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Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone

A recent list of must-read books for children compiled by the Britain’s Royal Society of Literature has raised a few eyebrows for its perceived slant toward the unnecessarily highbrow and difficult. The list of 30 titles — chosen by poet laureate Andrew Motion and authors J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman — included such titles as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. A column in The Times has now called the list to task, claiming that it is exactly this type of prescriptive reading list that scares so many young people away from literature — often for life.

Columnist Carol Sarler claims to be one of those former students who lost her taste for good books after being forced to read so many of them while making her through the British school system of the 1960s. She read the assigned books, did well on her tests and essays, and then never read a work of literature again. Why? “Reading books was … the stuff of school in exactly the same way as was trigonometry or chucking a javelin — and since leaving my esteemed seat of learning, I am as likely to curl up with Jane Austen for the fun of it as I am to flirt with a cosine or risk the wrong end of a spear.” Sarler compares her schooling with that of her daughter’s, whose experience of the more reader-friendly (and much maligned) curriculum of recent years had an unexpected effect: “When child of mine left school she, too, relinquished teenage activities in favour of the new — but, do guess, what new did she find? Why, at the age of 18, there it was, laid out before her: the entirely unexplored landscape of literature, which she swooped upon with what would become and has remained a sincere delight.”

Related links:
Read the op-ed piece in The Times
Read the Royal Society list in The Guardian

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