May 28, 1999
He'd stop requiring them to slog through the likes of "Julius Caesar," "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Antigone."
Good riddance, I say. Such texts may be suitable for college-prep kids, but why, I ask, should the republic at large suffer through them?
Making kids read the classics turns them off to reading, says Bushman, professor of teaching and leadership at the University of Kansas and author of a Prentice-Hall textbook called "Using Young Adult Literature in the English Classroom." In fact, research that he conducted with a sample of 380 high school students showed that 12th graders read less than ninth graders.
To inspire reading, teachers should offer their students young adult literature written by contemporary authors, Bushman suggests.
He rattles off the names of writers I don't know: Robert Cormier, Chris Crutcher, Ann Rinaldi. He tells me about an English class in which 30 copies of Crutcher's "Running Loose" were passed out on Thursday and, by Monday, every kid had read the book. I like that hit rate.
Talking with Bushman brought back some high school reading memories. I would spend the school year flogging my way through novels like "Tom Jones" and "Billy Budd" † and then, each summer for four years running, would rip through J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." I dug Holden Caulfield, the book's caustic adolescent hero; like poor old Holden, I thought myself an outsider, in but not of a world of phony people. In reading this book, I discovered a pal in print. Reading to know that we're not alone and to discover one's identity are especially helpful to adolescents, Bushman thinks.
Having said this, I now want to back off a little. I don't believe Bushman would protest the sprinkling in of a few classics. F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby" is readable. The worlds of Hemingway and Steinbeck are not all that alien.
Reading texts about human lives that appear different from ours because they are remote in time or removed in social circumstance lets us discover how common and widespread human sorrows and rejoicings are.
Finally † and this, I admit, is a personal quirk † I would nudge the young to read world mythology, fables, epics. Norse legends kept me spellbound in childhood.
In them, I discovered that a giant ash tree called Yggdrasil overspread the world, binding Earth, heaven and hell together. At the end of time, I learned, wolves would devour both the sun and moon. Reading such stuff helps kids discover the miracle that an infinite number of worlds can be spun into being from a combination of just 26 letters.
My point is that even in adolescence, there are dozens of reasons for reading besides discovering our identity and what we share with other people.
Nevertheless, as Bushman rightly points out, the first task is to get the kids to turn the page. So young adult literature is probably the place to start.
Premature exposure to "Moby Dick," I'm sorry to say, doesn't help.
Column by Roger Martin