What We Talk About When We Talk About Love of Reading Part 1

Tim Shanahan

Teacher question: I’m an avid reader of your blog. I know that your focus is on teaching reading, but what about fostering a love of reading? Recently, the news has reported that no one is reading anymore. Shouldn’t we do something about that?

Shanahan responds:

You’re right about the recent news. The headlines have been incessant:

A Third of Americans Say They’re Reading Fewer Books (CBS News)

Gen Z is Reading Less. What That Means in the Age of Ready Answers. (Forbes)

Reading for Pleasure is Sharply Down Among Schoolkids, Report Shows. (NBC News)

Fewer People Are Reading for Fun, Study Finds (New York Times) 

Reading for Pleasure in Free Fall: New Study Finds 40% Drop Over Two Decades (University of Florida News)

Is the decline in reading books making us dumber? (The Economist)

Reading for pleasure builds empathy in children, but fewer kids are picking up books just for the fun of it (The Conversation)

If you dig down into those accounts you’ll find statistics that are every bit as depressing as these lead-ins. For instance:

• A Gallup survey reports that 35% of kids in K-12 don’t like reading and 43% never read for fun (Jones, 2022).
• A National Endowment for the Arts study reports that fewer than half of adults have read a book in the past year (Iyengar, 2024).
• The National Assessment of Educational Progress finds that only 14% of 8^th graders read for enjoyment daily (NAEP, no date).
• The U.S. Department of Labor says that adults are spending about 25% less time each day reading than they did a decade ago (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024).
• The American Academy of the Arts and Sciences (2023) reports that 84% of adults read for 5 minutes or less on a typical day, while only 19% devote such a small amount of time to watching television, playing games, and using computers for personal purposes.
• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reveals that the U.S. is near the bottom of 63 countries in how much our 15-year-olds read for pleasure, including many countries whose students cannot read as well as American youths (OECD, 2011).

Independent reports, varied research methodologies, different but large and representative populations… and with consistent conclusions: We don’t read much for enjoyment, and we’re reading less than we used to.

The reason? According to a lot of the articles, the problem is our smartphones. The story that they tell is something like: In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced phones that could connect to the internet. Since then, reading in America has waned. Screens displaced books, and immediate internet gratification sapped our attention to the point where few can stay on task long enough to read more than 140 characters.

At least those conclusions are often drawn. That’s referred to as displacement theory. We don’t read because screens have displaced reading.

Before conceding the point or exploring solutions (if there are any to be had), let’s contextualize that data and make sure we understand it.

First, I think it’s worth noting that America’s abandonment of reading began long before the smartphone and social media. In the most rigorous and incisive analysis of all this, it’s noted that our reading decline started in 1940s – not the 2000s (Bone, Bu, Sonke, & Francourt, 2025; Canoy, van Ours, & van der Ploeg, 2006; James & Moore, 1940; National Endowment for the Arts, 2007; Robinson, 1980). That’s right, reading had been receding long before these screens were available.

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