I remember the feeling of becoming a person who read chapter books in early elementary school; it felt like a badge of honor, like I had unlocked some secret universe with more complicated, exciting stories. During silent reading time, the books in my hands looked serious, important, and enriching. Every book I read was a new world I could add to the inventory of places in my head. But this feeling is becoming a childhood experience fewer and fewer kids will ever have.
It’s becoming a well-known fact that children’s reading scores are declining across the nation. Most of the concern I’ve seen surrounding this has been about an expected consequential decline in intellectual curiosity. We think of reading as this vaguely intellectual act, valued by our STEM-centered culture as an investment into building critical and logical thinking, all while giving us something scholarly to talk about and impress people with. When this is the goal, the pinnacle of reading is nonfiction: the how and what, never the who.
I think that the who is exactly what’s most critically at stake with this reduction in reading. When I reflect on why I’m so attached to my personal relationship with literature, my primary takeaway isn’t that it’s because it gave me an increased aptitude for academics, although it certainly did help. I think it made me someone who is excited to learn about new facets of the human experience. If I hadn’t been such an avid reader in my childhood, I don’t know if I would feel the same way. I don’t think I was born empathetic; I think I was conditioned to be empathetic by the exposure fiction gave me.
And it isn’t just me. The relationship between fiction and empathetic ability has been widely documented and studied. For example, reading about positive intercultural interactions improved intergroup attitudes among Italian high school students attending schools with tiny immigrant populations, meaning they displayed a reduction in stereotyping and increased desire to interact with such groups. Reading the “Harry Potter” series has been proven to positively influence the attitudes of elementary, high school, and university students toward stigmatized communities, such as refugees and homosexuals. Of course, these studies are both based on positive interactions and therefore assume a certain perspective from the author, but countless other studies across a variety of disciplines – such as psychology and neuroscience – come to similar conclusions: reading fiction directly correlates with an increase in empathy.
The specific properties of fiction that differentiate these outcomes from nonfiction seem unclear on first glance, but may have to do with the reader’s active role. The difference between fiction and non-fiction narrative genres comes from the degree to which the reader immerses themselves in the story upon initial approach. For example, ‘the autobiographical pact,’ conceptualized and discussed in a series of essays by Philippe Lejeune, is the unspoken contract between the author and the reader of an autobiography where the author is presenting an accurate and truthful account of their life. He parallels this with the fictional, or “romanesque,” pact, where the reader accepts fictionality for the purpose of communicating a meaning from author to reader. In fiction, this ‘meaning’ is usually character-centric, as it’s not concerned with real-world plausibility but with some aspect of human experience. This fictional pact is what allows readers to deeply identify with the characters without preoccupation with assessing the narrative’s truth.
This deep identification with characters is also what separates fiction and literature from other forms of narrative media, such as theatre and television. Through the action of reading, readers are committing themselves to spending a lot of time and mental energy with these characters. Not only are readers exposed to the inner thoughts and feelings of a character, which can be hard to communicate in detail in visual media, but the long-form and contemplative nature of fiction allows for nuanced, ambiguous, and unresolved themes. Repeated exposure to complicated and unsatisfying themes requires the reader to become more comfortable with the coexistence of logical and emotional thinking, even while striving to find harmony between them.
That’s why literacy scores worry me. I don’t think people are becoming less informed, less epistemically curious, or less intelligent as a whole. What I do see is a decline in empathic curiosity: a desire to understand and connect with others across geographic and cultural differences. While it is true that nonfiction, such as biography and news media, provides invaluable insight into other parts of the world, reading fiction nurtures an empathetic lens through which to think about local, national, and global issues.
Without empathic curiosity, extreme polarization becomes inevitable, as has been clearly demonstrated throughout the past decade of identity politics, foreign policy, and immigration issues. When empathetic or emotional arguments are considered the antithesis of, rather than complementary to, rational, evidence-based arguments, we lose the ability to reach a shared understanding.
A hyper-individualistic, close-minded population will never be a prosperous and united community. With this mindset so deeply entrenched in modern politics, it seems impossible to come to a consensus on anything. But perhaps the solution is as simple as the elementary school ritual: nationwide silent reading time.
Featured Image Source: Mahika Sama Reddy