Editors note: For a related article, please see “The decline of reading,” by Roger Kimball (Armavirumque, 7.14.2004).

“Reading at Risk is not a report that the National Endowment for the Arts is happy to issue,” writes Dana Gioia, the Endowment’s chairman, in his introduction to that lament for the decline of literary reading in America. Maybe so, but they’re prepared to put up with the report’s sad news, if the alternative is wading into controversy. It’s easy to shake the head and cluck the tongue about the fatal allure, particularly for the young, of television and the Internet, but what seems to me to be the primary cause of the public’s indifference to literature—namely the way it is now being taught in schools and universities—cannot be mentioned, for fear of a ...

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