The real problem isn’t that young people don’t read. It’s that they read at random

I hardly ever read the statistics on reading habits amongst teenagers anymore – not because they aren’t interesting, but because they’ve been saying more or less the same things for years. Sometimes things seem to be improving (the decline caused by Covid is being reversed); sometimes they seem to be getting worse (in other major European countries, people read more than they do here): the Minister for Education says he is satisfied with the small progress made, whilst the editor dusts off last year’s or 2015’s column: more should be done to promote reading; young people do not even know the most basic words (this morning, in a first-year exam, the ‘mystery word’ was, er, ‘soleva’…), and so on.

In an effort to avoid going along with the crowd, I can offer a few remarks based on my own experience (a quarter of a century of setting Italian Literature exams for Arts and Languages students fresh out of secondary school). 

To read, one needs to see others reading. Those who have well-read parents and well-stocked home libraries are fortunate. For everyone else, there is the public library—or rather, there would be, because many of my pupils have never set foot in a library. This is because there was no school library, or no local library, or it was too far away, or nobody ever informed them of its existence. So, generally speaking, rather than lectures, what’s needed is a good school library (not difficult to put together these days, given that people die and leave behind shelves full of books that nobody wants); and, even before that, you need a teacher who takes you there and shows you how it’s done, and who has enough charisma to make you want to be like him or her (‘Having an idiot as a role model makes you think twice about studying the subject that reduced him to that state’: E. Albinati and F. Timi, Tuttalpiù muoio, Rome, Fandango Libri 2006, p. 105). For this reason, when drafting the new National Guidelines for literature syllabuses, we recommended that teachers ensure pupils become familiar with libraries: after all, at that age, it is perhaps the only educational trip that really serves a purpose.

Having ruled out those pupils who simply do not read at all, what is particularly striking about the others (who make up the majority) is their lack of direction, in the sense that they read at random. Reading at random is fine at the age of eleven, if you have no guidance (I used to read at random, and look at me now); it is not fine at twenty, after thirteen years of compulsory schooling. At best, they have read a few ‘school’ books such as Il fu Mattia Pascal and La coscienza di Zeno (they usually do not know what ‘fu’ means), but they have taken little from them beyond a few equally schoolish labels (the ‘inept’, the ‘double’ and other rubbish). Increasingly, they have been reading young adult fiction, a genre about which I know almost nothing but which strikes me as generally dreadful; increasingly, they read exclusively fantasy, meaning that for them there is no such thing as ‘fantasy literature’ but rather, in separate categories, ‘fantasy’ and ‘literature’, and they are interested in the former. Some have, by chance, read a bit of Kafka or a few nineteenth-century classics. But—and this is the surprising and bitter thing—school does not seem to have provided them with a guide as to what is worth reading and what, after the age of twenty, is too immature to read. University arrives either too late or at an inopportune moment, since it is not guaranteed that students will have the time to read truly significant books (this morning, for example, a master’s student in Anglo-American studies admitted having never read a single line of Bellow, Hemingway, Faulkner, or Roth, and showed no embarrassment). After the library card, this map is the thing that, in my view, every secondary school and every literature teacher should give to their pupils. And then hope for the best, of course.