En studie som publicerades i slutet av fjolåret visar att elever mellan ungefär 10-16 år läser oerhört lite i skolan och att dessa små mängder blir allt mindre. Sånt här får aldrig accepteras.

Några citat:

Thirdly, during this very same period reading habits among Swedish children and teenagers have changed steadily as new digital screen media have taken over their attention. Only between 2012 and 2018 the proportion of 15-year-olds who say they read books or newspapers daily has dropped from 21 to 9 percent (Statens medieråd, 2019), whereas the figure for 12-year-olds have stayed almost the same (from 26% to 24%). Even though 94% of 12-year-olds and 98% of 15-year-olds in Sweden have their own smartphone with internet access, the reading of continuous text is not what they are used for; and playing screen games does not make up for lack of reading (Lieury et al., 2016).

Vidare:

Ten years later the group of zero-readers in middle school made up 33% of the student population, which means that the proportion of zero-readers has increased with more than half its size over this decade. It can also be noticed that the proportion of readers of 1–4 pages dropped by almost half from 57% in 2007 to 33% in 2017. However, the trend is the opposite when it comes to reading more than four pages; the proportion of students reading five or more whole pages of continuous nonfiction text increased from 21% in 2007 to 33% in 2017. These results thus indicate that the gap has widened between students who do not read any or very little continuous nonfiction and those who read more extensively. This expanding gap is corroborated when we compare the average number of pages read by the students in the two cohorts. In 2007 the average number of pages of nonfiction text read was 3.93 (SD = 3.64), and in 2017 it had increased to 6.10 (SD = 7.38), despite the larger proportion of zero-readers. As also indicated by the more than doubled standard deviation figure, the practices of nonfiction reading in middle school have become much more unequal over this ten-year period. The overall difference in distribution among the reading groups between the two cohorts was statistically significant, F(3.097, 801.010) = 5.529; p < .001.

Vidare, om läsning av skönlitteratur, som också minskat i omfattning över tid:

As can be seen in Figure 2, the proportion of zero-readers of nonfiction in lower secondary school increased by more than half over this ten-year period, from 33% to 50%. Similar to the younger students, the proportion of readers who read 1–4 pages decreased significantly, from 43% to 24%, while the groups reading 5–9 pages and 10–19 pages stayed about the same. The group of students reading more than 19 pages remained small, even though proportionally it increased from 1% to 3%.

Det är uppenbart att läsning behöver uppvärderas betydligt mer, såväl forskningslitteratur och annan facklitteratur (till exempel populärvetenskapliga artiklar och böcker) som skönlitteratur. Det är varje individ, lärare, politiker och förälders ansvar att göra något åt detta och skapa ett samhälle som präglas av dels jämlikhet, dels en vilja till självförbättring. Det är som att nyliberalismens fokus på självförverkligande måste smälta samman med litterär förkovring och det egalitära och demokratiska samhällets fokus på relativt lika möjligheter, och gärna, även utfall. Just nu är det bara en liten andel av övre medelklassbarn som läser mycket, i och utanför skolan. Läsning måste givetvis ske i bäggedera sammanhangen.