Compared with other countries in the OECD, Sweden is in the absolute bottom league when it comes to young people's desire to read.
This according to the Teachers' Foundation's report "A readable country".
The report is based on the Pisa survey's readiness index for 15-year-olds.
It is a downward development.
In 2009, 39.4 percent of 15-year-olds stated that they only read if they have to, in 2018 the figure was instead 56.9 percent.
These 17.5 percentage points mean that Sweden ends up at the bottom of the list of the 37 OECD countries when it comes to reading development.
The declining desire to read is the main reason why Sweden is furious at Pisa's reading desire ranking.
Today, our elongated country has the sixth worst reading desire index in the entire OECD.
Only the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland are worse.
Two out of three boys read only if they have to, among the girls it is every other.
"The economy that governs"
The change is clear even in the schools, according to the Teacher.
From 2007 to 2017, the proportion of students who read five pages or more of coherent text on paper or screen during a school day has decreased from 44 to 8 percent in grade 6, and from 31 to 6 percent in grade 9. About twenty teachers have been interviewed by the magazine , and they agree on what the negative development in the schools is due to: The requirements for teachers to document knowledge goals and meet grading criteria means that reading is prioritized in today's school.
- It is also the economy that rules in today's schools.
At the same time, digitalisation has gained a prominent place, often at the expense of school libraries and books as teaching materials.
When fewer and fewer students are able to read longer texts, it is crazy not to provide books and longer texts, says the acclaimed Swedish teacher Fredrik Sandström.