bringmethathorizon: obsessionful: infoneer-pulse:
What do American kids read? From middle school through 12th grade, the answer is consistent: the Twilight and Harry Potter series, with a little bit of Romeo and Juliet and Holocaust literature sprinkled in. The average reading level of the top 20 books read by U.S. high school students is 5.3—two and a half grade levels easier than a front-page article in The New York Times or Washington Post. In no grade do students typically read nonfiction, beyond memoirs like the The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night—even though success on standardized tests, in college, and in many jobs requires the ability to comprehend dense nonfiction texts.
Those findings are from one of the only surveys available of the reading habits of American young people, conducted by the educational technology firm Renaissance Learning. The survey includes both books read for pleasure and those assigned in class, tracking which e-books 4.6 million students downloaded from Renaissance’s Accelerated Reader software during the 2008-09 academic year. The reading lists—in many ways unimpressive—are significant in light of the release last week of the nation’s fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores, which were dismal.
» via The Daily Beast
BLAH BLAH BLAH TWILIGHT AND HARRY POTTER ARE MAKING OUR KIDS DUMB SLIPPERY SLOPECAKES
Okay, look. Teenagers? Are people. With their own preferences, opinions, and reading habits. Sure, they might be in the process of forming those, more so than we are in our crotchety adulthood, but that does not make them less valid. Do you remember being a teenager? Do you remember being told what to read by adults who thought they knew what was good for you better than you did?
Did it work?
We can talk on and on about what we think kids “should” be reading, and I’m all for giving them access to a wide range of materials and introducing them to new kinds of books, but forcing them to read things is a great way to take the pleasure out of reading them. Also, dude, everyone reads Harry Potter. Some of those kids are going to grow up to be avid readers of all sorts of things, and some of them aren’t. Demonizing Harry Potter isn’t going to change that.
What Sophie said, pretty much.
Also, those are some pretty blanket assumptions, there, oh pal of assumption. No one else read Emmerson or was forced to trudge through Homer? No one else read any Vonnegut or met Kerouac before college?
You mean Every Single Teenage is a mindless drone who has no reading preference of their own? I had a penchant for Russian Histories…not Tolstoy or anything, but actual history books about the Romanovs and further back. Here I thought they were people, almost adults who were making opinions and learning how to assert themselves in the world as such because in just a short amount of time we will be expecting it of them (and how the fuck else are they going to learn how if we don’t treat them like we expect it of them?), but I am full of whacky notions about how kids are actually people…
Blanket assumptions are fun! Wheee!
I didn’t read Harry Potter until I was learning my third fucking language. At 25.
Also very good points! I mean, yes, I was reading Harry Potter. And Diane Duane, and YA Fiction more generally. And I was also reading all sorts of Eccentric Nonfiction Books (not gender/feminist theory or theatre stuff until I started university, but biographies, science books, books about music…lots of things). Even if the latter wasn’t true, it’d still be okay, but it’s a really good point that kids & teens are not some kind of monolith.
I don’t know. My two younger brothers are in public school in Arkansas right now. For 11th grade English, the older brother had to read two books. Any two. He could pick. Two books a year— with no proper discussion, since everyone read different books!— is just not an adequate English education.
I mean, the books that teens choose to read— those are their choice. “ZOMG HARRY POTTER AND TWILIGHT” is a pretty bullshit argument. But… the stuff on the curriculum? The stuff that’s not their choice? I’d rather we push them to read the hard stuff. Harry Potter is awesome pleasure reading, but it shouldn’t count for English class.
I’ve had a stellar English education. Because my teachers picked books that were long, or old, or complicated, or from a minority perspective — and then they showed us why these books were famous. That’s the point, to me; you take a book that isn’t accessible, and you make it accessible by teaching students to close-read and to notice the themes and allegories. It’s not really honest for me to say I enjoyed Black Boy— but I sure as hell appreciated it.
Anyway, I haven’t read the original article, but I just wanted to say: Teens should read whatever they want on their own time, and more power to them if they want to read the books that tell them that teens can have fantastic lives of their own making. But in school, we absolutely should be keeping an eye on what they study. Because only a teacher can make Shakespeare fun and valuable to a 7th-grader, but Harry Potter can be read any time.
