“Murder is the most honest form of expression.”
I said this, mostly out loud, in senior English class in high school. I partly said this because I was the kind of teenage boy who enjoyed the flustered, slightly scandalized attention from the pretty blonde girl who sat next to me because she was the kind of teenage girl who enjoyed the rush of being scandalized by the slightly dangerous sounding but probably perfectly safe boy (I was. But don’t tell her.) from the “wrong side of the tracks”. But I also said it because it makes sense. If you aren’t paid for the killing, and are in your right mind, murder is the epitome of honesty. You wanted that person dead, and now they are dead. No dissembling there.
This was not, as I recall, a universally held opinion. But the teacher let us argue and bicker for the whole class, occasionally keeping our fights inline, occasionally praising us for good points, occasionally drawing us back to the text that sparked the discussion (Of Mice and Men, as I remember, but it might have been MacBeth. It was a while ago.) It was among the most fun I have ever had in any academic setting, and one of the most indelible memories I have from my teenage years. I don’t think, based on my own son’s experience in English classes, that such a scene would have been allowed to be played out today. And I think that has as much to do with why kids don’t read as much as for fun as they did in the past.
Jean Twenge, who is a psychologist who writes about teens and technology, has a newsletter post up about how academically inclined teens don’t read as many books for pleasure as kids in the past did. The numbers are pretty stark — kids who planned to get degrees used to read eight books a year for pleasure. Now they read about three, for example. Twenge puts the onus on phones and social media and the affects they have had on attention spans and the kinds of material they encourage kids to read. I am sure there is some truth to that, but I wonder if there is not a more academically focused reason.
My youngest son swallowed books whole for a good part of his life. He read all the time, in all places. He would read a book in the car on the way home from the bookstore and sometimes, if we were far enough away from home or had enough errands to run, finish it before we got home. It was enough to warm my heart and empty my wallet. But that all changed late in middle school. He essentially stopped reading for pleasure, first novels then even manga. His reading was limited to what he was required to do for school. Now that he is in college, this has started to change. He is slowly getting back into novels, and I asked him why recently. His answer tracks with what we saw in his later grades: class work killed reading for him.
Reading in his experience was not about enjoying the books, discussing them with classmates, and collectively coming to realizations about the writing like it had been for me. Reading was about memorizing the text and taking test after test to prove that you had learned the very narrow points that the test writers were certain were the only important things about the texts. And you read a lot more than I did in school, because savoring and discussing the books was not important — getting to the “point” was. And only those tests mattered, because in modern schools, if it cannot be measured, it has no value. My son was never allowed to argue about whether or not murder is the most honest form of expression because discussing anything other than what was on the tests was not allowed.
I am not saying that we did not have tests, and I am not saying that we did not have guided discussions. Quite the opposite. But I think we had a lot more space to explore the meaning of the material ourselves, a lot more space to play with the words and the themes and the imagery. I got an A on an essay about how the witches in MacBeth were manifestations of Protestant morality, that they were essentially, agents of God. No serious scholar thinks that, but my teacher allowed me to play with the text and the history and make an argument. It was fun, at least to us, and that sense of fun encouraged me to read for, well, fun. My son was never really given that opportunity, at least to the degree I was.
When he entered college, though, reading became more like it was for me in high school. Classes were less driven by standardized tests and more driven by conversation and the freedom to think. And, miraculously, he has rediscovered his love of reading. He is not the same reader he was as a child, but it is now on his list of things to do for fun, and he now brings home novels to read because he wants to read them for his own sake, not because he has to.
So, yes, the medium kids read on today likely has had an effect. But I think we also need to look at the system that has taught them that reading is just another input into the interminable line of tests that is their school years. Reading, to modern kids, is something to be sliced up and tested against, not something that could ever be a source of intellectual stimulation or, God forbid, fun. Want kids to read for fun? Maybe stop teaching them reading is nothing but mark in a grade book and start letting them explore the joy of discovering a text in all its weirdness.
Even if it does teach them that murder is the most honest form of expression.