America’s youth is becoming illiterate. Earlier this year, the National Center for Education Statistics released another year’s edition of the Nation’s Report Card. This report evaluates the performance of students in fourth, eighth and 12th grade in subject areas including math, science, civics, reading and writing. Reading results this year were poor. Samantha Laine Perfas, staff writer for the Harvard Gazette, introduced a podcast episode of Harvard Thinking with these chilling words: “This month, average reading scores for high school seniors … fell to their lowest level since 1992.”
When this report reached headlines, I attributed this decline to lingering effects of the covid-19 pandemic. This attribution was a poor guess. The report indicates this is a trend accelerated by the pandemic rather than caused by it. Data on fourth grade reading scores indicate results have been declining as early as 2015 and 2016 for students all over the percentile distribution. Students in eighth grade showed a peak around 2013 and then a steady aggregate decline, with some bucking reflected in the data.
These statistics may point to any number of underlying issues. Perhaps students are falling out of love with literature, perhaps phones are frying students’ minds or perhaps frightening economic outlooks are pushing students to pursue financially sound STEM degrees. Perhaps it is a mixture of all of those things. Whatever symptoms may be the cause, the diagnosis — a breakup with the page — is frightening. As Mr. Keating, Robin Williams’ character in the film, “Dead Poets Society,” puts it, “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion … But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
If Mr. Keating is correct, and I believe he is, we must do something to reinvigorate reading. This is a call to you, St. Joe’s student body: Whether you have younger siblings, children, nephews or nieces, let us be present to help them see that literature, art — these things of the soul — are still worth it. They can be the medicine to our minds.
