of the student body disregards books by choice and disposition, and they don’t expect to suffer for it. In their minds, a-literacy and anti-intellectualism pose no career obstacles, and they have no shame attached. Uninterested in reading and unworried about the consequences, kids reject books as they do their vegetables, and the exhortations of their teachers fall flat. A quick glance at a newspaper once a day would augment their courses in government, a subscription to Popular Science magazine might enliven their chemistry homework, and an afternoon browsing in the public library might expose them to books they find more compelling than those discussed in class. But those complements don’t happen.
     
     
    We might assume that the weaker and alienated high school kids pull down the average, and that seniors and juniors headed for college display better attitudes and higher reading rates. But three