The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Summer Reading List Blues
This Op Ed piece has an interesting take on modern children’s lit. One part really rings true for me and that is that kids are now given mandated summer reading lists that count as part of the following year’s grade. Sad. I always found summer the time that I could just read any books I pleased and many more of them than I would read during the school year.
While I don’t agree with her take on modern realistic novels for children being too heavy for kids. I do agree that there is a power to fantasy novels that is freeing and perfect for summer reading. I do see it as problematic that summer reading lists depend on Newbery winners to make up their lists. I would hope that teachers begin to point kids to some of the wonderful books out there that will never win awards like that.
Tha article concludes with:
“We seem to have lost sight of what children can actually process, and more important, of their own innate capacities. Instead of our children being free to roam and dream and invent on their own timetable, and to read about children doing such things, we increasingly ask our children to be sober and hard-working at every turn, to take detailed notes on their required texts with Talmudic attention, to endure computer-generated tests. And the texts we require them to pore over have become all too often about guarded, world-weary, overburdened children, who are spending their childhoods trying to cope with the mess their parents left them.
Strangely, it seems that in such stories the only people who get to break free are the missing parents: these characters seem to have found their lives too stressful and boxed-in, and have fled — right out of the books.”