The National Endowment for the Arts (the other NEA, not the terrorist organization) released a big, important report yesterday, To Read or Not To Read, synthesizing over 40 studies to comprise "everything the federal government knows about reading." In an obligatory press-release second-graf block quote, NEA chair Dana Gioia tried to scare the bejesus out of all us slackers:

"The new NEA study is the first to bring together reliable, nationally representative data," said Gioia. "This study shows the startling declines, in how much and how well Americans read, that are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement."

The results, taken at face value, are indeed troubling. Literary reading as a voluntary activity has declined among young adults. Reading scores have "deteriorated" in the teen years, and while American employers are demanding better skills, today's high school graduates rank below Poland and Korea in proficiency. We're even behind Canada.

If you're not shocked and awed by that, the NEA has scary examples of cultural fallout on display. Still think it's cool not to read, kids? Well, which one of these bullet points would you want to fall under?

• 84% of Proficient readers voted in the 2000 presidential election, compared with 53% of Below-Basic readers.

• Only 3% of adult prisoners read at a Proficient level.

And what study of reading would be complete without a Vibram-soled kick or two at the still-twitching dead horse of television?

From To Read or Not To Read (Research Report #47), courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts. Of course, Roger Waters covered this in his 1992 album, Amused to Death.

And yes, they have a full-page tinted call out in which they quote Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. "We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word. [...] They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is no parity here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens."

The late Dr. Postman was a brilliant and incisive theorist, and I agree completely with him about television. But it is worth remembering that he wrote those words in 1985, two years before the first Hypertext conference and six years before the Web was invented to share scientific research papers. Now admittedly, not every minute spent on the Web these days is with sites like Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg, but text is still a dominant component.

And yet, despite the fact that the report was being released the same week Amazon announced Kindle, likely to be the first commercially viable e-book reader, nobody at the NEA seems to take online reading very seriously:

• Literary reading declined significantly in a period of rising Internet use. From 1997–2003, home Internet use soared 53 percentage points among 18- to 24- year-olds. By another estimate, the percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds with a home broadband connection climbed 25 points from 2005 to 2007.

A decline in literary reading for pleasure. Is this any surprise, given the grinding, meathook insistence on testing that "accountability" has driven into our school systems? I'm shocked. Shocked, I say. Let's make those kids read Fahrenheit 451. That will fix things. And what are Those Kids Today doing with all that bandwidth?

• 20% of their reading time is shared by TV-watching, video/computer game-playing, instant messaging, e-mailing or Web surfing.

There is no doubt that reading has been reconfigured by digital technology. As I have been arguing for years, the electronic text marks a departure as radical as the change from orality to literacy. But truly investigating the new is nowhere near as easy as lamenting the decline of the status quo. This NEA report is very old wine in a new bottle: Socrates made the same complaint about the new world of writing compared to the spoken rhetoric of which he was a master.

"[Writing] is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." — Plato, Phaedrus

Assisting our children with the transition to digital literacy is not best accomplished by hand-wringing over the Way Things Used To Be. The NEA's proposed solution, called "The Big Read," aims to "restore reading to the center of American culture," by encouraging communities to read novels like "The Death of Ivan Illich" and "The Great Gatsby." Can you think of anything less likely to foster reading for pleasure than some government-sponsored program to make us appreciate dead 20th-century literature?

There is reading happening all over the Web, on blogs, wikis, e-mail, SMS, Twitter. More importantly, there is writing happening too, and reading-writing connections with a genuine audience that far outstrip anything available in the pure print age. That's where we should be applying our pedagogical shoulder to the wheel.

With mobile devices you have the whole world of open-source literature in your hand, wherever you are; I can sit in a coffee shop with my iPhone and call up Shakespeare, Plato, and Mark Twain. But I can also read Sheila Lennon, Eileen Spillane, and Kiersten Marek. Imagine a future where all citizens were part of a community dialogue, reading and writing into shared spaces that crossed over from schools to work to the public sphere. That would be a very Big Read indeed.

But it's always easier to focus on the familiar world of the past than try to comprehend something truly new and scary, and I guess we can't expect more from the government than the corporate executives lampooned by Monty Python in their final film...

[Large corporate boardroom filled with suited executives]
Exec #1: Item six on the agenda: "The Meaning of Life" Now uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this.
Exec #2: Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this "soul" does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
Exec #3: What was that about hats again?
Exec #2: Oh, Uh... people aren't wearing enough.
— Monty Python's Meaning of Life, via IMDB