People claiming thirteen-year-olds can't be expected to read an entire book clearly haven't encountered middle-schoolers. Your ability to focus and to chew through books is basically unparalleled at that age. Yes, not every kid is going to like reading (that's true in any cohort), but it's insane to claim that none of them does, or even that most of them don't, and especially insane to claim that that should guide educational policy.
And also, Mister Netflix CEO, not to sound like a boomer, but watching Lawrence of Arabia or 2001: A Space Odyssey on your phone screen is only 'a matter of preference' if your 'preference' is for an objectively worse experience.
(I understand that sometimes there are accessibility issues that make watching films at home easier, but that is an argument for greater accessibility of the big screen, not fewer big screens).
My seven-year-old read about 25 short novels (~100 pages each with illustrations) over Thanksgiving break. She got mad at us when we suggested that she should do something that wouldn't allow her to read, like going shopping with us or playing outside. We eventually persuaded her only because she could read in the car on the way to the shops. I was actually starting to wonder if we had a little problem on our hands--the opposite of the not being able to read a novel all the way to the end problem. I remember reading about "an addiction to novels" as something that the Victorians worried about a lot. I definitely remember that was my experience growing up, too: my parents had to make a rule about not reading at dinner.
If anything, it's adults who seem unable to concentrate, probably because of unlimited access to TikTok videos and Instagram posts. I've sat behind a couple of people on planes recently who spent the periods of four or five or even more hours scrolling mindlessly through feeds. I once sat next to some people who nearly caused a pilot to make an emergency landing because they got borderline abusive and violent when the plane's wifi stopped working.
As for the Netflix CEO, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it's difficult to get a man to see the value of the big screen when his salary depends upon him not seeing it.
I mean certainly I agree with you that taking novels off the curriculum is a terrible idea.
I read A Raisin the Sun in 7th or 8th grade; I don't think I've ever actually seen it performed but reading it was excellent, as also To Kill a Mockingbird, read around the same time.
I think the problem arises when reading (which I'd define broadly to mean engagement with longform narrative, whether it's the traditional reading of a book, listening to stories, or watching drama) starts getting bowdlerized into a set of "skills" that are applicable to other things. The truth is that I don't think any of us know what longform narratives are good for in an absolutely scientific way. They might teach empathy. They might help with concentration and focus. They might help us understand complexity. Those are all plausible stories about stories. But what we know for sure is that spending time with imaginary characters over the course of a narrative is part of the deep cultural practice of humans, traceable back to our prehistory. We had a lot of other things to be doing back then to survive, but we still took time out of hunting, gathering, defending ourselves against predators, etc. for the time-intensive art of telling long stories to each other. To me, this speaks to its intrinsic importance apart from any of the discrete skills that we'd associate with post-Industrial Revolution mass literacy. It speaks to its meaning of imaginative leisure for the human soul, even if we can't say precisely what that meaning is. I know that schools don't like to speak in that language because of the religious overtones, but my own definition of a soul owes more to Aristotle than it does to Christianity, and I think it is defensible on wholly secular grounds. And I think we lose (or lost) the battle when we start trying to make engagement with fiction into a means to something else instead of an end in itself. That's where the philistinism creeps in: when we turn something that's just human, full stop, into a job-related skill set.
on one hand i agree on the other i can surely say I did not read the books assigned (and neither did most of my classmates)
because as soon as I get a reading assignment it sucks out all of the joy of reading. Reading in school went so far as have me completely stop reading on my own (whereas I was an avid reader before) because it became something I associated with school and not as escape and finding novelty.
Perhaps that's more a case of the joy being sucked out of reading because of the way the teacher taught it. I would think that an imaginative and skilled teacher could foster that joy.
I guess parents have to help too... my 8th grade son decided on his own to read To Kill a Mockingbird in the last month. He's blazed thru all Madeleine L'Engel's novels and now he's on CS Lewis' Space trilogy. (Incidentally his school is unique, fabulous and not philistine at all—they have a rigourous program in class hours, but the amount of homework still leaves time for self chosen reading. ... we are so fortunate.)
People claiming thirteen-year-olds can't be expected to read an entire book clearly haven't encountered middle-schoolers. Your ability to focus and to chew through books is basically unparalleled at that age. Yes, not every kid is going to like reading (that's true in any cohort), but it's insane to claim that none of them does, or even that most of them don't, and especially insane to claim that that should guide educational policy.
And also, Mister Netflix CEO, not to sound like a boomer, but watching Lawrence of Arabia or 2001: A Space Odyssey on your phone screen is only 'a matter of preference' if your 'preference' is for an objectively worse experience.
(I understand that sometimes there are accessibility issues that make watching films at home easier, but that is an argument for greater accessibility of the big screen, not fewer big screens).
My seven-year-old read about 25 short novels (~100 pages each with illustrations) over Thanksgiving break. She got mad at us when we suggested that she should do something that wouldn't allow her to read, like going shopping with us or playing outside. We eventually persuaded her only because she could read in the car on the way to the shops. I was actually starting to wonder if we had a little problem on our hands--the opposite of the not being able to read a novel all the way to the end problem. I remember reading about "an addiction to novels" as something that the Victorians worried about a lot. I definitely remember that was my experience growing up, too: my parents had to make a rule about not reading at dinner.
If anything, it's adults who seem unable to concentrate, probably because of unlimited access to TikTok videos and Instagram posts. I've sat behind a couple of people on planes recently who spent the periods of four or five or even more hours scrolling mindlessly through feeds. I once sat next to some people who nearly caused a pilot to make an emergency landing because they got borderline abusive and violent when the plane's wifi stopped working.
As for the Netflix CEO, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it's difficult to get a man to see the value of the big screen when his salary depends upon him not seeing it.
like suggesting it'd be okay to listen to great music played with 8 bit Atari synth sounds
A Raisin in the Sun is a play not a novel.
I mean certainly I agree with you that taking novels off the curriculum is a terrible idea.
I read A Raisin the Sun in 7th or 8th grade; I don't think I've ever actually seen it performed but reading it was excellent, as also To Kill a Mockingbird, read around the same time.
I think the problem arises when reading (which I'd define broadly to mean engagement with longform narrative, whether it's the traditional reading of a book, listening to stories, or watching drama) starts getting bowdlerized into a set of "skills" that are applicable to other things. The truth is that I don't think any of us know what longform narratives are good for in an absolutely scientific way. They might teach empathy. They might help with concentration and focus. They might help us understand complexity. Those are all plausible stories about stories. But what we know for sure is that spending time with imaginary characters over the course of a narrative is part of the deep cultural practice of humans, traceable back to our prehistory. We had a lot of other things to be doing back then to survive, but we still took time out of hunting, gathering, defending ourselves against predators, etc. for the time-intensive art of telling long stories to each other. To me, this speaks to its intrinsic importance apart from any of the discrete skills that we'd associate with post-Industrial Revolution mass literacy. It speaks to its meaning of imaginative leisure for the human soul, even if we can't say precisely what that meaning is. I know that schools don't like to speak in that language because of the religious overtones, but my own definition of a soul owes more to Aristotle than it does to Christianity, and I think it is defensible on wholly secular grounds. And I think we lose (or lost) the battle when we start trying to make engagement with fiction into a means to something else instead of an end in itself. That's where the philistinism creeps in: when we turn something that's just human, full stop, into a job-related skill set.
on one hand i agree on the other i can surely say I did not read the books assigned (and neither did most of my classmates)
because as soon as I get a reading assignment it sucks out all of the joy of reading. Reading in school went so far as have me completely stop reading on my own (whereas I was an avid reader before) because it became something I associated with school and not as escape and finding novelty.
Perhaps that's more a case of the joy being sucked out of reading because of the way the teacher taught it. I would think that an imaginative and skilled teacher could foster that joy.
I guess parents have to help too... my 8th grade son decided on his own to read To Kill a Mockingbird in the last month. He's blazed thru all Madeleine L'Engel's novels and now he's on CS Lewis' Space trilogy. (Incidentally his school is unique, fabulous and not philistine at all—they have a rigourous program in class hours, but the amount of homework still leaves time for self chosen reading. ... we are so fortunate.)
Wrong "it's".
Gah!