The school system gets blamed for a lot of intellectual passivity that, on closer inspection, set in somewhere else: between the last book an adult read for pleasure and the first year they described themselves as too busy to read.
That gap is now measurable. A study published in August 2025 in the journal iScience, led by Jessica Bone of University College London and drawing on more than 236,000 responses to the federal American Time Use Survey, found that the share of Americans reading for pleasure on a given day fell by roughly forty percent between 2003 and 2023, from about 27 percent to 16 percent.
That finding comes from one paper analyzing one federal dataset, and it should be read as a strong signal rather than a settled verdict. Schools are an easy target in the same story, because school is where reading is assigned, tested, and graded. But the decline the paper documents runs across the entire adult population, not just the school-age one. It tracks a shift that has very little to do with curriculum.
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The timeline points at homes, not classrooms.
What the federal data actually shows
The Bone paper is not an isolated data point. The National Endowment for the Arts reported in an October 2024 post, drawing on its own Survey of Public Participation in the Arts alongside separate federal time-use and school data, that 48.5 percent of American adults had read at least one book for pleasure in the past year as of 2022. That was down from 52.7 percent five years earlier and 54.6 percent a decade before that.
Children’s numbers move in the same direction. According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ 2023 Long-Term Trend Assessment, the share of thirteen-year-olds who said they read for fun almost every day fell from 27 percent in 2012 to 17 percent in 2020 to 14 percent in 2023.
Put those figures next to each other and the shape is consistent. Adults, teenagers, and school-age readers have all drifted away from reading as a discretionary, appetite-driven activity over roughly the same twenty-year window, in the same country, measured by three separate federal instruments.
One dataset, not a verdict on any single reader
This is one analysis of one government dataset, covering one country. It should be read that way. The Bone paper cannot explain why any specific person stopped reading, and its authors stop short of assigning a single cause.
What they do note, and what outlets covering the paper, including Smithsonian, have repeated, is a correlation between rising time spent on digital media and falling time spent reading. A correlation inside a national time diary is not a mechanism. It is worth resisting the temptation to compress the finding into a tidier story about phones ruining a generation’s attention, since the paper itself does not make that claim.
Longer work hours, shift schedules, and the sheer amount of unstructured time available in a given evening are all plausible contributors that the time-diary format cannot isolate from one another.
Why the school explanation is incomplete
The common assumption is that if children read less, the fix belongs to schools: better curriculum, more class time, a livelier reading list. That assumption is not wrong so much as aimed at the wrong end of the timeline.
The NEA’s own figures show the adult decline predates, and in some respects outpaces, most of the curriculum changes schools have made over the same period. A parent who has not opened a book for pleasure in years is not modeling a habit that a school reading log can manufacture on its own. Schools can require reading. They are on much thinner ground trying to install an appetite for it that is not present at home.
This is our reading of the pattern, not something the cited studies test directly. None of the sources above measured whether a child’s reading habits mirror a parent’s inside the same household, and that gap is worth naming rather than papering over.
What the numbers do not prove
The time-use data cannot distinguish between someone who used to read novels and now reads long articles on a phone, and someone who has stopped engaging with any sustained text at all. Nor can it separate structural barriers, like time poverty and shift work, from a straightforward loss of appetite.
The Bone paper notes a related gap worth sitting with. Only about 2 percent of participants read with a child on the diary day, even though roughly one in five had a child under nine with them at the time.
None of this is an argument against schools, libraries, or reading programs, all of which do real work with the time and reach they have.
What the data supports is more modest: that the timeline of this particular decline starts earlier, and in a different room, than the usual conversation about schools tends to assume.