eMOST

Member Submission

Required Reading
by Anne Taft

A recent New York Times article discussed a recent Middle School innovation: allowing each individual student to choose which books to read for English class. Its proponents argue that this approach can turn more children into lifelong readers. That's great if it works. But let's be realistic - the approach requires a certain amount of dedication on the part of the teacher to help each child find appropriate books. Also, even the proponents recognize that the approach does not produce consistent improvement in student scores on standardized tests, and that's often what matters to educators these days.

I think back to my experience as a student. The middle school I attended pushed its students to be well-rounded readers. Our summer reading list grouped books into categories, and we were required to read a certain number of books from each category and turn in book reports when school resumed in September. During the school year, we were required to keep up with our "outside reading" with books approved by our English teachers in advance. What I enjoyed reading during those years was my brothers' comic books and juvenile science fiction, all very easy reading for me and very enjoyable, but not acceptable to my English teacher, even for "outside reading".

I began to enjoy reading again in High School, but not in English class. I had a wonderful Civics teacher who required us to choose some reading to supplement our class work on each of the several topics we covered during the year. This included books from the library as well as magazine articles. The requirement was fairly loosely defined, so it was easy to find something that met the requirement and was interesting as well. Maybe that's why most of my reading today is non-fiction and magazine articles. I read occasional fiction, but only if it's safely outside the categories required by my Middle School English teachers.

Perhaps we should reconsider the goals of education and how best to realize those goals. If we want our children to have read the same books, to know the same "classic" literature, is it really necessary to have every child read these books? However carefully we may select the books, some children will read them voraciously, others will dutifully read them without any pleasure, and a few will not get past the first chapter. If we want our children to know that Moby Dick begins with the sentence "Call me Ishmael", is it really necessary that each of them can get through the often verbose prose of the rest of the book to get that one bit of knowledge? Perhaps a survey of literature course could do the job by including key passages of great literature and discussing the literary qualities of each. I'm reminded of the basic calculus course required to earn an MBA. It was required because calculus is used to derive the formula for the most economical quantity of manufacturing parts or supplies to order at a time. A business administrator does not need calculus to use this formula or to do anything else that's important to the job. So why require it?

Do we want our children to read the same literature in school so that, as adults, they will have read what other adults have read, but are so alienated from reading in general that they rarely read anything as adults? Or is it more important that they learn to love reading so much that they prefer it to advertisement-laden television and continue to enrich their lives with reading as adults?

The editor invites reader responses.

Although the members of Mensa can be opinionated, the Mensa organization itself has no opinion and remains neutral on issues.