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In our era of instantaneous gratification, students are turning away from reading, yet reading offers pleasures beyond the momentary.
Several large-scale studies confirm that students nationwide are eschewing reading for other pursuits. Less than one third of 13-year-olds read daily; the percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing for pleasure has ballooned. In a span of 20 years, American students have transformed from being among the most to the least avid readers of literature in the world.
When the Progress of International Reading Literacy Study polled 4th graders around the world, they found that American 4th graders placed near the top in terms of proficiency and near the bottom in terms of enjoyment. American 4th graders didn't detest reading; they just didn't derive much pleasure from it (Mullis et al. 2003).
The average time an American teenager spends reading has shrunk every year since 1976 and now sits at an all-time low of six minutes and 36 seconds per day (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2007). In 1976, 86% of high school seniors reported reading a book or magazine at least once per week. By 2004, the percentage of seniors who claimed to read at least once per week had dropped 19 points to 67% (Porterfield and Winkler 2007).
The last time that Americans spent more time reading than playing video games and surfing the Internet was 1996 (Baines 2008). Since 1996, time spent reading books has declined slightly while time spent playing video games and surfing the Internet has risen 400% (Veronis Suhler Stevenson 2006). Although web sites host vast repositories of free books online, research indicates that teens use the Internet for social networking, shopping, music downloading, and image searches. Reading novels online isn't even on the radar screen (Lenhart, Madden, and Hitlin 2005).
As Immanuel...