Kids are better than SJW ideologs

Scholastic conducts an annual survey covering children reading. It is useful for its currency. Most of the findings are relatively uncontroversial but they always warrant reinforcing.

This year's report, Kids & Family Reading Report 2014, has something I haven't seen before. In the section What Kids Want in Books, Scholastic has this revealing chart:

Things Children Look for When Picking Out Books to Read for Fun
Base: Children Ages 6–17

Click to enlarge.

Look at the second to last bar. How many children look for characters that look like them in books as a criteria for picking books? Only 17%!

Very interesting. Over the past couple of years, I have had repeated run-ins with Social Justice Warriors who are insistent that the publishing industry is actively prejudiced against minorities in terms of which books get published. It doesn't matter what evidence you present showing that this is unlikely to be the case. It is also their firm belief that it is important for children to be able to "see themselves" in print, i.e. that there need to be more books which "reflect the face of America". This actually evolved into a campaign launched a year or so ago called We Need Diversity Now.

I have argued that this campaign is likely to fail in its fundamentals. The issue is not with publishers but with writers and readers. It is demonstrably the case that the reading public is perfectly willing to buy books written by and about various minority groups and with various minority protagonists. The problem is that they don't, for all groups, have an equal demand. Basically, there is insufficient demand. It doesn't matter how many books you publish if nobody buys them.

I have asked these SJWs for the evidence they have that 1) people actually want more diversity in books than there already is, and 2) for the evidence that they have that reading books that can be characterized as more diverse has any causative relationship with any desirable outcomes such as increased reading volume, capability, etc. There is no evidence for either proposition. (Which needless to say, doesn't mean that the propositions are wrong, only that they are unsupported by evidence.)

This Scholastic question regarding attributes that children seek in a book reinforces my position. I have argued that a focus on race is an adult concern and that race of characters is usually a tangential or even inconsequential attribute that children do not focus on. I have made the argument from theory and inference but have never had direct evidence. If only 17% of kids select books based on the race of the characters, then that is consistent with my argument. But evidence is no tool for persuasion in the face of ideological belief.

There is actually another item that SJWs believe when it comes to children reading and that is that the books need to be relevant to the child, that books need to reflect the type of life that the child lives. Again, I have argued that there is little evidence for that, that the demand for relevance is an adult's ideological demand not reflective of a child's desires and that there is no evidence that a book's relevance has any relationship to life outcomes.

The third to last bar addresses this issue of relevance. When asked what attributes were important to them in selecting a book, only 25% actively choose books which "Are about things I experience in my life."

Putting both these statements more positively, I think it is encouraging that 83% of child readers pay no attention to physical resemblance to themselves when choosing a book and that 75% are unconcerned about whether the book is "relevant" to their lives.