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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]English major here:  I think this is a combination of phones and screens, which have killed reading for pleasure in many kids, and the fact that teaching of literature has become “politics by other means” and now almost entirely centers concern about inclusion and contemporary obsession with questions of identity at the expense of teaching challenging works. When you swap out The Scarlet Letter for some sort of Y.A.-level story about the challenges facing Identity Group X, it will have pedagogical impacts. [/quote]

I’m an elementary teacher with a master’s in English and the use of lower level texts over the last twenty years is appalling. I don’t see anything like what you describe about content, but teachers are definitely giving students much less complex texts because they say students can’t understand the harder stuff. If students aren’t reading grade level texts when they leave fifth or sixth grade and have access to intensive literacy teaching and interventions, it’s going to be much harder to get on level before they graduate.[/quote]

I think this starts with parents. If you tell many parents here on DCUM that alongside reading Dog Man and Rainbow Fairies their kids should also be introduced to books from the golden age of children's literature (late 19th century to mid 20th) like Narnia, The Borrowers, Andrew Lang fairy stories, E. Nesbit, and so many others they will tell you those books are "too boring" or "too hard" and you should only ever let kids read whatever as long as they are reading. But parents - and you see this most often with homeschoolers - who read aloud rigorous stories to their kids and require them to read some on their own know that you can absolutely expand a child's reading "palatte" just like you can expand their food palatte. Just like it takes 15 times for a kid to learn to know a certain food, it takes a little while to develop an appreciate for a more complex story. It's easiest if you start by reading, say, a fairy tale illustrated by Paul O. Zelensky and Winnie the Pooh to your preschooler and go from there. Sometimes you may need to have your kids tackle a denser story on audiobook. My kids would never read The Princess and the Goblin because it's really vintage 19th century language, but they devoured the audiobook.

If your kids from preschool on are used to the classic literature that college kids of, say, the 1980s would have also read, then they will already know many of the figures of speech from what they learned young. If they read D'Auliers Greek myths as kids they will have background for Homer. If they read Andrew Lang they will have been steeped in the same stories that readers of Dickens knew.

And yes - some of the thing is that we expect many more people to go to college these days than they did in prior generations. If your parents don't know the value of J. R. R. Tolkein, they aren't putting in the work for you to do so. And that makes teachers jobs much harder.[/quote]

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