4 Ways High School Makes You Hate Reading

Let me be clear: I still love reading good books, but since experience has taught me that there's about a 95 percent chance that a random (adult) book I pick up is going to be unenjoyable, I spend more time researching a book before I read it than I spent researching my house before I bought it. It's crazy to have to be so scared and wary of something I used to look forward to so much.

I think this kind of experience is part of why only 50 percent of American adults have read any novel, short story, poem or play in the past year, and only 54 percent have read any kind of book at all that wasn't required. There was a bump up from 2002 to 2008, which they think was related to Oprah's book club, or Harry Potter -- you know, things reminiscent of the "Reading Is Fun" campaigns they targeted at kids, which I guess we need for adults now.

Getty/Photoshop
I'm not sure if this is a farcical joke about a dumb reading campaign or a satire on the way they are actually marketing books to grown-ups these days.

And as a disclaimer, I know there's going to be people out there who loved The Scarlet Letter or A Separate Peace or what have you and feel like they got a lot out of it, and teachers who manage to get kids really engaged in discussing literature, and that is cool, but I don't think that's the common experience. Here are the sorts of things I think are going on a lot more often:

A lot of these may be good reasons why you should read the book, but they shouldn't be used to prove that the book is good. I'm not saying to strip all these books out of the curriculum or only make kids read things they enjoy. Life is hard and you have to do things you don't like. When you grow up, you will have to read boring/wrong things and listen to boring/wrong people from time to time, and figure out how to pay attention and understand their point of view, and that is a skill you need to practice. But when just about every single book on the reading list is something that makes the majority of your class go home and blog about how much they hate it, it starts to seem like a Fahrenheit 451-style plot to destroy people's interest in reading.

The stated goal of teaching literature isn't just to get kids familiar with famous books; it's also supposed to teach kids how to discuss stories and write intelligently. You teach them how to find symbolism and metaphors and hero's journeys and character arcs in an assigned book so that when they consume other media (other books, movies, long personal lies told by disturbed family members, etc.) in the future, they can point all those things out to explain why they're good or bad.

And to be totally realistic, most of the practical application of this would go to movies, because more people watch and discuss movies (or TV shows) than read books these days. This seems bad at first, because there are a lot of terrible movies and TV shows out there today. But there's a lot of very smart criticism and discussion of bad movies. I've mentioned Red Letter Media and their reviews before. You wouldn't think there would be anything to learn from the vacuous Star Wars prequels, but apparently there's a lot to point out about what specific elements of story and drama are missing, and a lot more intelligent observations to be pulled out of the movies than went into them, somehow.

So of course you don't want to let the kids get away with writing an essay about an assigned book saying, "It sucks, it was boring, Heathcliff and Catherine were stupid and annoying," even if you admit that Wuthering Heights is a piece of shit. But what if you let them write an essay that goes negative on the book as long as they make reasoned, intelligent points that show they understood the author's intentions and the methods they used to achieve them, and then explain why they think the author failed at this?

Getty
"I feel that Bronte was needlessly derivative in naming her main character after a cartoon cat."

They can't just say "The book was preachy" -- they'll have to say that a specific point was made "heavy-handedly," cite a passage they find particularly ham-fisted and explain which words and phrases they feel butcher the idea of subtlety. They'll have to explain why a certain chapter might have appealed to the author's contemporary audience by showing an understanding of those readers and their situation, before explaining what's changed in the intervening years to make that part of the story mawkish and cartoony. (Am I talking about Dickens? You decide.)

It's a lot more motivating to write something you really believe. When you look for supporting points for your assigned essay on which character in The Great Gatsby best symbolizes the American Dream, you'll probably be looking through your notes trying to figure out what your teacher wants you to say, and you'll learn how to repeat things people want to hear. If you're writing about why The Sun Also Rises sucks, your points will come from actual opinions you have and you'll learn how to organize your own opinions and express them.

Getty
Without using penis-shaped emoticons.

Even if the kids are wrong, like they say Shakespeare was a hack, being able to actually support that opinion with good points that show they really understand the material is pretty impressive. And the real world is full of murky issues (religion, politics, which character class is overpowered) where there's no authoritative adult to come in and say which is the "right" opinion. They need to learn how to back their shit up themselves when nobody else is there to back them up and tell the class they got the right answer. People who don't know how to articulate their reasoning just put down their stakes defensively and end up getting into a grown-up version of "Nuh-uh"/"Uh-huh." And it's not cute at that age.

The argument is that fun and popular books are too shallow to get much out of. They're not going to have as many themes, or new vocabulary words, or symbols, or unusual storytelling techniques as a classic novel. And that's probably true in a lot of cases. The point they're missing here is that most high school classes never even get close to digging out all the analyzable stuff from a book, because of time limits or limits of the students' reading level. So imagine books as oil wells, full of tarry, black, flammable ideas to analyze. War and Peace has like a ton of light sweet crude going 5 miles deep and Jurassic Park is about, I don't know, 10 feet deep.

Not to scale.

From my experience, even the average honors class only ends up drilling down about 9 feet. Tolstoy sure has a lot more to offer, but you're never going to get to it.

Maybe that's a good experience to have -- to know that there are books that are totally going to make you feel out of your league and take a lot of time to fully grasp. But you should also have the experience of thoroughly analyzing most of the facets of a book to get an idea of all the parts you should be looking at, and just to have the satisfaction of mastering something. You can get a Cliffs Notes overview of a big, complex book, and then just totally dismantle a more lightweight book like you are rebuilding a '57 Chevy.

By Buck, via Wikimedia Commons
That's one of those cars people rebuild, right? I don't know cars.

And when you're discussing universal themes like good and evil, redemption, belief, and farts, or common techniques like symbolism, irony, and first- vs. third-person narrative, I think it's a mistake to only look at them in classic literature. It creates an artificial barrier between classics and modern-day popular media so that a lot of people who learn those concepts while reading Shakespeare don't think about applying them to Inception.

I think it would be kind of neat to have an assignment dealing with a character's turn from good to evil where you compare how it's done in Paradise Lost, Animal Farm, Breaking Bad, the Star Wars prequels and Warcraft III. Where was it most believable and why? How much of it was character-driven and how much of it was driven by outside circumstances or magic? And you'll probably get to use the term "deus ex machina" somewhere in there. Literary!

You'd read Paradise Lost or Dorian Gray or whatever in class, and it's up to you to find other things to compare them to. You only get one video game. (And if it's Deus Ex, you're not allowed to use the term "deus ex machina.")

Ill Gaming
I read in Reader's Digest or something that some mom was shocked when her kid asked for this game because she thought he was saying "Day of Sex." That is now the only thing I will call that game.

Instead of asking kids to accept the idea that some books are deep and some books are not because we say so, why not have them look at the "deep version" and the "shallow version" of the same plot? Hamlet and The Lion King or something. When they compare and contrast them, they'll probably see for themselves what The Lion King is missing, even if they like it better. Of course they should also be allowed to say what they think Hamlet is missing, too (lions).

And this teacher feels like kids should not waste their summers reading The Hunger Games because they don't gain much "verbal and world knowledge," recommending The Red Badge of Courage and a bunch of nonfiction books about the horrors experienced by real people in other times and places, like Hiroshima, well-known as a great summer romp. These are really valuable books, and kids should have some idea about the world around them, but seriously, even in the summer, they can't read a book just for fun?

She says: "Summer assignments should be about why we need to learn and why we need to talk about what we think." Sure, that's an important lesson that needs to be taught at some point, but when is there time for them to learn the other important lesson: Reading is something you can also do for fun, when you are taking a break from learning? You can't just tell people that and hope they remember it when they graduate and finally have time for it. That's something they need to learn by doing it and experiencing the fun.

Ill Gaming
Like you shouldn't play a video game about a day of sex; you should just go out and have one.

I was a really fast reader and had no life, so I probably had the time to read important, assigned books as well as fun things over the summer, but most of the other kids I knew didn't read that fast and had a lot of activities, and, you know, friends or something. If you assigned them a book to read for the summer, that was probably going to be the only one they would have time to get to. They would see reading as a hateful devil that chases you relentlessly, even into your leisure months.

Getty
Here is a painting of -- I am not joking -- the devil trying to get St. Augustine to read something.

I'm not saying people should stop teaching classics or make the entire curriculum out of Stephen King books, but at a certain point in a kid's life, reading gets turned into all work and no play (which makes Jack uninteresting or something ... I forget). You've got to really be pretty crazy about reading to come out on the other side still excited about the next book you're about to open. (And you'll probably lose that excitement after going through any literary fiction for adults these days, but that is another story.)

As for me, I haven't given up on reading. I'm still looking for good books to read, but I've been burned so much by recommendations that I've instituted a new procedure for the approval of any new reading material. I will require at least five notarized affidavits from me-certified book evaluators who give the book at least 4 out of 5 stars in three major evaluation categories (pacing, character development and amount of dinosaurs, for example) before I will read it. Certification is a fairly straightforward process involving an application in which you list your favorite books and other media and a brief essay describing what you think I am looking for in a book. If your application is satisfactory, it will be followed by two phone interviews. Certification can be revoked at any time if evidence surfaces of you reading Fifty Shades of Grey or other disqualifying material unless you can submit witness statements from two independent evaluators testifying that you were only reading it so you could write jokes about it. This might sound like a great deal of trouble to recommend a book, but think about what's at stake, man. I could be bored for several hours! Who wants that on their hands?

Check out more from Christina in 6 Bad Ideas in Video Game Mash-Ups We'll Probably See Next and 6 Ways Cities Are Getting Into the Attention-Whore Game.