If teens aren't reading, it might be what and how we ask them to read
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
One is to blame the kids. We all know that kids these days don’t seem to be reading books as much as they could since they have so many pictures and videos on their smartphones to distract them.
The other reaction is to focus on the traditional media and ask whether it is relevant to kids today. Maybe they are not reading newspapers because newspapers aren’t talking to them in a language they understand.
I’ve been reading newspapers since the 1960s and, in many ways, they look and feel the same. You have the lead (spelled “lede” in the trade) to hook the reader, the nut graph to explain why the story is important, some quotes for color, some background for context, and a kicker at the end. Who has time for all that?
Today, kids get their news from social media and they often prefer it in the words of their friends and their cultural heroes. Why believe some nameless, faceless reporter on issues of sexual harassment when you can get it directly from Lady Gaga ?
Why listen to some old white guy explain racism when you can get it directly from young people of color who have experienced injustice? Want to read about life on the farm? Find a farmer-blogger . Instead of reading one quote from President Obama, selected by a journalist, you can listen to a whole podcast .
I started my career in journalism in 1982 on a manual typewriter. Within a few years, we graduated to word processors and from there to computers. Today, I run a digital media company that is all about elevating the voices of everyday people to put them on a par with the influencers: politicians, experts, academics and, yes, journalists.
Everyone’s opinion counts. Media have never been closer to democracy than today, even as the industry is flooded with bias, dogma and outright deceit.
And the kids get it. They understand there is a lot of fake news out there, which is why traditional media platforms still have the most credibility. According to a Pew Research Center survey , local news is trusted more than national news, and both are trusted more than “friends, family and acquaintances” and much more than “social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.”
So, the fact that young people are not reading newspapers isn’t a crisis. They’re just getting access through different channels. Today, they can consume 100 headlines from around the world in minutes and decide what to read. For their parents, that was impossible; they read what was put in front of them in their local newspaper.
The second big finding of the study is that a third of young people have not read a book for pleasure. Alarming as that might sound, it means that two-thirds of teens have read at least one book for pleasure last year, which is higher than I would have guessed. It’s worth noting that “leisure reading” is down among all age groups , according to one analysis.
The study doesn’t tell us what kind of books young people are reading, but you can scan the New York Times Young Adult Bestseller List and you will find that four of the top 10 books are by an author named John Green. He’s a 41-year-old Indianapolis native who built a following on YouTube and now is one of the most influential authors in the world. There’s also the Harry Potter phenomenon , which single-handedly changed children’s publishing.
Either way, the question for the education sector is, should we keep asking kids to read the same books that we read, such as “Catcher in the Rye,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men”? Do we mix it up and bring in more popular, young fiction writers to prompt kids to put down their phones and pick up a book ?
Thankfully, teachers have the answer. A few years ago, the Guardian asked a number of them how to get kids to read for pleasure and they offered a host of tips that mostly boiled down to this: keep it fun.
Peter Cunningham is the executive director of Education Post , a national network of education advocates, and a former assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration (2009-2012).
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If there is one take away from this, is this last link:
how to get kids to read for pleasure
Of course, this is not a surprise to the publishing industry. The one thing I will personally say is that parents are not reading to their kids. I was reading to my girls from about 6 months till they were old enough to read Harry Potter by themselves.
Back in the 6os I became a reader thanks to the old sci-fi masters.
Met Heinlein, ate breakfast with him and was seriously impressed.
Very Cool.
I started reading with comics but quickly went on to sci-fi. Still a sci-fi junkie.
I was one of those kids that would read SF way after lights out. Flashlights under cover were my friends. As a result, I became a 'flashaholic'. Can't swing a dead cat around my place without hitting a high tech flashlight.
YES!!!
Young people these days seem to be only interested in their hand held devices as their sole means of communication with others. They seem to have no natural curiosity in the larger world around them. They have no desire to read as they get all their knowledge of the world on social media. They also appear to have lost the desire to be with and interact with people face to face.
I was a reader from a very early age, and still am.
There are lots of good YA books on the market. My wife and I are both heavy readers, so our son grew up seeing his parents both with books constantly on their laps. He was reading kids' novels at six or seven, and YA novels at ten. In either language... We did nothing special. It was just the way of his world.
Now, of course, with competition form electronic media, things have changed. I haven't read a dead-tree book in years, and mostly do audio books. (If necessary, I make them myself from EPUB files, using an excellent text-to-speech program called TextAloud.)
Our grandson, now nine, likes his "iPad" (actually an Android tablet
) and his sports games on the big TV... but he also reads YA novels. Last year already, Redwall became our first read-by-three-generations novel.
The point of all this is that most of parenting is by example. If parents read, children read. If parents never take their noses away from their phone screens.....
Exactly Bob.
I think if they want kids to read more books why not assign them books like Harry Potter or the Hunger Games?
I read "Of Mice and Men" on my own and loved it, but I was a reader. Not a lot of my classmates were
I liked "The Old Man and the Sea"... but not many of the other ones I had to read in school.
I had to read Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"
I liked it
It was ok. I liked Hemingway's straight ahead style.
For us it was War and Peace... Like reading 1980's stereo instructions.
Spent some time in Key West with folk who had known him (claimed to have known him).
So glad I got to meet Hunter Thompson and go just a little bit nuts back in the day.
HAMC?
I remember reading "Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep" and "The Lathe of Heaven" when I was 13 and also reading Catcher.. I liked the both for different reasons at the time, but if you ask me which still has more impact on me even now, it was the first two.
From what I've read, he was a self-centered jerk.
Good writer, though...
I tried to read that book. Tried is the operative word here.
Your teacher must have hated all of you
Yes, she did.. LOL
I listened to The Great Gatsby on audiobook last year, after not having seen it since high school, when I didnt find it that interesting. I was kind of blown away, listening to it, by what a good writer Fitzgerald was.
Great story. You should try to watch the version with Robert Redford.
My middle school reading teacher was a huge Tolkien fan, so we read The Hobbit. Even most of the nonreaders liked that one.
But it won't work for every kid. I read to my son from the time he was born until about 2nd grade. He hates to read. His reading ability is fine, but he doesn't enjoy it much. There are a few authors he likes well enough, but he's not excited about them.
I had students like that, and it may be that he changes when he gets older. Many of the kids that i had that didn't love novels, went on to avid newspaper readers.
My brother hated reading as a child. Now he "forgets" to return books I loan him.
Harry Potter is not literature. I still think kids should be exposed to great writers from the past. Or the present, although I am not as familiar with them.
I liked the novels of Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion (my idea of the great American novel).
I think pop fantasy novels and adventure stories are fine to get kids interested in reading, but they should get exposed to great literature as well.
But it encourages kids to read and that is an important step.
My kids read because of their love of Harry Potter. As they got older, they started to read the classics. I think that book that is well written is better than being on the computers.
I agree. I think with the Harry Potter series many kids realized not only that reading can be fun but that they were quite capable of reading books that were more than 50 pages in length.
LOL, I know what you mean they look for instant gratification instead of learning.
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Completely agree with you John and it certainly matches my own reading ark.
In the third grade, (age 7 or 8), I checked out three books at random for a 6 week long reading assignment.
Sixty years later I remember all three because, for the first time, reading those books invoked images in my mind, not just a collection of words.
Those three books lite a fire that would become a 300 page a day reading habit which lead me to dive head first into such works as all 6 volumes of Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to Pirsig's, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and everything in between.
Over the years I've read and enjoyed something from every genre of writing you can think of, though Fantasy and Science Fiction always remand my go to's, well every genre except those historical romance novels. Never had any interest in those Fabio type stories.
My three magic books.
Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable, Or Stories of Gods and Heroes
.
Robert A. Heinlein. Red Planet
.
The Saga of Grettir the Strong
How many kids were weaned on Heinlein?
Billions and Billions? (smirk)
Harry Potter may not be literature but it got kids reading. Is it really important that kids read the classics? I read very few of them and I turned out all right.
They should read all sorts of things. Maybe not everything written by Twain, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Steinbeck , Dickens, Jane Austen, etc, but at least a taste of each.
The only one in your list I read was Steinbeck and then only one book. I tried to read "East of Eden" but it was boring and slow.
I did read Orwell and Huxley. Only for sheer entertainment, tho, but my dad wanted me to read "Animal Farm" so I did
That is a good way of putting it. Of course, I think of this in terms of my personal experiences and though late joining the discussion, the topic stirs the memory.
Long, drawn out story to follow. Hope you don't mind.
As a young reader, I was completely indifferent to the things I needed to read. To this day all I want to say is F' Dick and Jane. I was constantly in remediation. My dear Mom began spending an hour several days a week making me read the dictionary. One time I screwed up the pronunciation of Ohio. Although, my phonetics were technically correct, it was wrong. Hilariously wrong. First I got this stern look and was ready for reprimand, then she burst out laughing.
After a while Mom figured out the problem wasn't the words.
Later on in second grade, a landmark discovery. The class was taken on a visit to the library. I found this fantastic book of real airplanes/Jets and car portrayed in the typical draftsman way in black on white form, with real specifications. It was fantastic.
I took it to the counter to check out and it was promptly snatched out of my hands. The librarian disappeared and returned with this book of cartoon like characters which were supposed to be airplanes and maybe 2 or 3 words a page.
Didn't go over well and I just returned to the classroom sans book.
That earned me a few hours for several weeks with the "student counselor". To be honest, it was pretty interesting and fun. We disassembled, inspected, analyzed and reassembled a steam engine. Intriguing.
Side note: My neighbor, who was 4 grades above me, knew the book and checked it out for me a few times. I wish I knew the name of the book so I could locate it again. Fantastic.
As time and things progressed, sci fi and automotive journals became more interesting. One day Mrs Randall gave us a "free reading day". "Bring in anything you want to read". Yes. "Bring in anything you want to read".
The next day I brought in a Hot Rod magazine I bought myself. It had a road test of a car, that to this day, is highly sought after.
A yellow 1969 L88 yellow Corvette Convertible. First year with the alloy open chamber heads. She reprimanded me, confiscated it and gave me the only detention I ever had. Bad, Mrs Randall.
Mark Twain. My older loved Mark Twain. Mark Twain, yada, yada, yada. Mark Twain, yada, yada, yada. LOL. Before long and before reading Mark Twain, I had my fill. Besides, his outdoors woodsy/river fishing descriptions were always wrong, based on my then years of "expert" experience hunting and fishing with Dad. To to honest I actually did have some good experiences hunting and fishing with Dad at a young age.
So anything from Mark Twain I always went in to with a skeptical attitude.
Still liked sci fi and tech journals.
F. Scot Fitzgerald seemed interesting at first. He had spent time in the town I had lived in, however on the other side of the tracks. A long way on the other side of the tracks.
For the first time I could put my finger on my dislike of typical reading assignments at that level.
Character development.
Really, at that age, not only did I have no interest in it in reading,, I loathed it and I loathed Fitzgeralds characters. Even at that age, thanks to the wonderful neighborhood, I already knew more than i wanted about useless, debased characters. I didn't want to waste my time reading about debased, useless characters from the authors minds. Screw them and that is what I think Fitzgerald even now.
I still enjoyed sci fi and tech journals.
Steinbeck. When I heard the name, I though "oh great another classic". Pretty sure I rolled my eyes and I know for a fact I gave out an audible sigh. Teach heard it too.
Cannery Row.
LOVED IT.
Maybe not for obvious reasons. During the summer between 8th and 9th grade may parents moved to what I call the hippie capitol of the world. Takoma Park, Maryland.
Wow, I was transported from one extreme to another. In the neighborhood I had come from there there 2 little enclaves of folks who were about as normal as one could find there. Between those enclaves, which were separated about as far as possible from each other within the community, was a a land of post apocalyptic radiation mutants. About the kindest thing I can say about them.
Those 2 little enclaves had kids who liked exploring, were smart and loved sports.
Takoma Park, Maryland.
Although there are some fond memories, most are bad and ugly.
As a young teen who loved sports and talking with intelligent people, other than a few adults, that situation simply did not exist in the immediate neighborhood.
Sports was, maybe a couple people standing flat footed about 30 ft apart gently tossing a frisbee back and forth. Or, maybe tossing a softball 5 or 6 times back and forth. That was about it, then time to light up another joint.
They would do the damnedest and most stupid things for entertainment and usually wind up breaking something along the way.
A family friend, who became my best friend for decades took me on evening car repair jobs where I learned hands on automotive mechanics. For physical activity I had my wrestling workout that I followed.
Outside of that, the world around me was nuts.
Steinbeck's Cannery Row put it all into perspective for me. I could now laugh about the Hobos. They never had a Mack. They were all just the guys.
Still loved and still do, sci fi and tech journals.
Probably full of grammar errors and typos. Left out a lot. It's okay.
The first 'book' I ever read as a very young child was "Scuffy The Tugboat." Loved it.
LOL.. I remember that book. Mine was "Mr. Pines Mixed Up Signs".
I may have read that. I do remember reading "The Little Engine That Could"...lol!
Mine was "The Pokey Little Puppy". I believe it's still in print.
A bit later I was into "Kon-Tiki by Thor Hyerdahl and the adventures of Captain Horatio Hornblower...although the titles escape me.
I think that electronic media is literally addicting. The Internet yes-- but IMO it started before that,with TV.
When I was a kid I was a "nerd" (or "geek? I think the meanings of those words may have changed?). I was a Science nut. Many years later when I first saw "the Big Bang Theory" I identified with them-- those were the types of friends I hung out with! `
For a long time after I graduated college, I deliberately avoided owning a TV set....
I spent most of my free time reading-- some science fiction, but also factual Science books. I had close friends who were also into Science-- we did chemistry and other experiments in their basement "Labs". (Anyone here ever have a Gilbert or Chemcraft "Chemistry Set"?)
For the most part, the only fiction I read was Science fiction. (Two exceptions I remember-- I loved Sherlock Holmes. Also the Dr. Doolittle books). Oh when I was very young I was a big fan of Winnie-the-Pooh (the pre-Disney version).
From early on I noticed my parent looked forward to reading-- they really enjoyed it. So perhaps that's why I realized it was enjoyable.
Why pick up paper when you can pick up a "Smart?" phone.
Seems technology makes people dumber, not "Smart"er.
It's on the internet, it must be true.