Did you know that in the year of 2024, 40% of adults in America read about one book? That is close to less than 30% of the U.S’s population. Statistically, about 40% more people a year get into a car accident than the amount of people that read a book per year.
Books are something that people are surrounded by. Not even just books, reading in general is everywhere. At school, work, posters, and signs. But, why is it that no one wants to read any of the things around them?
For kids, when they’re in school it’s kind of hard to escape books. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, almost 88% of public elementary schools have a library media center. Children, about once or twice a week are being read to one way or another in school.
Elementary schools make it fun, they get the students engaged. As students start evolving though, and get older reading slowly starts becoming a chore.
There isn’t any time anyway to start reading for fun, school consumes the average teenager’s life. Not even just school, life in general. Reading as a choice just doesn’t fit into the schedule anymore.
Sophomore Maia D’Annunzio, shared that she reads very little.
“Two books”, said D’Annunzio.
D’Annunzio admitted that those books were required for school.
Sophomores Madelyn Creveling and Shay Mourad had similar answers, saying how about 75-80% of the books they read per year are for school reasons only.
So many students and adults put everything else before even considering reading, but why is it that they don’t put in the effort to read? Something that people don’t think about is that even though reading might not seem important, reading is one of the most important things that keeps our minds healthy and working.
NHS librarian, Jennifer Bradley, thinks that teenagers and adults don’t read as much as they did when they were younger because of outside distractions.
“I think that there are a lot of distractions. There’s a lot of other things that they do, and that they need time for. So reading kind of gets put towards the bottom,” Bradley said.
Books are clinically proven to help strengthen the mind, and it shows. Studies show that as the years go by, test scores in the states such as MCAS, STAR, AIMS, and other standardized state testings in the U.S decrease. Reading in free time, or even just reading repeatedly in school can strengthen basic skills in the classroom.
When people stop reading, they will eventually lose or worsen these skills that should be used on a daily basis. As students and others lose these skills, reading becomes harder. No one wants to do something that’s difficult for them.
It’s not impossible though to never get back into reading, finding the right book for you could be one of the easiest things a person can do. When someone finds their book, it automatically changes the game, it turns reading into something more than just… well, reading.
Reading is a skill that so many people should be grateful to have, and when people recognize that they will notice that reading shouldn’t feel like a chore, it should feel more like a privilege.
