Whenever I visit a bookstore, the first thing that catches my eye are rather not the books but the people. And what I’ve noticed is that the majority of people who visit the bookstores I go to aren’t really high school students but adults or young children. Though this may be coincidental, it also got me thinking: are high schoolers actually reading enough anymore?
This also applies to me; whenever I go out to Barnes and Noble, I tend to go there to study rather than to pick up a book to read. Yet even when I do select a book to read, opening the book tends to feel like a chore and I have to find the motivation to read each page. I feel like when I was younger, I had the superpower of finishing a book in one sitting. Unfortunately, that doesn’t apply to me anymore.
So why is that? Is it the lack of time we have as high school students, or is it also the fact that we trade our motivation for school then slump over our phones to rest our heads?
Recent national surveys, such as PubMed Central (PMC) and the Arts Endowments, show that American teens are reading less for pleasure than any generation before us. Though it may be easy to blame social media, busy schedules, or even school itself, this drop in reading isn’t just a trend. It’s a warning sign about how we learn, think and connect with the world around us.
Some ways I think students could approach this matter are by setting reading goals. This is the smallest step one high schooler can make. For instance, it could be just reading a research paper or reading some of an AP class text in one month. By challenging themselves bit by bit with goals, anyone can find improvement in reading comprehension and the motivation to select more text to read.
Students can even improve their reading habits with their phones. By turning on audiobooks and reading the book in their hands, they can improve things immensely. There are even electronic books that people can read off of their screens, and trying these things may help one student realize what they’ve been needing to take in order to improve their reading.
At the end of the day, reading doesn’t have to be an impossible task that we keep putting off. If we start setting small steps like setting goals, exploring genres and using the technology already in our hands, we can rebuild a lost habit of reading. We’ll never read like we did when we were little, visiting the children’s section constantly to pick out books we can read in our everyday lives. But we can still choose to make reading part of our lives again. And that choice alone could change more than we think it would.
