Summary
A National Literacy Trust (NLT) survey reveals that children’s enjoyment of reading is at its lowest in 19 years, with only 34.6% of eight- to 18-year-olds saying they enjoy reading in their free time.
This marks an 8.8 percentage point drop from last year, part of a declining trend since 2016.
Reading frequency has also hit a historic low, and a significant gender gap persists, with only 28.2% of boys versus 40.5% of girls enjoying reading.
The NLT calls for a government taskforce to address these declines, warning that “the futures of a generation are being put at risk.”
Not just in the UK. In the U.S. too. We have never been able to get our daughter interested in reading. We read to her every night when she was a kid, but once she learned to read, she wasn’t interested in reading or us reading to her. She can read. She has no reading disabilities. When she’s assigned a book in school, she has no issue reading it and doing tests on it and such.
But reading just doesn’t interest her in the slightest. It breaks her librarian mother’s heart, but nothing seems to convince her.
Some people need a reason to read, some knowledge or skill to be gained, and aren’t into just reading for reading’s sake. I’ll never read Harry Potter or most other fiction, but I’ll definitely binge some electronics engineering and programming reference books. Doesn’t mean I hate reading. It just has to be useful to me. I have to walk away with the feeling of having gained info that I didn’t have before.
That’s probably why I don’t play many videogames either.