Does What You Read Matter…
Posted on August 30th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
….or does it matter only that you read?
The Times reports on a fascinating trend among schoolteachers to abandon fixed reading lists and allow students to read whatever the hell they want, from James Patterson novels to chick-lit to serial novels.
The reason? They say it promotes greater passion about reading than assigning kids books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Moby Dick,” which they may not like.
But of course the underlying reason is the concern that kids today simply aren’t growing up with the habit of reading books that older people did.
“I actually used to be a real hard-line, great-books, high-culture kind of person who would want to stick to Dickens,” said Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and the author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” But now, in the age of Game Boys and Facebook, “I think if they read a lot of Conan novels or Hardy Boys or Harry Potter or whatever, that’s good,” he said. “We just need to preserve book habits among the kids as much as we possibly can.”
On the whole, this seems encouraging to me. But why not a mix of books that have to be read in common—works that define our cultural history and help bind us together—and books that kids read because they choose to do so?
2 Responses
8/30/2009 10:41 am
What struck me about the story was that the featured teacher does not encourage or allow them to read “young adult” literature, e.g. Hardy boys, Harry Potter, etc. The seventh and eight graders are mostly reading books aimed at an adult readership (with the exception of Twilight for one student). I agree that reading anything and developing a passion for reading is the most important. Still, this teacher isn’t having her students read just anything, “whatever the hell they want”: while she may not be enforcing a distinction between canonical high-culture literature and other types of reading, she is moving these students into adult reading. I think the quotation from Mark Bauerlein that you highlight doesn’t recognize this aspect of her reading lists.
I applaud this teacher, since I find that many of my college students still haven’t made the leap to independent adult reading. Their important reading experiences remain children’s literature and young adult novels (which seem to be a growing genre). And if some of my 30-something Twilight-and-Harry-Potter-reading friends are anything to judge by, this preference sticks with people into their adult life.
The teacher is sacrificing the communal reading experience somewhat in favor of encouraging independent reading. My bet is that these students are much more likely to continue reading outside the classroom.
The most radical part of her program though is that she discusses poetry with them together first!!
8/30/2009 5:55 pm
Beecham made the most important point — the teacher isn’t exactly choosing what kids read, but she is doing something very much like that. But two other points are worth mentioning. First, time devoted to reading may be as important a variable as who picks the books. And second, I’ll bet quality of teaching dwarfs other variables in its effect on the effectiveness of reading programs. It takes both literary knowledge and personal skill to steer kids towards reading from which something will be learned, and not every teacher has McNeil’s skills. Educational effectiveness is so hard to measure — controlled experiments are next to impossible to design, there are Hawthorne effects, etc.