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Avid High School Reading Begins in the Primary Grades

by Gaby Chapman
A recent study published by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers has concluded
that the decline in reading skills among American adults can be attributed to the practice of allowing
high school students to read books that interest them. When students choose what they read, the
top two books are the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series. The implication is that high school
teachers must double down on making their students read harder books. But this has not and will
not make them into readers.

Here are the reasons why high school students are choosing to read Harry Potter and Twilight:

The Harry Potter and Twilight books are two series that have “escaped” from the clutches
of an adult world seemingly dedicated on destroying any child’s natural interest in reading
for fun—and all kids instinctively know this. So when kids with no love for reading reach
high school and hear they will have to read a book of their own choosing for so many
minutes a day, they know they will be able to make it through such a dreaded assignment if
they choose Harry Potter or Twilight.
High school students choose to read Harry Potter or Twilight because they did not get the
chance to become enthusiastic readers in the earlier grades. Does anybody think that a child
who reads Harry Potter in fourth grade is going to be choosing to read it in twelfth? If that
child has spent his/her earlier years reading Harry Potter, followed in rapid succession by
Garth Nix, Kenneth Oppel, Suzanne Collins, Jonathan Stroud, Orson Scott Card, Cassandra
Clare, and on and on, by high school, that child will be choosing Haruki Murakami, Neal
Stephenson, Franz Kafka, and Phillip Dick, to name a few.

High school is when most students finally give up on reading. Fifty percent say the like to read in
fourth grade; less than twenty five percent say they like to read when they graduate from high
school. Reading for the pure pleasure of it is almost as rare in high schools as is sightings of the
Loch Ness monster. More forced readings of ordained books in high school will not make better
readers. More encouragement for reading with wild, joyous abandon in the earlier grades will deliver
more high school students who will run circles around teachers who offer up To Kill a Mockingbird
and Tom Sawyer.

Sources:

To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, Executive Summary." National


Endowment for the Arts, November 2007, Research Report,6.

Heitin, Liana . "Teacher Magazine: Study Challenges 'Idiosyncratic' High School Reading
Selections." Education Week American Education News Site of Record.
http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2010/10/28/alscwlitstudy.html?qs=Liana+Heitin
(accessed November 10, 2010).

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