This evening Trey Gowdy said on his program that children’s school grades and scores have been falling since 2011. He mentioned difficulties reading in particular. I can agree with that, kids that can read, quickly and well, can learn everything else they need to know by reading about it. A good deal of the loss I will lay at the feet of school teachers, who assign just dreadful books for the kids to read. My youngest son had a good deal of trouble learning to read, so I did what I could to help him, including reading his assigned books so we could talk them over. Most, perhaps all, of the assigned books were terrible. “The Giver” about a distopia so harsh as to make 1984 look like summer camp. “Riding the bus with my sister” where the sister was autistic or something and the protagonist finally falls in love with the bus driver and marries him (Boring, extra boring). “Of Mice and Men” assigned in 7th grade which is entirely too young for a story about sexual dysfunction. “Fahrenheit 451” instead of Bradbury’s much better “Martian Chronicles”. A looser story about the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in which the young girl protagonist’s favorite camel gets turned into K-rations for the mujh to eat. I don’t remember reading a single book that was of interest to Youngest Son, or to me, and I do a lot of reading.
About the only good books from my childhood still in the bookstores are Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. We have picked up the Phillip Pullman books, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and the Rick Riordan books, but that is about all. We have lost Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan and the John Carter Martian stories). Andre Norton, (lots of good science fiction), Robert Heinlein, the greatest science fiction writer, L Frank Baum and Ruth Plumley Thompson, the Oz books, Fletcher Pratt, The Battles that Changed History, Bruce Catton, civil war.
In short assign the kids too many really dreadful books to read, and we have taken a lot of the good readable books off the market.
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