Books are in the news these days for a multiplicity of reasons, most of them bad. I put some thoughts to the blog on the idiocies of stealth book editing (depressingly, they’re now messing with Agatha Christie. Can’t you people just put in a disclaimer and leave it at that?) and outright book bans with a dash of 'the decline of the humanities’ thrown in for good measure, but now I stumbled across the knottiest of problems: why kids aren’t reading.
The original article in The Atlantic is buried behind a paywall, but thankfully the internet is full of delightful people who post the entire thing in the form of a Reddit comment so you can read it all for yourselves.
The actual title of the piece is ‘Why Kids Aren’t Falling In Love With Reading’ which I think is the first problem. Kids don’t like being spoon-fed or force-fed books in high school. I couldn’t stand The Catcher In The Rye. I tanked my grade for a trimester in 11th Grade American Literature because The Color Purple straight up did not hit for me. I couldn’t stand The Great Gatsby. Some kids will read that one book in English class and it’ll blow their minds. On The Road, for instance, was just okay for me. It was essentially a road trip with jazz clubs and mescaline was thrown in for good measure. Other people in high school read it and plunged headlong into things like Dharma Bums or Big Sur.
When it comes to kids and reading, there’s a spectrum. There’s always been a spectrum and there still is now. My own kids illustrate this perfectly: Eldest Spawn has to be made to sit and read a book. Medium Spawn #1 will flip through Dog Man books for hours, but (so far) either genuinely can’t quite read yet or just chooses not to. Medium Spawn #2 is a bit better, loves books, and has to have a book read to him every night. (We’ll see how he does next year when he gets to kindergarten.)
I feel like this is a debate that takes the form of a mountain range. You could plant your flag on many different peaks and make a good argument for any number of things. The Atlantic piece focuses a lot on standardized tests and how teachers have to teach reading for the tests now and the focus is more on textual understanding and comprehension than getting kids to fall in love with books and then which opens their world to reading, increases their skills organically, etc. Their argument touches on a very real debate that’s going on about reading in education circles (which is important, but a rabbit hole I don’t want to fall down with this post) but ultimately misses the mark for me.
It’s not an unpersuasive argument by any stretch of the imagination- it just slides into the idea I laid out above. When you say, “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now” that doesn’t strike me as much different than saying, “There are kids who were forced to read The Catcher In The Rye for English class and hated it.” Plus, even before No Child Left Behind came into effect, there were still assessments… I remember the Iowa Tests of Endless Dots as I’m sure many people do and I’m willing to bet other states had similar things.
So, not unpersuasive. Just incomplete.
So, what’s my explanation? I think it’s something both more basic and more complex at the same time: we don’t have shared cultural experiences the way we used to especially when it comes to books.
Underling all of these articles is a sprinkling of nostalgia. The Atlantic piece references the works of Judy Blume, Beverly Clearly, and the beloved children’s character Amelia Bedelia. Kids who grew up with Scholastic Book Fairs as the highlights of their school year are now parents and are probably more excited about them now than the kids are. Everybody (well, most everybody) but a lot of people remember literacy programs like Book It fondly.
But the way we share cultural experiences has changed profoundly and I hate to bring this tired old saw into it, but I’m going to, with the mass adaptation of the Smartphone.
Think about it though: an entire generation grew up with Harry Potter. It was a shared cultural phenomenon. Even post-Potter, The Hunger Games has sold over 100 million copies, Twilight 160 million, and Fifty Shades of Grey comes in at 35 million. You see it on television as well: 76 million people watched the finale of Seinfeld when it aired in 1998. Go back a little further and the finale of M*A*S*H had 125 million viewers.
Now, since 2010 or so (which I’m going to take as the rough date for the mass adaptation of the Smartphone) can you think of a cultural phenomenon that’s come close to pulling any of these numbers? For television, Yellowstone might be the closest I can think of- but I’ve never actually seen a single episode of it. I can’t think of a literary equivalent off the top of my head. Movies are sporadic and I don’t think you can quite get a handle on where they are post-COVID yet. Music? Post Taylor Swift, who do you got? Sure, there are performers that pre-date 2010 that are pulling in big numbers and that’s fine. Lizzo might be the only artist post-2010 that’s approaching big numbers that I can think of right now.
None of this means that there aren’t awesome books, movies, television, or musicians out there right now. What it does mean is that the adaptation of the smartphone and the rise of the internet/age of streaming opened up a firehose of content on the general public that makes those shared cultural connections/experiences harder to achieve. I don’t think we’re ever going to have an episode of a television show score 125 million viewers ever again. I don’t think there’s going to be a finale of a television show on any streaming platform that’s going to be considered ‘must-see’ TV anymore.
The process of generating culture has changed, so that means our consumption patterns have changed as well.
The firehose of content combined with the spread of the internet means two things: one, it’s (relatively) easier for people to break through now compared to say thirty years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, by any stretch of the imagination- it’s just more possible than it used to be. It also means that we have to change the definition of what a cultural phenomenon/shared cultural experience actually is. Thirty years ago, where one author could sell 100 million copies, realistically in today’s environment you’re looking at four authors selling 25 million copies apiece.
Many options mean it’s less likely that kids are going to be running out to read the same books. The rise of technology and smartphones further impacts the amount of reading that kids do. Overscheduling of kids is also an underrated problem here. It’s easy to bemoan the fact that kids aren’t falling in love with reading the way they used, but when there’s a documented decline in unstructured play and an overscheduling phenomenon that’s equally well-documented and undermines the resilience of kids overall you can’t ignore those factors either.
I think we’re still treating the idea of reading and getting kids to connect with books using a cultural framework that just doesn’t exist anymore. It’s different now. Whether it’s the educational system, the rise of technology, or the multiplicity of assessments schools have to offer- all these factors have changed massively and in ways, we’re just now starting to seriously grapple with.
To me, the question that no one is asking about all these book bans isn’t whether the book in question is appropriate for the age group/grade level in question- it’s whether any of these books are being checked out at all. (That’s the data point I’d really like to see here.)
So, what’s the solution?
Well, assuming there are going to be any books left in school libraries, I think the basic answer is more books. Books are read together as a class. Books they read individually. Just books. I’m sure educators are already doing that, but I’m saying, take what you’re doing and do more. Expose kids to all kinds of books and then see what happens.
One thing that surprised me once I got kids of my own in the school system was the sheer amount of data tracking they do now. Maybe they’ve always done that and I was just blissfully unaware of it when I was on the other side of the equation, but given the capacity to do that now, that’s where I would start. You can’t rely on the shared cultural phenomenon anymore because culture is being constructed differently now. It’s more diffuse. Schools can’t control technology either— you can’t stop the screens, however much you might like to. So what are you left with?
Finding a verifiable way that gets kids to read more and though it seems like the blindingly obvious way to start, you can drill down from there. Does flooding the zone work? Do kids respond to group read-along versus individual reading time? Does one strategy improve reading comprehension more than the others? Suck in all the data you can use all the permutations you can and see what it tells you. I’m sure every kid will be different and every school/state will be different and that’s fine- if policymakers allow you to be flexible enough with curriculum to allow that.
Ignore the reading wars for a hot second. If the old ways of getting kids to connect with books no longer work- whether because cultural construction has become more diffuse with the rise of the internet or because kids want to look at screens more than books these days, all you can do is what you can do. To me, it’s just having books around. It’s reading books all the time and seeing what happens.
Of course, in the age of nonsense we’re currently living in, that’s much easier to type than do. And it’s important to note that I’m not an Educational expert, so everything I’ve just written could be already being done and educators could still be scratching their heads.
If that’s the case, call up Pizza Hut, and bring back Book It. I mean, it worked before, right?