Neuroscience confirms what many of us long suspected: Fiction is more powerful for developing the mind, social skills, empathy, and imagination than non-fiction. And yet for nearly two decades, American schools have been encouraged to downplay fiction. Teachers have been told to downplay novels, fewer novels are assigned, and fewer students read whole books.
Instead of reading stories, students read excerpts in preparation for the format of standardized tests. There, students are asked questions about extracts without a beginning, a middle or an end.
Why?
Seventeen years ago, the Common Core State Standards were introduced to the public as the salvation of education. Its sponsors claimed that they would raise scores and close or narrow achieve gaps.
The Common Core standards were funded almost entirely by the Gates Foundation and enthusiastically endorsed by Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The Obama administration gave states a huge incentive to adopt the Common Core standards. States were required to endorse the Common Core to qualify to compete for a large chunk of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.
Most states adopted the Common Core standards, sometimes without actually reading or reviewing them. Behind the Common Core was the dubious belief that standardization of standards, tests, textbooks, and teacher training would have a dramatic positive effect on student test scores. That turned out not to be true.
But even worse, David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core (and now the President of the College Board, which publishes the SAT tests, the AP tests, and other standardized tests) believed that “informational text” was more valuable than fictional works.
The Common Core recommended that the curriculum be weighted 50-50 between literary and informational texts in fourth grade; 45-55 in eighth grade; and 30-70 in twelfth grade. That is, only 30 percent of reading in twelfth grade would be fiction.
Tom Loveless, then at the Brookings Institution, showed how these ratios, which were literally based on nothing, no research, led to a decline in the assignment of fiction in schools.
In response to the widespread adoption of the Common Core, textbook publishers and test publishing companies de-emphasized fiction. The National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the federal test called NAEP, downgraded fiction in its national tests for fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades.
According to an article by Richard Sima in the The Washington Post, the theory that fiction was of lesser value was wrong.
Sima, a neuroscientist and science journalist, writes that fiction is better for the growing mind than informational text.
He writes:
Reading in general — newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books — has been linked to slower rates of cognitive decline in older adults and even longer lives.
But reading fiction may have unique benefits. For example, the amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds. And, perhaps even more importantly, research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition — our ability to think about and interact with other people — and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place.
Why? Fiction forces you to imagine a story’s world and characters. It makes you grapple with different perspectives, mentally inhabiting distinct points of view, according to Nick Buttrick, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
This can help us find “better insight into our own experiences, insight into the experiences of others who are very different from us,” said Raymond Mar, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, who recently wrote a review on the benefits of reading narrative fiction. “It just tends to evoke a form of reflection and contemplation, which can only be good for us.”
Why reading is actually social
Social health is important for overall health. And it turns out that reading, though often thought of as a solitary activity, can boost our social abilities.
To understand why, it helps to look at how reading shapes us as we grow.
Between ages 4 and 6, children develop a theory of mind — the ability to understand that others have different beliefs, perspectives and feelings. Studies find that children exposed to more storybooks are further along this developmental milestone than those exposed to fewer ones, Mar said.
A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 studies found that children who read more storybooks had more empathy. And there is evidence that empathy and reading go both ways. Better reading comprehension was a predictor of empathy later in life, while empathy also was a predictor of better reading ability, according to a 2024 study of more than 900 children. And adolescents who read more for fun became more social adults, a 2023 study found…
Reading fiction “presents to us a complex cognitive and emotional simulation of the social world,” which is useful in the real world, Mar said.
The power of storytelling
These benefits may be due, in part, to the power of storytelling.
Neuroimaging studies find that brain networks involved in understanding stories overlap with brain networks needed for theory of mind. This suggests that “while engaging with stories, we’re also pulling online the same kinds of brain networks that we use to understand other people,” said Mar, who wrote a review about these studies.
Other forms of storytelling, such as television and movies, may provide similar benefits, but “one of the things that you do when you read is you have to construct the world” in your head, Buttrick said. “The world is not given to you. You have to do the work of imagining.”
The article goes on in greater detail about why fiction is more important for young people than non-fiction, the exact opposite of the premises of the Common Core.
