Give Your Kids a Christmas Present: Reading! by John M. Grondelski

The New York Times ran a December 12 feature whose thesis is depressingly simple: American elementary and secondary students no longer read full-length books. The title says it all: “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.” “Rarely” now means perhaps one or two books a year—four at most. And even those few tend to come from a narrowing, predictable list: To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth. Even Shakespeare often gets reduced to the balcony scene.

There are plenty of causes for this collapse. The Times wants to blame standardized testing: schools “teach to the test,” not to the soul, so curricula flatten and homogenize. That’s certainly part of it. Another culprit is the ever-growing presence of technology in the classroom. I’ve witnessed it personally: across my three children’s schooling, I’ve watched the textbook all but disappear. ….