kids shouldn't read classics

I mean, they can if they want to, but it shouldn’t be inferred that they’re going to—and certainly not in school.  Is there, anywhere on the planet, a worse idea than forcing a pile of high school freshmen to read an epic poem from the eighth century written in Old English about some blowhard tooting around trying to kill a monster and the monster’s mother?  Because, ladies and gentleman, that’s Beowulf, and fourteen-year-olds all over America are reading that in class.  Ok, the Russians?  They’ve got to go.  Anyone with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky on your syllabus; they’re out.  And frankly, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, they’ve got to go, too.

The Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five, The Heart of Darkness, Catch-22, 1984, The House on Mango Street, they can stay.  They should stay, because kids can access them. People get at books (at anything, really) through their own lives—especially people of the teenage variety.  Um, hello, do you remember being fifteen?  And to some degree, that never changes.  I deal with people all day long, across all walks of life, who are looking for a book that they can, in some way or another, fit themselves into.  And with teenagers, you often only get one or two shots, and then you’re out.  By presenting literature to high school students through books that they cannot relate to, we are molding generations of people who will not have any interest in books.  These people will not read!

So the loss is twofold: the love of reading as a whole—because if you can’t make books immediately relevant and ENGAGING for them, then they won’t bother to incorporate them in their lives.  And the loss of the particular book.  So Joe Shmoe reads Anna Karenina in tenth grade with his class, and well holy mother of god, 19th century realist Russian epics just ain’t his thing.  So he comes away from one of the best books of the century thinking, well that sucked.  So now, Joe Shmoe is getting shortchanged because:

1. Do you think he’s going to try Anna K. again?  Unlikely. And,
2. Will he be inclined towards the whole reading thing at all?  I’m not so sure.

If you can introduce kids to books that in some way move them, mirror their experiences, make them laugh, reflect their interests, and encourage their aspirations, you will create life-long reading devotees.  In other words, prove it.  Give them a reason to give a shit.  And yes, that is your job—as a teacher, a parent, or a human being living on the surface of this planet.  And you will have to give them multiple reasons to give a shit so it sinks in that books as a whole, not just one or two have the capacity to “get” them.

Once you do those things and books have become something that matter to them, then you can make them work for it.  But if they don’t love it (or at least like it) first, once you turn your back, they won’t read.  You better lay some serious groundwork before you go shoving Hard Times down their throats, because otherwise the book is wasted, and you’ve just further reinforced the message that they’re getting from pretty much everywhere that it’s TV, and movies, and video games, and the internet, and magazines that are who they are, and what they want to be doing.  It is eighty-billion times more important that they learn that books are relevant to their lives than that they read Pride and Prejudice by the time they’re sixteen.  If you make them want to read, they will do the heavy lifting on their own—or at least, with some degree of interest when you tell them they have to.