How to turn our kids into lifelong readers
At its best, reading is an intimate experience. It creates a direct conduit between the experiences and imaginations of the writer and the reader.
Patrick Hogan of the University of Connecticut and Keith Oatley of the University of Toronto are researchers who have studied the links between emotion and understanding.
They suggest that literature can play a vital role in helping people, especially young folks, learn to understand the lives and minds of others.
But what kind of literature? That often depends on what we, as adults, think it is “good” for kids to read.
Unfortunately, even in high school, what might have been the best part of my school day was rendered aggravating by having to read Shakespeare and sometimes read it aloud.
It was only in later years that I learned that Shakespeare’s stuff was never intended to be read, much less read aloud by less-than enthusiastic Grade 12 surfer/rugby players. I also discovered that Shakespeare’s brilliant plays were written to be performed by the best professional actors of the day for an essentially illiterate audience.
But somehow, high school killed Hamlet stone dead for me long before the prince of Denmark met his literary end at the point of Laertes’ poisoned blade.
Fortunately, brilliant film versions by Laurence Olivier, Tony Richardson and Kenneth Branagh eventually resurrected Hamlet for us all.
After high school came an undergraduate degree in English literature requiring exposure to the great works of literature — the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen. It was a curriculum designed to turn me into a lifelong reader of said great literature.
It did not. Quite the contrary, when I graduated, I thought I’d never read another book again.
My childhood imagination, which had been fostered by Treasure Island, Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, was well and truly dulled during those undergraduate years by the insistence of my professors that I embrace not just literature for its own sake but the intellectual analysis of literary critics such as F.R. Leavis, whose life’s work was to introduce a “seriousness” into studies of literature and an insistence that literature be subjected to the Leavis brand of intellectual scrutiny and evaluation.
It was a lot to take in, and Leavis and his followers made my head hurt, when all I really wanted to do was read the prescribed texts and, if at all possible, enjoy them.
My library became a collection of dusty, untouched texts.
As a recovering non-reader, it wasn’t until a few years later that I discovered John Steinbeck, and decided that reading was actually much more stimulating than I had been led to believe.
I devoured Steinbeck, all 16 novels, six nonfiction books and two collections of short stories. I visited Monterey and wandered along Cannery Row thinking about Doc and the others.
Steinbeck’s characters became part of what informed my understanding of a life I had not experienced, but which was closer to my own than life as represented by Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, the Brontës or even H.G. Wells.
So here’s my pitch for turning kids into readers.
The revised B.C. senior high school English curriculum requires that students begin to understand that literature should be studied within “personal, social and cultural contexts, values, and perspectives in texts, including gender, sexual orientation and socio-economic factors.”
No problem with any of that, but as a recent CBC piece quotes former English teacher Marnie Maretic as saying: “Our students are reading the same books that I read in the ’70s — The Outsiders, The Chrysalids, The Lord of the Flies.” Maretic added that many of her students have had trouble relating to characters in these older books. “It’s not that these aren’t great books,” she says, “but there have been great books written since then. Why can’t we update the material our kids are reading?”
The same report quotes B.C. Teachers’ Federation president Glen Hansman as saying: “There’s a need to increase the diversity of books and explore the perspectives of First Nations, LGBT and immigrant communities.”
“There’s all sorts of amazing books out there that might resonate with learners … but if no one’s been using them in schools before, a school might not be willing to take a chance on it.”
I’ll even throw in a bit of intellectual heresy here and suggest that for senior students we might include well-written “page turners” by contemporary mystery authors such as Canadians Louise Penny and Peter Robinson, American Martin Walker, Scottish author Ian Rankin or Irish author Derek Fee, whose books might not be regarded as “great literature,” but whose novels, replete with characters to whom we can relate, are hard to put down.
Turning kids into lifelong readers? Whatever it takes, I say.