I Disagree with *The Atlantic*: Kids Can Read Books. (They do need help though.)
Do Kids Read Books?
The piece has lots of quotes like this -
“Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.”
Funny enough we have a client who’s reading Pride and Prejudice. So I wanted to put this to the test. Could he “attend to small details” and keep track of everything going on? What did he think of Mr. Darcy?
He was reading it for his English class, and really struggled to get going. His teacher dutifully assigned something like 25 pages a night. In our first couple sessions: We read for five minutes so he could figure out his “rate of reading” - it came out to 1 page every 2 minutes. Then we made plans. Set goals. “I will read for 50 minutes tonight. I will break it up into 2 sessions of 25 minutes each.”
But when he tried to execute and read on his own?
“I got 90 seconds in, then my mind wandered.”
“To what?”
“I don’t even know.”
That’s not unusual. It reminded me of a recent Ezra Klein quote:
“I want them to be kind, to be curious. I want them to have healthy bodies and healthy attention. Kids graduating who can’t read a book — it’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because we have raised them on technologies that have deranged their attention. To read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ — you are developing an attentional faculty that changes the literal shape of your brain. We are uncreating the literate brain.”
You can’t fake your way through Austen. You have to sit in it. Train it. Like a muscle.
So in our sessions, we try two things.
First: Solo Attempts
“How did it go reading on your own?”
“Eh… 2 out of 10. I barely got through a page.”
What complicates this a bit: He doesn’t have to do the reading to stay afloat. But I tell him straight: “I care less about class and more about your attention.” We want for our clients what Cal Newport would call “getting your brain in shape.”
Second: We Read Together
Tonight, we knocked out eight pages. Took 10 minutes. Then we talked about what happened.
We hit the scene where Lizzy pulls up to Pemberley and sees Darcy in a new light. He hears kind things about him, sees the housekeeper’s pride, imagines a fuller version of him. We talked about whether Darcy had changed or whether context changes us. Are you the same person at school, at home, with your cousins?
This led to something important: the session ended with him saying, “Maybe I’ll just keep going with Pride and Prejudice tonight.”
That’s a win.
Kids Can Read … But There are Powerful Forces Working Against Them
We did four things here -
WE “JUST DID IT.” Don’t overthink it. Open the book. Read a paragraph. Then another. Like any kind of practice, it's harder before you begin.
WE WERE EACH OTHER’S BODY DOUBLE. We read side-by-side, quietly, together.
WE COMPETED WITH EACH OTHER FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. “Let’s see who reads more pages. No cheating.”
WE TALKED ABOUT IT. The book club effect. When we discuss what happened, it becomes sticky.
Reading doesn’t have to be miserable. But for kids whose attention is still developing, it has to be scaffolded. And sometimes that scaffolding looks like a coach reading Pride and Prejudice with a 16-year-old, debating whether Darcy planted that housekeeper’s praise on purpose.
Because if the session ends with “Maybe I’ll just keep going,” WE GOT A WIN. LET’S GO WIN.
