No wonder kids don't like to read: YA books are vapid and ideological
- Joanne Jacobs
- Aug 8
- 2 min read
Schools are "hastening the end of reading and critical thought" by assigning trite, ideological and low-quality young adult books, writes Valerie Stivers on Unherd.
As summer reading for his Brooklyn public school, her rising ninth grader had a choice of a three YA books, she writes. One was a Hunger Games-ish sci-fi book that imagines a society with very late-term (age 13) abortion, a "boring and badly written" fantasy apparently chosen for Chinese "representation," and Punching the Air, a "deeply manipulative" novel in verse about a sweet, innocent black art student falsely accused of beating a white teenager. It's co-written by Yusef Salaam, one of the “Central Park Five.” The book tells black kids they're doomed by their skin color, tells whites they are the enemy and glamorizes prison life, writes Stivers. Apparently, there's a prison-to-rap-star pipeline.
At a different New York City public school three years ago, "the entire incoming freshman class was assigned a piece of transgender agitprop for young adults titled The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives," writes Stivers. Kids were told "their acceptance of transgender ideology was the key to preventing horrific crimes. "
"These books’ arguments are lazy," she concludes. "They present sacred cows that kids know they can’t argue about." Students won't be "drawn into the world of reading." If they skip the books and read the ChatGPT summary instead, "they won’t be missing anything."
When Junior Great Books started in 1962, I was one of the pilot groups. I was a fifth grader. About a dozen motivated students met with an adult volunteer after school once a week to discuss classic literature.
"Young adult" hadn't been invented. Early on, we read Aesop's Fables, Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, Kipling's Jungle Book and Arabian Nights. I saw an old set of paperbacks online with The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island and The Pied Piper of Hamelin. In sixth through ninth grade, we read lots of Russians: I vividly remember Gogol's The Overcoat, but also stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov and (I think) Turgenev. There were some Americans. I think we read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Or possibly The Open Boat. Every year, when we got the new set of books, it was exciting.
Junior Great Books was expanded to more grades and a wider range of students. The readings became less challenging, less "great."
I hate those lousy YA books. I read three or four of them, because I was funding some books for a classroom, and they were terrible. I like the O Henry suggestion, some of his short stories are just funny as they can be and all out of copyright. Also, you can't go wrong with the Heinlein juveniles, still in print after many decades. Mark Twain is, of course, a canonical choice. There's tons of stuff out there that isn't dreck. The only reason to assign that YA crap is that you want to deliver a message.
Is Saki (HH Munro) out of reach, or O. Henry? Why not read Achebe's cycle, from Things Fall Apart to Anthills of the Savannah?
Perhaps churning or planned obsolescence explains the emphasis on new work. Can't make money if we use old books year after year.
It looks like Language Arts (i.e., English Lit) curriculum planners assume that everyone likes fiction. They're writing off a significant part of the enrollment.
Charles Darwin was a poet. The Voyage of the Beagle. chapter 15, "Passage of the Cordillera"
"The rivers which flow in these valleys ought rather to be called mountain-torrents. Their inclination is very great, and their water the colour of mud. The roar which the Maypu made, as it rushed over the great rounded fragments, was like that of the sea. Amidst the din of rushing waters, the noise from the stones, as they rattled one over another, was most distinctly audible even from a distance. This rattling noise, night and day, may be heard along…
Even in the 90s, fresh-from-ed-school female teachers were pushing vapid navel-gazing chick lit on their students. I fought to allow my kids to read decent (older) books instead. We discovered the Rosemary Sutcliff versions of classic legends and historical novels (with young male protagonists even) set in Roman Britain. I could read and enjoy them, also.
It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to read and talk about the YA agitprop books you describe.