Are kids today missing out on the classics?

[hedgehog]

It's wonderful that there are so many books out today for young readers all the way from picture books to chapter books. On the other hand, back in the old, old days, I was forced to read classics if I wanted to get hold of a good story. I read Heidi, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Master of Ballantrae and all of Jules Verne. Has anyone born in the last 20 years cracked open 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?

[terrya]

1. I hope they're being taught the classics.

I didn't have to be forced to read some of the books you listed...I read them on my own. Plus Dickens as well.

[ruiner4u]

2. I thought you meant classics as in Antiquity

Which todays youth are sickeningly unaware of...

[hedgehog]

6. I Loved reading Greek and Norse myths. I think I moved on to

them after I ran through all the fairy tales. I think kids today miss out on both myth and fairy tales. I know I read a lot to my kids when they were little, but I know that I wish I'd read more fairy tales. We had copies of the D'Auleire's books on the Greek and Norse myths and wore them out.

[yellowdogintexas]

39. oh yeah, someone gave me an anthology of Greek/Roman/Norse myths

written at a 6th grade level (this was 6th grade level in the late 1950's, so fairly complex but still quite readable) and I devoured it, read it over and over till it fell apart. I also had a big book called "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" which was an anthology of Norse/Scandinavian fairy tales which was wonderful.

Of course I read Alcott, Twain, Heidi, etc too. Treasure Island!

[MADem]

3. They think the 'classics' are "Leave it to Beaver" and "The Donna Reed Show" NT

[LisaM]

4. Don't know. I know one of my friends spurned some books I offered to lend her

For her daughters - stuff like the Shoe books, the Betsy-Tacy books, and Anne of Green Gables books. She said her kids liked stuff with more "action" in it! So I know two perfectly nice girls who probably haven't read any classics.

[hedgehog]

7. I remember my frustration because I KNEW there were more stories about

Anne of Green Gables out there, but I had no way of finding them.

Does anyone else remember the monster edition of Books in print that you used to have to search through if you wanted to order a book?

I LOVE on-line book stores and being able to order books from the entire county library system on-line.

[Warpy]

5. I think schools that still teach the classics

have the timing all wrong.

I read The Iliad and The Odyssey when I was 11 or 12 and loved them. When peers got them in high school, it was a terrible chore to kick and claw through them. What had been rollicking good stories at the end of childhood were crashing bores in early adulthood.

I bought paperback copies of them for friends' kids when they turned 12, and much to the shock of their parents, the kids devoured them eagerly. They were ready to hear the teaching surrounding them when they got through high school and reread them, remembering their earlier enjoyment of them.

The success of the Harry Potter series demonstrates that schools aren't asking too much of our kids, they're asking far too little of them.

The classics should be part of what they ask.

[Burma Jones]

14. Iliad and Odyssey - now those are Classics......

Shakespeare too.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

38. I read Pilgrim's Progress at age nine and loved it

I saw it as an adventure story, not as a morality tale.

If I were designing a social studies curriculum for fifth and sixth grade, I'd start with the ancient world, pairing a brief outline of the history and culture of those societies with their mythologies and a bit of their languages.

I think we sell kids short (and bore them) when we assume that they're capable of learning only about the modern world.

[Rabo Karabekian]

8. Some Real Garbaj for Kids

I don't have any whippersnappers, yet, but when I worked at a bookstore I was amazed at all the tripe out there 'for kids'. Books about farting dogs, murdered teachers, gossip clubs, and the like... I was thinking what happened to Narnia, Beatrix Potter, and Wind in the Willows?

[China_cat]

9. Wind in the Willows got nixed in our schools

because Mr. Mole -smokes-.

[msongs]

10. yeah but jesus drank...alcohol nt

[China_cat]

25. But alcohol's ok. Smoking makes you a drug addict.

[Sequoia]

17. That's terrible !

[hedgehog]

11. What I really hate are what I call artificial books for children-

based on a commodity (The BRATZ in Paris, The BRATZ in London) or else "written" by a celebrity.

[rurallib]

12. like Lynn Cheney or Bill-O?

[Burma Jones]

13. They have Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket and all sorts of Science Fiction

I don't think they're missing out on all that much. The works you cite I believe are the 19th century equivalent of today's mass market fiction. Plus, with over 50 years of Television and 25 years of Video games and the shift from the passive absorption of content to a more interactive method of gaining information (including literature) - Victorian era fiction is perhaps a little long winded.

[hedgehog]

16. On the other hand - the good stuff is what lasts.

Other books I read

Little Women/Little Men/Joe's Boys

Eight Cousins/ Rose in Bloom

Uncle Tom's Cabin

[yellowdogintexas]

40. oooo Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom were my most favorite of Alcott's Books

I wore out two copies of Eight Cousins!

[DCKit]

15. Too busy studying for placement tests to bother with actual reading. nt

[hedgehog]

18. That's a favorite phrase in this house: "homework is interfering with my education!"

[Burma Jones]

19. All too true.......

[DCKit]

24. I feel ya'.

Kids have to fight and work far harder than we did for a good education and that's not right.

[hedgehog]

26. I can't get over the amount of time my nephew spent on a homework a

meta-analysis of a rather insipid "You are there" version of the voyage of the Titanic. He could have been reading stories like the Monkey's Paw and The Lady or the Tiger? instead. That's what we had in our literature books and I still remember those stories.

[pnwmom]

20. Sure, some. But it's impossible to read all the good books out there.

I read many of the classics, too, because that's what was in my grandparents' home library.

But the Harry Potter books, for example, are a modern classic, as capable as any you mentioned of entralling young readers.

The trick is to find the books that turn young people into avid readers -- after that, the directions they take are up to them. In my son's case, the first couple of Harry Potter books were what did it for him.

[BamaGirl]

21. My girls are 10 and 11

They read a pretty decent variety of stuff but their faves by far are fantasy and horror. My 10 year old reads a lot of non-fiction too. They have read Heidi, Hans Brinker, Grimm, a kids version of the Odyssey, Wizard of Oz and Treasure Island plus required school reading. They love Nancy Drew and anything by L'Engle, but they both hated Narnia and neither finished it. Same with Wind in the Willows.

So some of those kids have cracked open those books. ;) Unfortunately, many probably haven't. :(

[hedgehog]

23. Hans Brinker ! That's one my kids missed!

Although they did go through the Dover Press re-prints of about 6 or 8 of Baum's Oz books.

[BamaGirl]

27. I think they only

suffered through Hans Brinker because I kept telling them how much I loved it as a kid lol. My oldest told me when she was done she kept waiting for it to get good. :P Little brat lol. They also read two of my other childhood faves, The Bears of Blue River (which I understand is back in print) and the Uncle Remus stories. Had mixed reviews on them too of course.

They are really psyched about the SciFi Oz miniseries coming up. Hope it lives up to expectations.

[yellowdogintexas]

41. Hans Brinker was a wonderful book. nt

[hedgehog]

22. Let's not forget King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

I ran through the Sword in the Stone and then The Once and Future King

[Goblinmonger]

28. OK, since nobody else has, I'll be that guy

You sound like the cranky old Grandpa talking about kids these days.

Kids are reading great books that cover the same themes and the same genres as you list. Jules Verne? I'm an English teacher and I'd rather be kicked in the head than read that. There is great stuff being written now and 50 years from now someone will be asking if anyone reads Watership Down or Bridge to Terabithia anymore.

[hedgehog]

29. I'll admit, his science fiction books get bogged down in his explanations

about how to build a submarine. Michael Strogoff, Courier to the Czar and Around the World in 80 Days were pretty good. Seems to me there's another book out there that gets bogged down discussing 19th century whaling methods. Let's see, Moldy Wick? Maby Rick? Something like that. It's still a pretty good read.


Seriously, I would have loved to have had access to all the books out there now. I read them now to catch up. I'm just noting that there is only so much time in the day and that a lot of good books have dropped out of sight.

[YankeyMCC]

30. You make a good point

I'm a huge SF fan and, though I'm not as old as this makes me sound I guess I was close enough generationally to get hooked on SF by the SF classics by Heinlein and Asimov classics.

But it all pretty much falls flat for me son. There's a great anthology that edited by Gardner Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann titled "Escape from Earth" that is an attempt (very succesful IMO) to create those kinds of stories again but for this generation by the current crop of talented SF writers and he loved those stories.

So it is important to expose kids to classics I think...and he's been exposed to the ancient classics by me, and he enjoys them but more as a source of 'camp fire' stories I tell him and his buddies when we go camping...but it's more important to let them find their own classics of their own generation. I think it also helps inspire them, showing them that they can participate in the creation of classic or important aspects of their own generation.

[LWolf]

31. My classroom library holds many classics

available to my 6th - 8th graders. A few read them. Sadly, most of my students don't have the vocabulary or reading comprehension or attention span to get through them.

In an age of anti-intellectualism, where they always ask me "why do you use such big words," where passive watching of video replaces actively reading and creating meaning, where "reading instruction" is all about teaching them to decode and to read aloud quickly, whether or not they comprehend,

it gets harder and harder to connect them to classics.

I'm currently working on book talks for "Kidnapped" and for "The Invisible Man." I'm also rereading "Tom Sawyer," just because I love it, and trying to decide how to present the use of the word "nigger" to them when I recommend the book.

[hedgehog]

32. Reading books with words we don't know is how we expand our vocabulary.

My life long problem is recognizing words without knowing how to pronounce them because I've only seen them in print and never heard them used!

I also learned history from the Three Musketeers and Kidnapped before learning it in school. I had a real leg up on other kids because I knew who Richelieu was.Yet I've heard people say kids won't get those books because they haven't been taught the history yet.

[LWolf]

33. Of course that's how we expand vocabulary,

and that's the key problem. The electronic generation doesn't want to read. The number of young people who read anything they are not forced to is declining every year, at least in my area. Even forcing them is hard to enforce, if you'll excuse the awkward wording.

They want fast, easy reads that don't require thought so that they can get back to the important things in life, like video games, computer games, text messaging, etc..

Attention spans are short, and so is patience for thinking about things outside the prime areas of interest.

After counting them up, I find that 20% of my students this year read willingly. That's out of 90 6th - 8th graders.

[hedgehog]

34. Isn't that about the historical norm, though? If anything, it'd be my

guess that that number is up from what it was when I was in school in the 60's.

[LWolf]

36. I don't know about the historical norm.

It's a downhill slope from my students in the 80s and 90s.

[yellowdogintexas]

43. my memory of my own school years, 20 to 25 percent avid voluntary

readers would hold... in my eighth grade of about 75 total students, there were maybe 6 or 7 of us who were big readers and maybe another 6 or 7 who were occasional readers. We traded books, spent every possible moment in the school library, talked about books, etc. In high school,( a different school system, different friends) you always found the same kids were always in the library, scouring the shelves for a good read. At this school I would say the percentages were closer to 20 percent though. And for some reason, more of the boys were readers than at my other school. I had 3 guy friends that I traded books with all the time. Still would be today if we lived closer together.

in college I never got to read what I wanted to read, just what I had to read took up all my time, but I was an English/History major so was reading good stuff. I lived for summer when I could read for fun.

[Wheezy]

35. It's funny...

I was so excited when my kids got near novel-reading age. I wanted to share Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, Heidi, Black Beauty, tons of other books with them.

And it was so disappointing when they just "couldn't get into them."

I'm hoping my oldest will soon take a look at The Count of Monte Cristo. That's one of my favorites. He's seen the movie and loved it. But he is very much a fantasy reader, so the classics just don't hold the appeal that Lord of the Rings holds for him.

[superconnected]

37. I doubt my nieces got the classics but they did devour the older pulp series'

that I did when I was a kid.

They're in their teens now but when they were younger they read all the nancy drew, hardy boys, Ramona the pest, my brother fudge series and some long series that I read when I was 5 with a family that had kids named things like benny, violet, etc. I couldn't believe they were reading them.
My sister took them to half price books regularly so they got wonderful experience of having a library just like me, my brother and sister did when we were kids - one small room full of shelves that we constantly bought used books and added to.

Some of my favs as a kid - like the secret garden, charlottes web, etc, didn't get read by them becuase unfortunately they were made into movies. Interesting movies but not as good as the books.

[yellowdogintexas]

42. there are well done condensed versions of these stories out there

in single title hardbacks for a very reasonable price. I bought several for my daughter but she skipped them and went straight to "The Hobbit" some of the best adult fiction I have read was referred to my by her when she was about 15., but I digress..

These books have a lot of the heavy Victorian prose edited down and the print is larger and there is an illustration here and there. I have given them as gifts to kids I know to be readers when they are around 8 or 9, because the sense of adventure and wonder in many of these books is still there. A good way to get a kid interested in Stevenson, Dickens, Verne, and Scott.

My daughter's best childhood friend loved to read and one summer my husband decided we should do some reading aloud together with our daughter and the friend. So we chose "The HObbit" and after about a week of this, they took the book away from us and read it themselves and came back for more. THEN they read Narnia, Then the friend for some reason picked up The Three Musketeers. By this time they were in 7th grade. This little 7th grader, who is the ultimate slacker, devoured the entire works of Dumas on her own ..and despite all the dumb shit she has done in her later years, and other stuff, bad decisions etc. I am still impressed that this kid accomplished that. She found books by DuMas I didn't even know existed. And she went on to other stuff.

The girls introduced us (husband and me) to George R R Martin. They started reading these in early high school, I think.