Why Kids Should Be Reading More

I do not know if the problem set out in Mike St. Thomas's American Students Are Starving for Fiction and Poetry, being long removed from school kids, but, if so, I agree with his argument:

everal writers have recently called attention to the decline of literature in American schools. Nathan Heller’s much-circulated New Yorker article “The End of the English Major” examined the slow death of fiction and poetry in colleges and universities. In the New York Times, Pamela Paul responded to Heller by blaming the Common Core for killing high schoolers’ desire to read. In the Atlantic, novelist Katherine Marsh lamented the lack of stories being read to America’s elementary students. At all levels, it appears, our students are reading less and less.

All this fatalism about our country’s wavering commitment to teaching English is telling. Despite the apparent decline of stories in our schools, literature remains close to our hearts. We may click our tongues at the demise of other liberal arts—philosophy, say, or history—but we gnash our teeth about English.

Encountering the right book at the right time can redirect a life like few other things can. In grade school my love of stories was kindled by the likes of the Hardy Boys and Matt Christopher’s sports tales. In college, reading and discussing long novels like Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov forced me to ask the ultimate questions—Why are we here? What is life for?—and spurred me to search for answers both in myself and in the world. In his 1949 Nobel Prize speech, William Faulkner claimed that the only thing worth writing about was “the human heart in conflict with itself,” and that is certainly what drew me—and still draws me—to a good book. Perhaps what we mourn in the death of the English class, above all else, is the rapidly closing aperture in public life for these kinds of transformative encounters.

I say that now, even though when I was school age I read large amounts of histories and biographies. I did want to know the world, but there were stories, too. Much to the worry of my mother, who thought I was drifting into a dream world. 

Without imagination, what are we?

sch 4/28