Data, comparisons and shared responsibilities tell of a more complex phenomenon than the simple accusation against the school. We need to rethink reading education, from cradle to adulthood, passing through school
“Young people don’t read anymore” – said the adults who don’t read anymore. And who perhaps have never read much. Part of the problem is already concentrated in this dynamic, because reading is not a spontaneous attitude nor a natural talent but a habit that is built over time and requires daily practice, a willingness to be slow, the ability to stay inside a page even when it doesn’t immediately return something, and all these conditions today seem to be in difficulty not only among children but in the entire adult world which should guard and transmit them. The widespread perception that young people no longer read is confirmed by the data, even if the Italian picture appears more complex and less linear than we are led to believe and requires us to distinguish between quantity of reading, quality of understanding and the cultural context in which reading takes place. According to Istat surveys, approximately 40% of the Italian population over the age of six reads at least one book a year, while approximately 60% do not read at all, a figure that places Italy firmly at the rear of Europe; at the same time, the share of readers is highest among young people, with peaks above 57% between 11 and 14 years old, i.e. when reading is compulsory in middle school, and this data suggests that the problem is not simply generational but concerns the transformation of cultural practices throughout life. On the other hand, every smartphone there is an open book on public transport, in the dentist’s waiting room, on the coffee table next to the bunch of keys and sunglasses?
The crux of understanding: reading is not enough
A critical issue emerges when reading skills are observed and not just the declared habit, because Invalsi tests at school age indicate that around half of Italian students struggle to understand texts of medium complexity, with 44% of eighth graders and around 50% of two-year high school students below the appropriate level, also reporting a decline in language skills from year to year. The problem is therefore not just reading little, but reading (little) without fully understanding, and this produces a deeper effect than the simple – and perhaps rhetorical – distance from books, because it affects the very possibility of building knowledge, of orienting oneself among information, of recognizing what matters. To understand, in a word. The causes of this situation cannot be traced back to a single factor, the school, indeed calling the school into question as the main responsible simplifies and reduces to controversy a phenomenon which instead concerns the entire cultural environment of which the school is only one of the factors.
The role of the family and school
Reading is born as a habit even before a skill, and this habit takes shape in the first years of life, when the presence of books in the home, shared reading and the way in which adults use language build a terrain that the school can subsequently cultivate, but not create from scratch. If we don’t read at home, if books are not familiar objects, if even before the age of six children have access to screens without limitations with the possibility of handling them independently and at any possible moment, then reading (and thus drawing, another practice that develops manual skills, as well as imaginative thinking and creativity) becomes foreign and unnatural. The school, in this framework, occupies a decisive but not exclusive space, and the way in which it deals with reading reveals a structural difficulty, because there is no shared reference on what it really means to educate reading in terms of continuity and experience.
Reading transformed into homework
It doesn’t make much sense, for example, to establish a number of books to read, also because the texts have very different lengths, complexities and densities, but it would make sense to guarantee a constant presence of reading in school life, a sort of minimum continuity whereby a student always has an open book, always a story in progress, always an active comparison with a text. However, this implies a review of practices, because when reading is transformed into a task, into a test, into a performance to be measured, it risks losing precisely that dimension of continuity that makes it effective, and the correction itself becomes a problematic issue, because evaluating reading without reducing it to a scholastic exercise requires tools that the school still struggles to stabilize.
The drop between middle and high school
It is difficult, very difficult, to get people to read – which in itself is an assigned task, like doing math or English exercises – and to develop the gratuitousness of the reading experience: it would be so in optimal conditions, let alone in these times of few readers among adults and of a culture of efficiency that goes the opposite way compared to the time spent reading for the sake of reading. And so the few available indicators suggest that reading is unable to consolidate itself as a stable habit, because precisely in the transition between middle and high school there is a significant decline in practice, as if the experience accumulated in previous years was not sufficient to transform into lasting behavior.
Time, efficiency and the attention crisis
This passage is particularly revealing, because it shows that reading is experienced more as an activity linked to a phase of life – the obligations of middle school! – that as a permanent form of relationship with the world, and that school, while intercepting younger readers, is unable to retain them over time. Added to this is a broader change which concerns the way in which time is organized and evaluated, because in recent years education has taken on increasingly anxiety-provoking traits, oriented towards results, performance, reduction of time, with a growing influence of models that look at the world of work and its logic of efficiency. Reading is outside this scheme, requires apparent dispersion, accepts the possibility of not understanding immediately, implies a continuous restart, and for this reason comes into tension with an idea of training that measures everything in terms of output and speed. Educating in reading means introducing a practice that does not produce immediate results but builds profound cognitive tools over time, and this makes it difficult to sustain in a context that favors immediacy. Digital platforms, television series and social media compete with reading for attention, offering more accessible and less cognitively demanding narratives, and this contributes to redefining the way in which stories are encountered and traversed. The problem does not consist in the existence of these languages, but in the fact that reading requires a type of concentration and continuity that must be trained, and without constant practice it tends to weaken.
How you really build a reading habit
The possible strategies cannot be limited to school and must start much earlier, because early exposure to books produces lasting effects and builds familiarity that makes reading less tiring in later years. In the family context, the presence of books and shared reading represent simple and decisive conditions; in the school context, the construction of spaces and times for reading without an immediate finalization, alongside moments of discussion and interpretation, can strengthen skills; on a social level, reading must be recognized as an essential cognitive tool and not as an accessory activity. The underlying question concerns the very meaning of reading, because reading is a real way of accessing complexity that allows one to develop inferences, interpretation and critical thinking. “Young people don’t read anymore” because adults struggle to read and do not demonstrate reading as a daily practice made up of time wasted, of constructed attention, of continuous returns to what is not immediately clear. The decisive question does not only concern young people, but who educates them and who should show – and know! – that reading is a form of relationship with the world that requires consistency and restores depth.
