biancadarc.com Blog

How Do You Get Kids to Read?

Apparently NOT by making them read award winning children’s books.

What? Okay, I’ll explain…

I recently read an article in the Washington Post about the Newbery Medal – a prestigious award for children’s literature. I have an interest in such things because, as some of you know, I am a librarian (among other things). Yet, as a child, I HATED to read!!!

You heard that right. I HATED to read… until… my 5th grade teacher gave us an assignment to do a book report. (I was down in the dumps over it.) The difference in this assignment was that WE got to choose the book from a list of about 50 books she’d selected. I trudged to the library and dutifully looked at all the books on the list and picked one that looked okay. It happened to be one of the Black Stallion books – not the first in the series, but somewhere near the beginning. I read that book, then HAD to go find the others. Over the next months I read every one of those books and let me tell you that is a LONG series!

Ever since then, I’ve been a voracious reader. But I still struggled through the assigned books in high school and I avoided college literature classes as much as possible. Being an honors program student and science major, I managed to place out of the writing classes and only had to take one or two honors college classes in literature. Sometimes I feel bad about that, but honestly, if I want to read more of the classics, I know where the library is.   And in my own defense, I have read many on my own.

I mention all this for a reason, and it relates to the controversey surrounding the Newbery Medal in a roundabout way. Apparently the books chosen by the Newbery committee in recent years haven’t been very accessible to their intended audience – children. They may have impressed the committee with their tough social issues (death, loss of a parent, diseases, etc, – sounds like a Lifetime movie of the week, doesn’t it?), but they’re not appealing to kids.

If the idea of children’s literature is to make kids into lifelong readers – which the Black Stallion, and later, The Lord of the Rings did for me – then the Newbery seems to be missing the mark. If, however, the committee is interested in advancing some kind of social agenda and promoting the careers of people who write such books, then it appears they are doing a fine job.

As The Post said:

“On the January day when the annual winner is announced, bookstores nationwide sell out, libraries clamor for copies and teachers add the work to lesson plans.”

“Winning books become instant bestsellers. Many bookstores and libraries have Newbery sections, and popular television shows interview the winners each year.”

So the award can turn an otherwise unknown book into an overnight sensation. And all the money and fame that goes along with it. That’s a lot of power to give a small committee of people.

The award is given by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association (ALA). I’ve had issues in the past with the way the ALA gets involved in political issues. It’s the main reason I am no longer a member of the ALA. I don’t like my dues money going to support political ideas with which I vehemently disagree. I mistakenly thought the ALA was supposed to be about supporting libraries and librarians, but instead it’s turned into some sort of political action committee involving itself in things better left to politicians. Not librarians. But I digress…

The Post goes on to say report:

“John Beach, associate professor of literacy education at St. John’s University in New York, studied 30 years of book lists… Books prized by children had stories and characters “accessible” to their lives, Beach’s report concluded. “The Newbery has probably done far more to turn kids off to reading than any other book award in children’s publishing,” he said.”

“Richard Allington, an education professor at the University of Tennessee and a literacy expert, wonders why adults seem to identify literature with books that are sad and difficult.”

Huzzah! I’ve always wondered the same thing. Why are “happy” books not considered “literature” for any age level? I don’t think it was this way in times past. If so, Shakespeare would have never written a single comedy!

Of course, what we now consider classics of literature were often the popular “pulp fiction” if you will, of their day. I wonder if the award winners of today will go on to be the classics of tomorrow? I’m pretty sure wildly popular books, like the Harry Potter series, will have some longevity, but what about the Newbery Medal winners? I’m not so sure about that.

Worse, if kids are made to read them and come to detest reading, what does that do for our future generations? If only we had more teachers like my 5th grade teacher. She let us pick the books we wanted to read – within reason, of course – and never commented negatively on our choices. As far as she was concerned, if we were reading, it was a good thing. That, after all, was the goal – to allow us to be independent thinkers who knew how to read, and who therefore would be able to find and digest information we’d need in the future.

She wasn’t trying to force-feed us some “hard facts” about life, death, parent loss, or diseases by making us do book reports on movie-of-the-week books. If we wanted to read happy books about horses, she was all for it. If some of the boys wanted to read biographies of famous generals or books about race cars, she didn’t criticize them for it. As far as she was concerned, we were reading and finding out what WE liked to read. She wasn’t forcing us to learn about some pet social issue of hers.

Let kids be kids. They’ll have to face the world’s social problems soon enough.

(Note: The book pictured above is a Newbery winner and has been criticized as being “inaccesible to young readers” in the Post article. I really like the cover (shallow, I know) and as an adult the book might appeal to me, but I’m not so sure a series of monologues is something kids would flock to.)