(Washington Post)
“There is no Frigate like a Book, to take us Lands away,” wrote poet Emily Dickinson. But fewer and fewer kids are choosing to jump aboard.
The statistics are startling. The number of 13-year-olds who read for fun most days has halved in a decade. It is now just 14 percent, according to the 2022-2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Restoring joy in reading will require commitment from parents — and a renewed trust in teachers, in librarians and in kids themselves.
Children’s reading skills shrank during the pandemic. But even before 2020, the pleasure they took in books was waning. In its 2023 Kids & Family Reading Report, children’s publishing giant Scholastic noted that only 28 percent of children ages 6 to 17 said they read five or more days a week, a fall of nine percentage points since 2010. Indeed, frequent reading has been on the decline since the NAEP began measuring it in 1984.
Read the full story in the Washington Post here.
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