The appeal, initiated by a group called the Reading Poland Coalition, framed reading not only as a cultural or educational concern, but as part of national resilience.
Its authors said that the "soft" skills developed through reading, such as critical thinking, empathy, communication and the ability to understand context, are essential to building what they call "hard" individual and social resistance.
'Ongoing cognitive war'
"In connection with the growing need to support the resilience of our society, we ask for a fund for the promotion of reading to be included in the 2027 state budget," the letter says.
The authors argue that reading should be treated as a public matter of strategic importance in what they describe as an "ongoing cognitive war," meaning efforts to influence how people think, judge information, and make decisions through disinformation or manipulation.
According to the letter, reading from sources other than social media and maintaining distrust toward social media content can improve resistance to disinformation.
The authors cite the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's 2024 Truth Quest Survey, which examined how people identify false and misleading online content.
They also argue that deep, sustained reading builds social resilience at the local level. In the letter, they define this as the readiness of communities to organize themselves and respond effectively in difficult situations.
"Social and local resilience, understood as readiness for self-organization and agency in response, is also a derivative of exercising the mind through reading," the letter says.
The coalition also links reading to Poland’s ability to make effective use of artificial intelligence. It argues that without broad cognitive skills, including analytical, logical, and cause-and-effect thinking, people will not be able to use AI responsibly or productively.
"Reading is not only an effective tool for building resilience and innovation in work with AI, but also a very inexpensive tool," the authors say.
The letter points to Sweden as an example of a country translating research on reading into national policy.
In April, the Swedish government announced a new reading strategy for 2026-2031 under the title "Sweden: A Reading Country."
According to the Polish coalition, the Swedish plan allocates around EUR 100 million annually to strengthening resilience through reading.
The letter quotes the Swedish approach as saying that "a society that does not read becomes more vulnerable to disinformation" and that reading is a condition for the conscious use of artificial intelligence and democratic life.
Reading and resilience
The Polish coalition says the connection between reading, democracy, innovation and resilience remains insufficiently recognized in Poland.
It proposes allocating PLN 500 million (around EUR 120 million, USD 135 million) a year to the promotion of reading.
"An appropriately designed allocation of PLN 500 million annually for this purpose could very significantly change Poland’s resilience landscape," the letter says.
Maria Deskur, head of the Universal Reading Foundation, a Warsaw-based NGO, said reading is no longer only a matter for educators, librarians or publishers.
She said experts in different fields, including democracy, mental health and digital law, as well as major businesses and technology companies, teamed up for the appeal, urging investment in reading as a tool for building resilience and innovation.
Studies of misinformation consistently point to the importance of analytical thinking, attention, vocabulary, background knowledge, and the ability to compare claims across contexts.
These are not skills that appear suddenly when a young person is handed a media-literacy module or an artificial intelligence tool. They are built over years through sustained engagement with language, stories, argument, and complex information.
Early reading is therefore a form of building long-term cognitive infrastructure: it strengthens the capacities people later need to question a misleading headline, recognize manipulation, resist emotional simplification, and use new technologies critically rather than passively.
In this sense, investment in reading is a practical an inexpensive form of insurance against disinformation, civic disengagement, and the gradual weakening of society’s shared cognitive resilience, according to the groups behind the appeal.
(rt/gs)
Source: pap-mediaroom.pl