Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

There’s been a lil bit of talk on the old Intertubes (or at least in the stupid blogs I read) about books in schools, probably precipitated by this Dana Goldstein piece on the Daily Beast. Here’s a telling couple sentences:

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.

Yikes! Goldstein and her sources lament the quality of young people’s reading lists, and take the tack that what we need is more non-fiction in the curriculum, to serve the dual purpose of giving kids real-world “background” knowledge, and to generally engage kids who otherwise yawn at traditional fictional offerings. To which I say, fine! I’m not going to argue with adding some non-fiction variety to middle and high school curricula. What I wouldn’t want to see is a dramatic swinging of the pendulum away from fiction. I was an English major, so I’ve got a dog in this race, but I definitely think there are things that fiction is uniquely positioned to teach us. The important thing to remember, especially for the teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats with influence, is that it’s not a contest. Good writing is good writing, and we should be putting good writing in the curriculum no matter what form it comes in.

The harder pill to swallow in Goldstein’s piece is the negative judgment she levels against the type of reading kids these days do for fun, panning “lightweight fiction” and taking the requisite cheap shots at Twilight. Which is why I liked this piece by Katie Baker on the Awl, examining, among other things, why boys don’t read as much as girls. As the only boy in my book club, I have a tremendous interest in why, at least in my experience, it’s so hard to come across a serious reader who’s a boy. Baker revisits what she calls the age-old issue: “should kids be allowed to read whatever they want, so long as they’re reading?”

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I’m no expert. Of anything. So I won’t offer any firm prescriptions for what I think is the right thing to do in the classroom (except for that good writing bit above). What I also won’t do is pick nits about what children read outside of the classroom. Are we really going to look down our noses at a kid for reading Twilight instead of The Best and the Brightest? I don’t want to alarm you, but most adults don’t read books. If a youngster is going to pick up a book, sit down, and read it cover to cover, I really couldn’t care less what it is. Good for her!

Baker’s point about the Sweet Valley High books being just, well, more interesting than typical academic fare is well-taken. I’ll speak from personal experience here. I’ve always been a reader, dating back to the day where I just got bored of the story my first grade class spent a week reading. (It was in an orange Houghton Mifflin reader, about a girl learning to roller skate, and she was really scared of falling, so she left the house with a football helmet and like, a bunch of pillows tied to her torso. Does anyone remember the name of this story? It was a turning point in my life!) My teacher, Ms. McDonald, bless her heart, gave me access to the bookshelf in the back of the classroom and let me read whatever I wanted once I had finished what the class was working on in the reader. After that, it was off to the races w/r/t me and books.

I usually just read what was made available to me by my teachers. It wasn’t until Goosebumps that I started making my own reading material choices. Like many boys my age, I was a CONSUMER of Goosebumps books. Every month, like clockwork, I’d grab the newest installment and rip through it in a weekend. (My parents were cool and would take me to the bookstore pretty regularly and let me get whatever I wanted, which allowed me to rent out the newest Goosebumps to classmates every month once I was done with them. I actually did this!) Goosebumps, of course, were a sort of little boys’ analogue to The Babysitter’s Club: quick, schlocky, cheaply suspenseful horror novels. Nobody would confuse them for high literature, or even high young adult literature. But that’s not the point.

The point is, I looked forward to a new Goosebumps book like I look forward to a new episode of Gossip Girl. It’s something special when a book can excite and engross a young kid like that. Reading Goosebumps books, as low-brow as they were, showed me that it was possible to be captivated by words on a page. Once you put that concept in a kid’s head, it’s not a huge leap to say, Douglas Adams, or Frank Herbert, or George Orwell (all writers I read when I was in grammar school). I always laugh when teachers and sundry authority figures refer to books as “friends,” but it’s not untrue. If you can learn to trust that a book can be worth your time, you’ll always have something to do, and something to learn.