The Read-Aloud Way

Commentary

It almost seems as if the schools and teachers have given up. A story in The New York Times last week reiterates a trend we have been hearing about for many months.

“Kids Rarely Read Books Anymore. Even in English Class,” the title reads.

The evidence the reporter gathers leads to the dismaying conclusion that the high school English syllabus, circa 2025, doesn’t contain many complete novels: perhaps two or three over the entire year. What used to be a defining feature of the field has disappeared. In 11th grade in 1975, I had to read “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Sound and the Fury,” “Invisible Man,” and many more hefty fictions. Now—forget it.

The point is echoed by college teachers who complain that entering students simply won’t do the work, won’t read books, at least not in their entirety. The screen has replaced the printed page in their out-of-school lives, and the classroom doesn’t try to counteract the switch. Social media, video clips, text messages … they’re too powerful and alluring. Adolescents spending hours on the screen see the long literary narrative plainly as a bore. Teachers know their predispositions all too well. The days of Dickens, Crane, and Vonnegut are over.

I imagine few of the people reading this commentary are surprised. The flight from leisure book reading among the young has been going on for years. We documented it back in 2004, when I was at the National Endowment for the Arts, with a report rightly called “Reading at Risk.” What is different today is that the abandonment of books by a majority of students and their teachers is complete. As I said, the forces against book reading are too strong. Television, social media, texting, scrolling, streaming, and the rest are a thrilling tidal wave; the 250-page book is a slow drip from a leaky faucet.

We can’t ask teachers to make kids do what they never do on their own and haven’t the concentration to begin. If we told the schools, “You must get tough, assign ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ and test the kids to make sure they do it,” teachers would laugh and shake their heads. Book reading isn’t like doing times tables. It’s a behavior; it takes many hours; it presumes a level of literacy, and it presumes, also, a motivation, an interest, an enjoyment. If the desire is lacking, threats, encouragement, and bad grades won’t excite it.

A love of reading starts in the home, when a parent reads to a child, and the experience becomes a daily joy. That habit largely ends, however, when kids learn their ABCs. By the time they get to middle school, reading books is a lost preference. They have phones now, and the dopamine rush of a racy video beats the slow reading of a Hawthorne story every time.

What can the schools do? Here’s an idea, one that won’t overburden teachers and requires no new expenditures or technology. The idea is simple: Teachers should start what parents stopped. In elementary grades, a good 45 minutes should be set aside as read-aloud time. No exercises, no lesson plans, no group work, no diversions, only the teacher reading a good story to the students, who do nothing but listen. The materials are free and easy to find: for younger kids, youth versions of Greek myth, Bible stories, folk tales, and legends, and perennial favorites such as Louisa May Alcott and Hans Christian Andersen. The practice should continue through middle school with Edgar Allan Poe, Sherlock Holmes, and so forth. Novels could be covered chapter by chapter, and teachers could key the selections to the interests and capacities of their students.

The goal is to make reading a source of pleasure. If the pleasure doesn’t arise, the resistance to reading years later in high school grades will stick, and reading scores will continue to decline. Exercises in reading comprehension won’t help, nor will the assignment of more homework, not when it comes to inciting kids to want to read. It would be more than great to witness kids leaving eighth-grade English class eager to return the next day to find out what happens in the next scene. If they do, what teachers think is currently impossible might actually transpire: that is, the return of entire books to the high school curriculum.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.