Yes, teenagers are struggling to read. But force-feeding them Shakespeare and the great poets is no way to foster a love of literature, so says Louise Tucker in The Guardian.
From the story...
Yet again last week, the reading abilities of boys were up for discussion: "Sats results ... revealed a particular problem with boys' reading ability. One in five 14-year-old boys has a reading age below what's expected of an 11-year-old." The Today programme's guests, Ian Rankin and Labour MP Barry Sheerman, were invited to make suggestions. Rankin sensibly said that perhaps the answer "is to get Top Gear magazine into every teenage boy's curriculum", but also that there is now a different sort of literacy, one involving texting and computer games, which is invisible because it happens beyond the classroom. Then he spoilt it all, by mentioning the "S-word", and suddenly the debate stopped, as ever, being about literacy and started being about "literature", preferably "great". Why do we still confuse the need for literacy with the experience of reading, and even more important to some, loving a canon?
In order to get his own teenager reading Shakespeare, Rankin gave him graphic novel versions. And, hallelujah, the boy now wants to go and see a play. As I brushed my teeth, all I could think was, well, why not just take him to see a performance in the first place? Why are we obsessed with "reading" Shakespeare, especially since he wrote, er, plays? As any English undergraduate knows, Shakespeare's plays are meant to be seen on stage, not on the page. So why do commentators rejoice when a teenager reads Shakespeare? Do we really believe that teenagers should be reading scripts, albeit cultural masterpieces?
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