Hey, know what's great for getting kids to read? Shaming them about what they choose to read!
It's not my job title, but I'm basically a cataloger. What that means is I sit and listen to NPR all day on the streaming radio from the Indianapolis and Yellow Springs stations while I enter books from the library into the searchable database.
Since I'm there for three or four hours a day on average, I tend to hear the same news stories over and over again and get really pissed off by them when they annoy me. (Dear Teapublicans: I don't buy your outrage over the tax thing. You weren't supposed to be applying for or getting nonprofit status in the first place, and you love things that you can blame on the Obama administration and/or feel persecuted by. On almost every show I can hear how thrilled the Republican talking heads are to have this to get self-righteous over. Shut the hell up already about how wronged you were.)
But yesterday I found it vaguely ironic that I've begun the special collections, the books over a hundred years old and/or in bad shape. So there I was working with books that have a few outliers out into the 1930s and 1950s (and one from 1820, which was in terrible shape but oh, was beautiful), but mostly range from about 1870 to 1925, while listening to people on the radio complain about how kids don't like to read old books:
What Kids Are Reading in School and Out
And it really, really pissed me off. More than the poor persecuted Tea Party, even.
The article actually manages to come off better than the radio segment did. The basic point of the story is that kids aren't reading a)at grade level and b)the classics. Text on a website has a pretty neutral tone, but on the radio it was, well, not delivered in a tone terribly different from the segments on the IRS and secret spying stories. The gist of it is that high school students are reading more YA lit and less of the classics, and teachers are assigning less difficult, and we can't be having with that. Juniors and seniors are reading books written at fifth and sixth grade reading levels, and "Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.' " Meanwhile another paragraph down is the line "Last year, we had more than 8.6 million students from across the country who read a total of 283 million books," says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning."
They like science fiction and fantasy! They don't like realism! Oh no! That's terri...ble... because... you know, of the... um...
...because kids like vampires different from the lore established by the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula? I guess?
But no, mostly it seems like people want us to think it's terrible that kids are reading tons and tons of books, but Teh Childrens aren't reading The Right Things. They make the argument that it's a problem because students often don't progress to books of higher difficulty than what they're reading at the end of middle school (so about twelve to fourteen years old). For every argument like that, though, there's inches more text like this:
"Most of the assigned books are novels, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm. Students even read recent works like The Help and The Notebook. But in 1989, high school students were being assigned works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Bronte and Edith Wharton.
Now, with the exception of Shakespeare, most classics have dropped off the list." (and since I spent way more time than I should admit to the other night reading entries from DC Comic's Superdictionary, now I feel like that paragraph needs "And that's terrible." added to the end.)
They're using the WHOA NO OUR KIDS RN'T REED GOOD argument to complain about speculative fiction and YA lit. That's basically all it is.
I am so sick of this kind of elitist snobbery. It's like when I lived in Ohio and worked for the public library there, and people would hear "feminist" or "writer" or "library worker" and go "oooohhhh, you must hate that kids are reading crap like 'Twilight!'"
And... no. No I don't. Yeah, as a feminist I worry when people--and it isn't just kids, it's people--insist that Twilight is the most perfect pure love story and Edward Cullen is the perfect man. As a writer, there is a part of me that's jealous that this kind of lazy (she didn't even go to Forks), badly written crap got so popular and made so much money. As a librarian-without-a-masters? I don't give a flying fuck. It's not my job to police what people read. They're reading, and that's good enough for me. The era of library as prescriptivist Arbiter of Culture is gone, and good riddance. You want Twilight? You want "The Anarchist Cookbook?" You want "Les Miserables" in the original French? Great, we'll try to get it for you, and take it with our blessings if we can. The point is that these young people who read Twilight are reading for fun, and it doesn't really matter if it's what people thirty years older than them think they should be reading. There is no one arbitrary standard by which people's tastes are good or bad. Reading schlock is better than not reading.
But what I find really frustrating that they're complaining that high school students don't read the classics while interviewing high school students who talk about how they like to read some classic novels. It's okay for people to not all like the same things. It really is.
Here's the thing: the people deciding that "The Catcher in the Rye" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Wuthering Heights" and all that are Important Works of Our Time and Relevant to Young People? They're not young people. These books might have been relevant when they were in high school, but that was at least a generation or two ago. It's like "West Side Story." The music's still great, the themes are still relevant. I'll even defend the dancing gang members, because if you actually watch the ballets like under the movie's overture and during the rumble, what that is is stylized gang violence, and depending on the production, it can be pretty obvious about what's actually happening. But you can't say that this is a modern Romeo and Juliette anymore, because it's incredibly dated. It was modern almost sixty years ago. In fact, it's an adult's idea of what teenagers were like from almost sixty years ago. Young people these days don't go around like "golly gee, daddy-o, look out for them swell zip guns!" So yeah, it can come off as pretty goofy in our actual modern times. It does not surprise me at all if some high schoolers today can't connect with it, because it doesn't speak to the world as they understand it. It's not their fault if they don't have the context and experiences to understand and appreciate something from forty years before they were born. "People have been reading this for a really long time" isn't a good enough reason to demand that it be taught until the end of time. Okay, Dickens and Bronte have long been acknowledged to be good writers. By adults (some adults, at that. I'll admit to not particularly liking any of their works I've read). Not by high school students.
If teachers can get more engagement with their classes and better academic performance with more modern, less realistic material? Hey, more power to 'em. I'm not much of a Harry Potter fan, but I think it would be unrealistic to say that those books aren't still going to be taught in another fifty years. We don't know yet what books are going to become the next set of Classics. It doesn't have to be the same ones they always were. There's nothing wrong with reading and teaching out of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century box. It seems kind of backward to say that "these books that are products of our time are trash because they aren't products of another time!" The world changes. The world grows. People's understanding of the world isn't what it was in 1915, and it's counterproductive to try to insist that this is the same world where Dickens and Sophocles and Shakespeare and whatall became classics, and so there's no room for anything after them. Not to mention, in the modern day, it's pretty easy to see how a lot of these classics are problematic as hell. It's kind of hypocritical to be like "these modern books provide terrible role models for children!" When you've got, you know, first wives being declared insane and locked away in attics in the "romantic" classics. Heathcliff is an abusive asshole who hates everyone and treats Cathy like dirt and Cathy goes with him anyway! Yes, that's um, so much better for teenage girls than "Twilight." Because really, when you look at this stuff that's supposedly so much better than what's out there now, there's one hell of a lot of racism and misogyny and classism and all kinds of things like that in there. High school students have a problem reading that? Good.
In fact, the whole "grade level" argument is kind of a cheat. They're talking about lexical grade level, sentence structure and things. Not content. I'm not completely sure I'd say "The Hunger Games" was written at a fifth grade level even if it has a fifth grade lexical score, because that's some dark, heavy stuff for a ten-year-old. One of the people interviewed was talking about how high schoolers aren't prepared for college because they haven't read novels with high enough lexical scores, but... what about the ones who don't plan to go to college? You really don't need much more than a high school or middle school lexical level in daily life. The average news story is written at a fifth-grade lexical level. Also,"Stotsky firmly believes that high school students should be reading challenging fiction to get ready for the reading they'll do in college. "'You wouldn't find words like 'malevolent,' 'malicious' or 'incorrigible' in science or history materials...'" Um, well no, but I'm fairly sure I've read words on that level in the Harry Potter books. Which have a lexical score below high school.
This whole idea that kids are somehow stupid or unprepared for the world because they don't read Charles Dickens is so incredibly insulting not just to the authors that do get them to read, but to the students and the teachers themselves.
From about a third of the way through the story:
"Back at Woodrow Wilson High School, at a 10th-grade English class - regular, not honors - students say they don't read much outside of school. But Tyler Jefferson and Adriel Miller are eager to talk. Adriel likes books about sports; Tyler likes history. Both say their teachers have assigned books they would not have chosen on their own. 'I read The Odyssey,' Tyler says. 'I read Romeo and Juliet. I didn't read Hamlet.' Asked what he thought of the books, Tyler acknowledges some challenges. 'It was very different, because how the language was back then, the dialogue that they had.'
Adriel agrees that books like that are tougher to read. 'That's why we have great teachers that actually make us understand," he says. "It's a harder challenge of our brain, you know; it's a challenge.'
But a challenge with its rewards, as Tyler says. 'It gives us a new view on things.'"
Literally two paragraphs later:
"'Kids were never pulled out of that particular mode in order to realize that in order to read more difficult works, you really have to work at it a little bit more," she says. "You've got to broaden your vocabulary. You may have to use a dictionary occasionally. You've got to do a lot more reading altogether.'"
JESUS CHRIST, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO THESE PEOPLE YOU'RE INTERVIEWING? These kids are smart. I think there are way more smart high school and middle school kids in public schools than a lot of people want to give credit to. They know how to read challenging books. Some of them like reading challenging books. But what they like to read doesn't impact what they can read. It's just human nature that when you're reading a book for fun, you tend to read something that you think is fun and maybe isn't too challenging instead of something that takes a lot of hard work. Should the library stop lending Janet Evanovich and Stephen King and Sue Grafton novels to adults until they turn in their book reports on the last Dostoyevsky they read? But oh no, kids read vampires!
Aside from that, trying to make someone appreciate Great Works is... going to make them not appreciate Great Works. My main memory of studying "To Kill A Mockingbird" in middle school is the teacher telling me off for reading the first book in the Man-Kzin Wars series (a spinoff from Larry Niven's novels) while I was supposed to be watching the movie version of a book I'd just spent four weeks reading. And I kind of remember being freaked out by the scene with the rabid dog, because other than "Old Yeller" I had no context to understand what was happening in that scene. I mean, "The Man-Kzin Wars" is crap, but I'd say that eleven years old is maybe not the best age for someone to appreciate what a damn fine actor Gregory Peck was. That movie was boring when I was forced to watch it. Even since I've kinda-maybe meant to read "To Kill A Mockingbird" again or watch the movie now that I can appreciate it, but I never actually do it. Meanwhile, while I was reading about the kzin, my tween brain was going "race of big macho war dudes with females that are basically unintelligent animals? WTF dude, that ain't right." I spent my tween/young teen years writing or plotting Known Universe fic where at least one of the important characters were the one or two lone exceptions who were not just intelligent female kzin, but kickass, really smart and clever and tough female kzin who impressed everyone with how awesome they were. Once I started reading C.J. Cherryh, there may or may not have been a crossover between Compact Space of the Chanur books and my version of Known Space that included the Sue-kzin. They really were the worst kind of Mary Sues, but the basic reason for them was that I saw a representation of women-equivalents that I understood as problematic, and that was how I decided to fix it. When I got a little older, I realized that it didn't make a lot of sense in the canon, and they split off into this related race that just never quite got mentioned in the books. Then that turned into the naitan, the main race when I started writing stories in my own original universe. And the space opera I've never been able to write that Charlie Bridger and Nicholas Vintner come from? Yeah, that's that. So arguably I got a lot more out of reading Larry Niven spinoffs when I was supposed to be watching the movie than I did from this film I kinda eventually mean to maybe see again sometime. (At the same time, when I was nine to twelve and reading pulp science fiction instead of "To Kill A Mockingbird," my other favorite authors were Jack London and Rudyard Kipling. So not being into one classic book doesn't mean someone hates the classics.)
Also? So what if high school students don't like realism in their fiction? There's plenty of realism in real life. If they don't want to read about people living horrible lives--because that's what "realism" seems to mean in the fiction I read in school, "awful things happening to people in meandering stories"--when they might be living their own horrible lives? The world's a pretty screwed up place right now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to crawl into a book about something completely different to get away from it. And if kids want to escape to the stars or to dystopias where the good guys win or to romances where they have some superpowerful, dangerous creature on their side and the monsters are obvious instead of to Napoleonic England, so the fuck what? Let them. It's not hurting anything. In fact, it's pretty damned presumptuous to determine that someone shouldn't want escapism or their reading escapist things is bad without knowing anything about what they're feeling or what they might be living.
It's really just another round of the same old "Children today don't do what we did when we were children. And that's terrible!" trash mixed with "genre fiction isn't real fiction, of course" garbage juice. There is nothing wrong with teenagers today wanting to read fiction that was written for them. There's nothing wrong with adults reading it. It's this you must and that's wrong that's the problem. For all the hand-wringing people who wring their hands do over Why Aren't Our Children Reading, this is a stupid manufactured problem. Our Children are reading. They're reading the things they like, and what the adults who are concerned about it need to do is give them credit for it and back the hell off. It's really a no-win situation there; "Oh no, why aren't you reading!" when they don't and "Oh no! Why aren't you reading what I want you to!" when they do. That's how you teach kids not to read the things they should be reading in high school.
This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/369162.html
Since I'm there for three or four hours a day on average, I tend to hear the same news stories over and over again and get really pissed off by them when they annoy me. (Dear Teapublicans: I don't buy your outrage over the tax thing. You weren't supposed to be applying for or getting nonprofit status in the first place, and you love things that you can blame on the Obama administration and/or feel persecuted by. On almost every show I can hear how thrilled the Republican talking heads are to have this to get self-righteous over. Shut the hell up already about how wronged you were.)
But yesterday I found it vaguely ironic that I've begun the special collections, the books over a hundred years old and/or in bad shape. So there I was working with books that have a few outliers out into the 1930s and 1950s (and one from 1820, which was in terrible shape but oh, was beautiful), but mostly range from about 1870 to 1925, while listening to people on the radio complain about how kids don't like to read old books:
What Kids Are Reading in School and Out
And it really, really pissed me off. More than the poor persecuted Tea Party, even.
The article actually manages to come off better than the radio segment did. The basic point of the story is that kids aren't reading a)at grade level and b)the classics. Text on a website has a pretty neutral tone, but on the radio it was, well, not delivered in a tone terribly different from the segments on the IRS and secret spying stories. The gist of it is that high school students are reading more YA lit and less of the classics, and teachers are assigning less difficult, and we can't be having with that. Juniors and seniors are reading books written at fifth and sixth grade reading levels, and "Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.' " Meanwhile another paragraph down is the line "Last year, we had more than 8.6 million students from across the country who read a total of 283 million books," says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning."
They like science fiction and fantasy! They don't like realism! Oh no! That's terri...ble... because... you know, of the... um...
...because kids like vampires different from the lore established by the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula? I guess?
But no, mostly it seems like people want us to think it's terrible that kids are reading tons and tons of books, but Teh Childrens aren't reading The Right Things. They make the argument that it's a problem because students often don't progress to books of higher difficulty than what they're reading at the end of middle school (so about twelve to fourteen years old). For every argument like that, though, there's inches more text like this:
"Most of the assigned books are novels, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm. Students even read recent works like The Help and The Notebook. But in 1989, high school students were being assigned works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Bronte and Edith Wharton.
Now, with the exception of Shakespeare, most classics have dropped off the list." (and since I spent way more time than I should admit to the other night reading entries from DC Comic's Superdictionary, now I feel like that paragraph needs "And that's terrible." added to the end.)
They're using the WHOA NO OUR KIDS RN'T REED GOOD argument to complain about speculative fiction and YA lit. That's basically all it is.
I am so sick of this kind of elitist snobbery. It's like when I lived in Ohio and worked for the public library there, and people would hear "feminist" or "writer" or "library worker" and go "oooohhhh, you must hate that kids are reading crap like 'Twilight!'"
And... no. No I don't. Yeah, as a feminist I worry when people--and it isn't just kids, it's people--insist that Twilight is the most perfect pure love story and Edward Cullen is the perfect man. As a writer, there is a part of me that's jealous that this kind of lazy (she didn't even go to Forks), badly written crap got so popular and made so much money. As a librarian-without-a-masters? I don't give a flying fuck. It's not my job to police what people read. They're reading, and that's good enough for me. The era of library as prescriptivist Arbiter of Culture is gone, and good riddance. You want Twilight? You want "The Anarchist Cookbook?" You want "Les Miserables" in the original French? Great, we'll try to get it for you, and take it with our blessings if we can. The point is that these young people who read Twilight are reading for fun, and it doesn't really matter if it's what people thirty years older than them think they should be reading. There is no one arbitrary standard by which people's tastes are good or bad. Reading schlock is better than not reading.
But what I find really frustrating that they're complaining that high school students don't read the classics while interviewing high school students who talk about how they like to read some classic novels. It's okay for people to not all like the same things. It really is.
Here's the thing: the people deciding that "The Catcher in the Rye" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Wuthering Heights" and all that are Important Works of Our Time and Relevant to Young People? They're not young people. These books might have been relevant when they were in high school, but that was at least a generation or two ago. It's like "West Side Story." The music's still great, the themes are still relevant. I'll even defend the dancing gang members, because if you actually watch the ballets like under the movie's overture and during the rumble, what that is is stylized gang violence, and depending on the production, it can be pretty obvious about what's actually happening. But you can't say that this is a modern Romeo and Juliette anymore, because it's incredibly dated. It was modern almost sixty years ago. In fact, it's an adult's idea of what teenagers were like from almost sixty years ago. Young people these days don't go around like "golly gee, daddy-o, look out for them swell zip guns!" So yeah, it can come off as pretty goofy in our actual modern times. It does not surprise me at all if some high schoolers today can't connect with it, because it doesn't speak to the world as they understand it. It's not their fault if they don't have the context and experiences to understand and appreciate something from forty years before they were born. "People have been reading this for a really long time" isn't a good enough reason to demand that it be taught until the end of time. Okay, Dickens and Bronte have long been acknowledged to be good writers. By adults (some adults, at that. I'll admit to not particularly liking any of their works I've read). Not by high school students.
If teachers can get more engagement with their classes and better academic performance with more modern, less realistic material? Hey, more power to 'em. I'm not much of a Harry Potter fan, but I think it would be unrealistic to say that those books aren't still going to be taught in another fifty years. We don't know yet what books are going to become the next set of Classics. It doesn't have to be the same ones they always were. There's nothing wrong with reading and teaching out of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century box. It seems kind of backward to say that "these books that are products of our time are trash because they aren't products of another time!" The world changes. The world grows. People's understanding of the world isn't what it was in 1915, and it's counterproductive to try to insist that this is the same world where Dickens and Sophocles and Shakespeare and whatall became classics, and so there's no room for anything after them. Not to mention, in the modern day, it's pretty easy to see how a lot of these classics are problematic as hell. It's kind of hypocritical to be like "these modern books provide terrible role models for children!" When you've got, you know, first wives being declared insane and locked away in attics in the "romantic" classics. Heathcliff is an abusive asshole who hates everyone and treats Cathy like dirt and Cathy goes with him anyway! Yes, that's um, so much better for teenage girls than "Twilight." Because really, when you look at this stuff that's supposedly so much better than what's out there now, there's one hell of a lot of racism and misogyny and classism and all kinds of things like that in there. High school students have a problem reading that? Good.
In fact, the whole "grade level" argument is kind of a cheat. They're talking about lexical grade level, sentence structure and things. Not content. I'm not completely sure I'd say "The Hunger Games" was written at a fifth grade level even if it has a fifth grade lexical score, because that's some dark, heavy stuff for a ten-year-old. One of the people interviewed was talking about how high schoolers aren't prepared for college because they haven't read novels with high enough lexical scores, but... what about the ones who don't plan to go to college? You really don't need much more than a high school or middle school lexical level in daily life. The average news story is written at a fifth-grade lexical level. Also,"Stotsky firmly believes that high school students should be reading challenging fiction to get ready for the reading they'll do in college. "'You wouldn't find words like 'malevolent,' 'malicious' or 'incorrigible' in science or history materials...'" Um, well no, but I'm fairly sure I've read words on that level in the Harry Potter books. Which have a lexical score below high school.
This whole idea that kids are somehow stupid or unprepared for the world because they don't read Charles Dickens is so incredibly insulting not just to the authors that do get them to read, but to the students and the teachers themselves.
From about a third of the way through the story:
"Back at Woodrow Wilson High School, at a 10th-grade English class - regular, not honors - students say they don't read much outside of school. But Tyler Jefferson and Adriel Miller are eager to talk. Adriel likes books about sports; Tyler likes history. Both say their teachers have assigned books they would not have chosen on their own. 'I read The Odyssey,' Tyler says. 'I read Romeo and Juliet. I didn't read Hamlet.' Asked what he thought of the books, Tyler acknowledges some challenges. 'It was very different, because how the language was back then, the dialogue that they had.'
Adriel agrees that books like that are tougher to read. 'That's why we have great teachers that actually make us understand," he says. "It's a harder challenge of our brain, you know; it's a challenge.'
But a challenge with its rewards, as Tyler says. 'It gives us a new view on things.'"
Literally two paragraphs later:
"'Kids were never pulled out of that particular mode in order to realize that in order to read more difficult works, you really have to work at it a little bit more," she says. "You've got to broaden your vocabulary. You may have to use a dictionary occasionally. You've got to do a lot more reading altogether.'"
JESUS CHRIST, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO THESE PEOPLE YOU'RE INTERVIEWING? These kids are smart. I think there are way more smart high school and middle school kids in public schools than a lot of people want to give credit to. They know how to read challenging books. Some of them like reading challenging books. But what they like to read doesn't impact what they can read. It's just human nature that when you're reading a book for fun, you tend to read something that you think is fun and maybe isn't too challenging instead of something that takes a lot of hard work. Should the library stop lending Janet Evanovich and Stephen King and Sue Grafton novels to adults until they turn in their book reports on the last Dostoyevsky they read? But oh no, kids read vampires!
Aside from that, trying to make someone appreciate Great Works is... going to make them not appreciate Great Works. My main memory of studying "To Kill A Mockingbird" in middle school is the teacher telling me off for reading the first book in the Man-Kzin Wars series (a spinoff from Larry Niven's novels) while I was supposed to be watching the movie version of a book I'd just spent four weeks reading. And I kind of remember being freaked out by the scene with the rabid dog, because other than "Old Yeller" I had no context to understand what was happening in that scene. I mean, "The Man-Kzin Wars" is crap, but I'd say that eleven years old is maybe not the best age for someone to appreciate what a damn fine actor Gregory Peck was. That movie was boring when I was forced to watch it. Even since I've kinda-maybe meant to read "To Kill A Mockingbird" again or watch the movie now that I can appreciate it, but I never actually do it. Meanwhile, while I was reading about the kzin, my tween brain was going "race of big macho war dudes with females that are basically unintelligent animals? WTF dude, that ain't right." I spent my tween/young teen years writing or plotting Known Universe fic where at least one of the important characters were the one or two lone exceptions who were not just intelligent female kzin, but kickass, really smart and clever and tough female kzin who impressed everyone with how awesome they were. Once I started reading C.J. Cherryh, there may or may not have been a crossover between Compact Space of the Chanur books and my version of Known Space that included the Sue-kzin. They really were the worst kind of Mary Sues, but the basic reason for them was that I saw a representation of women-equivalents that I understood as problematic, and that was how I decided to fix it. When I got a little older, I realized that it didn't make a lot of sense in the canon, and they split off into this related race that just never quite got mentioned in the books. Then that turned into the naitan, the main race when I started writing stories in my own original universe. And the space opera I've never been able to write that Charlie Bridger and Nicholas Vintner come from? Yeah, that's that. So arguably I got a lot more out of reading Larry Niven spinoffs when I was supposed to be watching the movie than I did from this film I kinda eventually mean to maybe see again sometime. (At the same time, when I was nine to twelve and reading pulp science fiction instead of "To Kill A Mockingbird," my other favorite authors were Jack London and Rudyard Kipling. So not being into one classic book doesn't mean someone hates the classics.)
Also? So what if high school students don't like realism in their fiction? There's plenty of realism in real life. If they don't want to read about people living horrible lives--because that's what "realism" seems to mean in the fiction I read in school, "awful things happening to people in meandering stories"--when they might be living their own horrible lives? The world's a pretty screwed up place right now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to crawl into a book about something completely different to get away from it. And if kids want to escape to the stars or to dystopias where the good guys win or to romances where they have some superpowerful, dangerous creature on their side and the monsters are obvious instead of to Napoleonic England, so the fuck what? Let them. It's not hurting anything. In fact, it's pretty damned presumptuous to determine that someone shouldn't want escapism or their reading escapist things is bad without knowing anything about what they're feeling or what they might be living.
It's really just another round of the same old "Children today don't do what we did when we were children. And that's terrible!" trash mixed with "genre fiction isn't real fiction, of course" garbage juice. There is nothing wrong with teenagers today wanting to read fiction that was written for them. There's nothing wrong with adults reading it. It's this you must and that's wrong that's the problem. For all the hand-wringing people who wring their hands do over Why Aren't Our Children Reading, this is a stupid manufactured problem. Our Children are reading. They're reading the things they like, and what the adults who are concerned about it need to do is give them credit for it and back the hell off. It's really a no-win situation there; "Oh no, why aren't you reading!" when they don't and "Oh no! Why aren't you reading what I want you to!" when they do. That's how you teach kids not to read the things they should be reading in high school.
This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/369162.html