The new European initiative DemRead will oppose the increasing autocratization of states by promoting higher-level reading.
This is an English translation of an interview originally published in the Slovenian newspaper Delo on July 19, 2025. The translation was carried out with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot and has been quality-checked by journalist Pia Prezelj at the editorial team at Delo.
Miha Kovač is known as a researcher of reading, an expert on the Slovenian book market, professor, writer, and editor. He also acts as one of the pillars of the new European initiative DemRead: Democracies Depend on Reading, which he recently presented at the World Expression Forum (WEXFO) in Norway. The leading partners, who come from Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Slovenia, warn that today almost three-quarters of the world’s population lives under autocratic regimes, and the decline of democratic values, they say, is connected to the decline of higher-level reading.
Reading at a higher level is our strongest tool for developing analytical and critical thinking, you emphasized a few years ago in the Ljubljana Manifesto. What data shows that the decline of higher-level reading is connected to the decline of democracy or democratic values? How is this trend reflected at the local and global level?
“At the University of Gothenburg, they analyze the state of democracy in most countries of the world every year. Based on a set of indicators, such as media freedom, fairness of elections, independence of the judiciary, and similar, countries are classified into four categories, from the most democratic liberal democracies, through electoral democracies and electoral autocracies, to autocracies. Denmark, for example, is classified as a liberal democracy, Slovenia and Poland are electoral democracies, Hungary was for the first time last year categorized as an electoral autocracy, and Russia is an autocracy.”
“Their analyses quite shockingly show that today a smaller percentage of the world’s population lives in liberal or electoral democracies than during the Cold War and before the widespread use of the internet. Even worse, in the last ten years, the number of countries that are becoming autocratic is greater than the number of countries that are becoming democratic. This means that mass and easy access to information, open borders, and free movement of capital and people do not in themselves guarantee democracy, as some of us naively believed in the 1990s, when the Iron Curtain fell and the internet began its triumphant march.”
So how is this connected to our reading habits?
“All ten countries with the highest level of reading literacy, according to the PIAAC survey, are liberal democracies. Among the ten countries with the lowest adult reading literacy, only three are liberal democracies, six are electoral democracies, and one is an electoral autocracy. Data also show, as expected, that countries with more developed reading habits also have more literate adults. In short, the connections between the level of democracy in a society, reading habits, and reading literacy are obvious enough to be taken seriously.”
In June, you participated in the World Expression Forum in Norway, where the focus was precisely on the fact that higher-level reading is connected to the establishment or preservation of democracy. How did the idea for the DemRead – Democracies Depend on Reading – project come about?
“To function in daily life, we need to know about a thousand word families – simply put, word families or lemmas are words that have the same root –, to watch a movie or follow a television show, you need to know about three thousand, and to understand more complex texts, such as novels, popular science books, or this interview, you need to understand about nine thousand word families. On this basis we can assume that with a narrow vocabulary we cannot acquire analytical and abstract thinking and consequently cannot understand the complexity of the world around us.”
“A narrow vocabulary practically forces us into simplified conclusions and interpretations of the world, as offered by conspiracy theories or various authoritarian leaders. From this perspective, higher-level reading is a necessary training ground for thinking, and thinking is the first condition for the existence of democracy, which brings us back to the connection between reading and democracy.”
At what stage is the project currently, and what are its goals?
“What especially pleases me is that the initiative for the project came from Norway, precisely because of the Ljubljana Manifesto on Higher-Level Reading, which was one of the pillars of Slovenia’s guest of honor program at the Frankfurt Book Fair two years ago. Apparently, we articulated something that many knew, but no one had said loudly enough.”
“We are currently submitting the project to several European calls, with lead partners from Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Slovenia. We decided on several calls because – somewhat unusually – we are combining research and promotion of reading. On the one hand, we want to define higher-level reading and its positive cognitive effects more precisely, and on the other hand, we want to develop new approaches to promoting it. In Western societies with a prevailing narcissistic personality structure, where pleasure is practically a life imperative, it is difficult to promote something that requires mental effort. It is even more difficult to do this in a civilization flooded with screen media and audio and video content.”
Why is it crucial that the project focuses on school curricula – that the effort to strengthen higher-level reading is tied to the educational system?
“In principle, good educational systems create equal opportunities for all, with special care for those who come from underprivileged backgrounds. For the last fifty years, we have had a stable forty percent of non-readers in Slovenia, so we can say that the percentage of children from reading-deprived backgrounds is high. An additional problem is that children come to school with – let’s call it – digitally trained brains: their media world is a world of numerous screen stimuli that require rapid switching of attention. Directing attention to something that does not move or sing – and letters on paper certainly don’t– is almost counterintuitive for them. Therefore, in the first phase, it is necessary for adults to understand the importance of reading books. Only then can we begin to develop ways to direct new generations towards reading. We will have to be truly innovative. Generations that use screens from cradle on have never before entered school, so I fear that we will have to develop reading promotion for them practically from scratch.”
Publishing Perspectives writes that the project “explores and develops approaches to foster higher-level reading.” Which approaches specifically?
“Let me first point out another unusual result of the PIAAC survey on adult reading literacy: Finnish high school students are more literate than people with university education in as many as nineteen countries that participated in this survey. This means that, as far as reading literacy is concerned, in these nineteen countries university diplomas – and with them a good part of universities – might as well be thrown in the bin. Slovenia did not participate in this survey, but I fear our result would not be any better. This is also because at universities we are more concerned with evaluating student satisfaction than with the quality of knowledge. To change this situation, we must first become aware of it, then understand its causes, and establish a broader consensus that such a situation is not good. Only then is it sensible to look at what those who are better than us are doing – and why certain approaches work for them, but perhaps would not work for us, given our prevailing values.
How do we measure up nationally in this regard, and how do you assess the rigidity or flexibility of our education system in implementing such approaches?
“One of the peculiar characteristics of Slovenian school reforms is that we never evaluate previous reforms, so we change the educational system on the basis of anecdotal evidence. At the same time, due to the growing number of regulations, teachers are increasingly turning into educational administrators. This automatically closes our educational system to the introduction of innovations. Perhaps also due to this mindset in the educational system, Slovenian ten- and fourteen-year-olds achieved the worst results in reading literacy last year since we have been participating in international PISA and PIRLS studies.”
Is there enough knowledge and will in our educational system to encourage reading?
“Problems are mainly looming in the future. Research on the reading habits of future teachers, which we have been conducting for the past five years, shows that 20 to 30 percent of them do not read in their free time, and those who do, read mainly light fiction. About a quarter of them read primarily in English. Even if we disregard the problems that some future teachers will have with Slovenian vocabulary because of this, it is logical that a non-reader will have difficulty inspiring anyone to read. It’s about the same as if the poultry company were to become the promoter of a meatless diet.”
“With such reading habits among future teachers, higher-level reading is practically a mission impossible. Therefore, if we want to change anything, we must first consider what is wrong with our university education.”
How will the development of artificial intelligence affect all this?
“Let me first point out that higher-level reading does not only mean reading more demanding books; the basic definition says that higher-level reading is the awareness that there are different ways of reading, all of which are legitimate and useful for different purposes. Skimming, for example, allows us to use screen technologies to scan vast amounts of information, while reading more demanding, longer texts trains us in mental abilities needed for deeper understanding of such information.”
“The secret to success, in my opinion, lies in the combined use of these two abilities, and this is something we are insufficiently aware of in the Slovenian educational system. In a way, this is not surprising – it is practically a global disease. Google over the last twenty years, and artificial intelligence over the last two years, have created the impression that access to knowledge and even its creation is easy, so those who call for more demanding education appear, next to these machines, like a dinosaur remnant of the past.”
“But this is a dangerous illusion: merely reproducing existing knowledge and parrot-like combining of existing content, as artificial intelligence does, cannot lead to new intellectual breakthroughs. This is why we need people with deep and complex knowledge who, with the help of such machines, can perform miracles.”
How do you respond to those who perceive calls for higher-level reading as a gesture of elitism, which, they say, plagues book markets largely supported by the sale of sale of light entertainment reading material?
“In recent years, several studies have analyzed the language of bestsellers and award-winning books, or those considered more demanding literature. It has been shown that the vocabulary and sentence structures in ‘literary fiction’ are more complex than in bestsellers. Some studies have shown that people who read more demanding literary works are, simply put, cognitively more skilled and flexible than those who limit their reading diet only to bestsellers.”
“Therefore, it does matter what we read: there is of course nothing wrong with reading bestsellers, but we must be aware that their cognitive effects are weaker than if we read more serious books. As mentioned, part of higher-level reading is also being aware that there are different kinds of reading and being able to adjust our reading strategy accordingly.”
“The thesis that only a select few are capable of higher-level reading is, of course, a typical example of elitism. We are all capable of it. It depends on our choices, social values, and educational system whether we will also practice it.”
Photo: WEXFO/Øystein Nordås
