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It's like a tic. Or a reflex. (Are tics and reflexes significantly different?) The point is, it's an automatic response, in virtually all humans, to think that things are getting worse. Medieval peasants lamented how good the Cro-Magnons had it; people in the Renaissance looked back on the Dark Ages with great fondness. This is a harmless enough reflex--lazy and uncritical, sure, but usually harmless enough.

But when it concerns how we see young people, and how we perceive the landscape of learning and literacy, this kind of doomsaying is a goddamned dangerous kind of intellectual sloth. When we assume, as most adults do, that kids are less literate, less interested in books, than ever before, it involves a willful kind of ignorance, and it imperils how we educate young people. Few if any of these dire assumptions--that no one under 18 reads, that all books will be obsolete by 2020--are borne out by any proof whatsoever.

The truth is that American publishers put out 411,000 individual titles last year, an all-time record, and netted $25 billion--hardly a sagging industry. And those kids who have abandoned books for electronic media? Since 2002, juvenile book sales have shown compound annual growth of 4.6 percent for hardcover books and 2.1 percent for paperbacks.

Anecdotally, we know this. We know about Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, Eldest--these juggernauts of contemporary youth literature--but still we cluck with acknowledgment when some pundit tells us that books are being crushed by an all-powerful digital junta. It must be true, we think--just yesterday I saw some kid on the bus, and he wasn't reading a book!

Since 2002 I've taught a class for high schoolers around the Bay Area. We meet once a week, and the 20 or so students come to read everything they can get their hands on, from The Paris Review to Transition to, well, Esquire. Every so often, I bring some of these assumptions I've heard to the class. I ask how many of them have Facebook pages (three of 20); how many spend more than an hour a day on the Internet (one said he did); and how many play World of Warcraft (only one, Terence Li, a kid who grew up in the roughest neighborhood in the city, reads The Kenyon Review for fun, and is headed to Stanford next year loaded down with scholarships).

One of the scholarships he won was given by our nonprofit center, 826 Valencia. We started six years ago as a writing and publishing center that would promote literacy and book-devouring among young people in the Mission District of San Francisco. Since then, six other cities have opened 826 centers. In San Francisco, we had a dinner recently for the four scholarship winners, all of whom are from low-income families, three of whom will be the first members of their families to attend college, and all four are voracious readers. I told Brianda Castro, headed to UC Riverside next year, that Michael Chabon and his wife were founders of the scholarship program. She lit up. "I just read his book!" she said. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay wasn't assigned in any class; she just read it because it looked like a good book. (Oh, also: She came to this country at age nine, from Mexico, speaking no English.)

The primary problem is that we look for gloomy statistics. Last year the National Endowment for the Arts issued a study that proclaimed that leisure reading was down overall, especially among the young. The study was much talked about, and again, much accepted. But soon a group of educators began to question the methods of the study, and the parsing of the results. Now, thankfully, the study is taken with a grain of salt.

I'll always oppose any statistical extrapolations that summarize the intellectual disposition of an entire generation. These "it's worse now than before" studies are always framed to imply that the teens' parents, at the same age, read more. And that their grandparents, well, they read their asses off. But this is simply not true. Far more Americans are educated now than they were 100 years ago, and infinitely more go to college. As a result, there is now a pool of potential readers that is far larger than it was a century ago.

And books, thank God, are easier to find and afford now than at any time in human history. Desktop software and print-on-demand technologies make it possible for anyone to create a book, and more-democratic distribution processes allow these small publishers--more than 100,000 of them, by most estimates--to get their books to anyone, anywhere.

And it allows us, at 826 Valencia, to publish our students, too. Every year we partner with a local high school to put together an anthology of the students' finest work. And to get in that book, to have their work rendered immortal by being bound between those covers, these students will stop at nothing. You think what I'm going to write is worth putting in a book? they say. We say, You're damned right it is. And then they get serious. They come after school, on weekends, and vacations to work on their writing, and why? Because at the end of the process, they'll be published in book form. I remember one student--I'll call him Carlos--who had been coming in mornings before school, he'd been late to soccer practice after school, and now he was coming during lunch. I asked him if he was really going to skip lunch to go over his essay one more time. "I gotta get in that book," he said, then pointed to the wall of books behind us. "I want to be on that shelf."

Books, inherently, require faith. Faith in an author that he or she will reward the many hours you'll spend in those pages, faith that a good story will be told, a lesson will be learned, a light will be shone upon a dim corner of the world. If you're reading this magazine, with its vast and rich history of literary achievement, you're alive to the pleasures of reading--for school or for no good reason at all. Now you have to give teenagers the benefit of the doubt, that they know what you know, that they do read and will read, that they will keep books alive, as alive as ever--that they will continue to pull the books from the shelves and add to those shelves books of their own.

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