Frank Hu is a senior and the salutatorian at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. He plans to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania to study simulational chemistry (chemistry major, computer science minor).
An avid reader, Frank makes a case today for allowing students to read books that interest them in class. By expanding classroom reading lists to books with relevance to young people today, Frank says Georgia could see its reading scores improve.
The AJC reported this week that Frank was one of seven Gwinnett County students to win a 2018 National Merit Scholarship Corporation scholarship.
By Frank Hu
Reading and comprehension are skills that follow us throughout our lives, regardless of profession; only through a base mastery of the English language can we effectively internalize and communicate information in our everyday lives.
So, it is distressing—and rightly so—when Georgia reading scores continue to lag behind, despite the best efforts of our public education system. Recognizing a problem is the first step, but how do we go about solving it?
Social, cultural, and economic factors aside, our attention should be focused primarily on reforming how language arts is taught in the traditional classroom setting. The unfortunate truth is that beneath the cumbersome curriculum and the intimidating line-up of mandatory readings, many students find themselves discouraged, any intrinsic motivation snuffed out by archaic prose and mind-bending syntax.
The moral of the story: you cannot throw the epics of Virgil or the social criticism of Sinclair at every student and expect consistent mastery. In class, there will be few who agonize over the text, dissecting it and analyzing it at its deepest level for a good grade or—certainly a rarer occurrence—out of genuine curiosity. The majority will spend their time distracted or thumbing through the pages half-heartedly, absorbing the teacher’s lectures and regurgitating them on tests.
Here is where the stratification begins, where the high-achieving students begin to excel while the others fall behind. While we’d like to think that through the educational pipeline everyone eventually reaches the same level, that simply is not true: this general apathy reaches past the formative years of high school, ultimately impacting performance in higher education and the real world.
Teaching the classics is important, as only by learning from the masters can we aspire to a higher standard of excellence; however, the classics should not be the first thing that’s taught. There should be a greater flexibility in the kinds of books youths are encouraged to read rather than an unyielding dogmatism that centers around a handful of key authors.
Now I know that you’re thinking: books like “The Hunger Games,” the Harry Potter series and “Eragon,” while entertaining, are nowhere near as worthy of study, cannot even hold a candle to the aforementioned “greats,” to say nothing of graphical novels and comics. And yet, it is precisely that literary snobbishness that is so constricting, so antithetical, to the aims of education.
The popular fiction and non-fiction of today could not be more different from the titles of ages past, but they are alike in one crucial respect: the question of theme. There are a central cluster of motifs that are endlessly toyed with and reformulated throughout the artistic conscience, all derived from the human experience and forming the thematic underpinning of the contemporary and classical. In many ways then, Harry Potter is reminiscent of the past, conveying many of the same messages more effectively in a product accessible to nearly everyone.
By giving kids friendlier choices for their language arts reading should not be considered a regressive change. As with any other skill, reading requires practice and a natural progression, much as how a beginning pianist may focus on mastering scales and etudes before advancing to symphonies and sonatas. Likewise, a beginning (or, more accurately, inexperienced) reader should start with the basics, a role aptly fulfilled by the young adult genre.
If students are allowed to read what they enjoy, then they will see that reading as an enjoyable and imaginative diversion as opposed to the senseless drudgery that school makes it out to be. Furthermore, there is no reason that critical thinking cannot be fostered within the context of a 21st century anthology, as the ability to reason abstractly is wholly independent of the perceived difficulty of the text.
In this way, we are catalyzing a lifelong infatuation with reading, which will, by virtue of maturity, transform into a consistent desire for scholarship and provide higher reading scores (among many other advantages). In the age of technological immediacy, this is how we can show that being lost in a good book is still better than being glued to phone and computer screens, and that reading can be equal parts enlightening and enrapturing.
So, the next time a student expresses desire to read a comic book or a fantasy novel, rather than scorning them, encourage them and even give suggestions—nothing is worse than reading nothing at all.
About the Author
