As a child, my favorite author, Alan Gratz, allowed me to walk in seven different pairs of shoes. I fled persecution from Nazi Germany with Josef, Cuban unrest with Isabel and the Syrian civil war with Mahmoud in “Refugee.” I was a spy embedded in the Hitler Youth with Michael, stealing blueprints of a prototype Nazi jet plane in “Projekt 1065.” I navigated the Battle of Okinawa with Hideki, a boy drafted into the Japanese army, and Ray, an American Marine landing on the island, in “Grenade.” I even raced against time with Kamran, a Persian-American, while his life unraveled amidst accusations that his brother was a terrorist in “Code of Honor.”
These stories, and the many others bound in fiction novels, expanded my thinking and helped me take on perspectives other than my own — many of which I might never have had the opportunity to know otherwise.
Because I walked in those seven different pairs of shoes, it is always jarring to hear people proudly proclaim the number of years it has been since they last read for pleasure. That dissonance feels especially intense now, as our country fails to prioritize reading and literacy initiatives. If we keep reading less as a country, literacy will keep declining — and empathy will too.
The literacy decline has been recorded for years. Between 2003 and 2023, daily reading for pleasure in the U.S. steadily decreased by 3% every year, amounting to an over 40% decline in total. This trend warrants concern, if not because leisurely reading is declining, then because literacy is as well.
In 2025, U.S. high schoolers scored at historically low levels on reading, according to a report from the National Assessment of Education Progress. This is true for 12th graders, with 32% testing below basic reading proficiency. Further, U.S. adults do not seem to be faring better, with 21% classified as functionally illiterate and the average American reading at seventh-to-eighth grade levels.
These findings come as the current administration guts the Department of Education, firing staff and withholding billions of dollars in congressionally approved education funding. All of this is occurring as students continue to feel the impacts of the pandemic, along with other cultural challenges like book bans, and as public libraries face financial threats.
Literacy is not a skill we can afford to lose, as it refers to so much more than just the ability to read. The National Literacy Trust in the UK defines it as “the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively and make sense of the world.” UNESCO adds that it’s also about understanding, interpreting and creating. No wonder then that experts say it also helps us do more complex thinking.
It might be more surprising to some that literacy and reading, particularly fiction, may very well boost empathy — another skill that is currently in crisis in the U.S. Studies have found that reading fiction not only helps people figure out what others are thinking and feeling, but also that if people are emotionally transported by a story, their altruism goes up in their real life, at least for a while.
Experts agree that America is in an empathy decline. Professors of psychology at Duke University and Northeastern University have said as much, as has a professor of medicine looking at the issue from a health perspective.
You can look at politics and social media feeds to see the empathy gap in action.
In 2022, Pew Research Center polling revealed that Democrats and Republicans are doing a bad job of putting themselves in each other’s shoes. Seventy-two percent of Republicans reported believing Democrats are more immoral and dishonest, while roughly 63% of Democrats reported believing that Republicans are more immoral and dishonest. And the issue has gotten worse over time: Researchers found a “particularly pronounced” increase in the share of partisans who described members of the opposite party as immoral from 2016 to 2022, and a similar effect for perceived dishonesty and open-mindedness.
Meanwhile, 52% of Americans experienced social media harassment in 2023 — a mark of how little we care to reserve empathy for others’ struggles. Struggles that can be understood societally and emotionally when literacy — especially reading fiction — becomes a priority of individuals, school systems and the government at large.
Reading fiction alone won’t completely solve polarization and other issues of fracture, since illiteracy isn’t our only problem — politicians, media echo chambers, inflammatory rhetoric, political violence and many more factors both obvious and minute contribute.
But reading fiction can play an underappreciated role in changing people, their critical thinking skills, and their attitudes toward others. Everyone can reap the benefits of doing more of this kind of reading — politicians, legislators, constituents, journalists, social media users and influencers — but it’s especially important for young people.
The normalization of reading among this age group is a necessity if they are to forge a future unburdened by illiteracy and apathy. However, it is a big ask to expect them to prioritize reading fiction when it seems their school systems and departments of education do not. When books are stripped from school libraries, public libraries receive inadequate funding, and teachers do not get the support they need, young people are, in effect, being told that literature is not valuable in their education, much less in their everyday life.
But all it takes to alter this perception is one book — one book that leaves you wondering where your perspective ends and that of a protagonist begins. It just takes one book to lay the foundation for a love of literature.
