The National Endowment for the Arts chairman, Dana Gioia, hopes the organization can soon take the lead in creating private-public partnerships that will promote reading. In the nearly two months since the NEA released its "Reading at Risk" report, Gioia said he has met with a variety of individuals, companies and groups (including the AAP) about what can be done to address the drastic decline in reading of literature documented by the "Reading at Risk" study.
Gioia said the NEA will create a "national initiative" next year that it will fund at some level, but he noted that while he is hopeful that the association's budget will be raised in the fiscal year beginning October 1 by $10 million, to about $132 million, the NEA "can't change things by ourselves. We can inform people about the issue and coordinate model programs that address the problem."
The NEA's July press conference about the report has generated over 300 articles, and the Endowment is in the process of setting up presentations across the country with writers' groups and libraries to continue the debate. Gioia said there has been an "enormous public response [to the study], but no less than the topic deserves. It is an important issue, and these are scary statistics." He said that some critics who have questioned the methodology used—the survey did not focus on people who read nonfiction—miss the larger point about the erosion of the reading habit. Gioia noted that the survey did find that only 56% of American adults read any book in 2002, while 47% read literature. "If we added quality nonfiction, I don't think the results would have changed," Gioia said, "the survey was designed to be as inclusive as possible. Anyone who had read a paragraph of fiction" was included in the reading column.
With the NEA's first objective of creating a discussion about the decline in reading well underway, the association is beginning to develop "effective model programs," Gioia said. He is a proponent of "civic programming" and cited the City Reads programs as an example of one form of reading outreach that the NEA could help expand. Gioia also wants to find ways to increase the media's coverage of reading, pointing out that "people only do things that they are aware of." Gioia said he would like to "reconnect literature with the notion that reading brings enchantment, pleasure and wisdom."
Gioia aims to start a few reading projects next year with some seed money from the NEA. He would like to model the reading initiative after an NEA Shakespeare program, which the association has spent about $7 million on over the past two years, and the private sector has contributed about $20 million. While Congress is likely to appropriate funds to support effective programs, that could take two years, he said. "We can't wait. We need to act now."
