A recent piece on NPR indicated that, according to recent studies, high school students are more and more frequently reading below their grade level.
It explained that the growing popularity of book series like The Hunger Games among teenagers is an indirect cause of this, forcing classics that formerly dominated high school summer reading lists—”Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Bronte and Edith Wharton”—out of academic consciousness.
Maybe it’s true that fewer and fewer high school students are familiar with Catherine and Heathcliff, that fewer and fewer spend time wrestling with Raskolnikov’s dilemma of the “extraordinary man.” Is this, however, a legitimate concern? Sarah at The Reading Zone questions the standards to which high school reading levels are held in this post.
Are high school students’ reading lists in a dangerous place? What should be done, if anything at all, to curtail this phenomenon?
