NPR on what the kids are reading...Hunger Games or Dickens?

I heard the NPR piece linked below in my car as I was driving around D.C. I thought about it during the day and I wanted to share a few personal thoughts about the section of the piece quoted below. I may piss a few people off here but whatever. The gist of the piece is that kids in school are having an increasingly difficult time grasping the classical literature or novels that have been standard high school reading over the years. In the piece it mentions that so many of the kids today are reading young adult fiction now such as The Hunger Games. The issue with that is The Hunger Games is written at a 5th grade reading level that is significantly lower than what even high school kids should be reading at. I do want to acknowledge that the 5th grade determination was deduced from an algorithm that I know nothing about, but from the small amount of similar young adult fiction I have read it sounds about right. I remember some of the reading I did in high school and I remember struggling with some of it. Most of what I struggled with was Shakespeare, as the kid in the piece says the dialog can be difficult to grasp. I also want to add that I read Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm for the first time in high school and I've read them over many times since then because they're amazing.


We are where we are. It established that American high school kids don't read at the level they are supposed to. My biggest fear is that we continue to drop to a point where illiteracy levels increase or we can read only to absorb mote information to pass the class. With that being said I think it is ok right now that the kids are at least reading SOMETHING. The really sad part is the amount of grown adults I meet who young adult 5th grade level fiction is the extent to which they read. I know that everyone isn't interested in boring things like race theory, Keynesian economics, or war history like I am. Also I am by no means saying adults shouldn't read teen fiction but I am concerned if Harry Potter is the extent of you reading intake. Hopefully once the kids finish The Hunger Games they decide to pick up another book and grow an appreciation for reading and using their imagination. You have to do more than just recite the words to yourself. Hopefully the kids will learn to appreciate To Kill a Mocking Bird and Dickens but if all the adults read are The Hunger Games then how to we encourage the youth to grow? It looks like author Joe Hill (Horns, Heart Shaped Box, and NOS4A2) took something similar away from the very same NPR piece.


NPR Piece (Listen or Read)


"Last year, we had more than 8.6 million students from across the country who read a total of 283 million books," says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning. Students participate in the Accelerated Reader program through their schools. When they read a book, they take a brief comprehension quiz, and the book is then recorded in the system. The books are assigned a grade level based on vocabulary and sentence complexity.


And Stickney says that after the late part of middle school, students generally don't continue to increase the difficulty levels of the books they read.


Last year, almost all of the top 40 books read in grades nine through 12 were well below grade level. The most popular books, the three books in The Hunger Games series, were assessed to be at the fifth-grade level.