Are we really this far gone? The Wall Street Journal announced this morning, "Problem: Boys Don't Like to Read. Solution: Books That Are Really Gross." I salute the WSJ for this particular syntactic masterpiece of a headline, but let's not jump on the bandwagon because we want to use the word "gross" on Page One.
I can understand why boys may not dig Charlotte's Web or Little House on the Prairie, but there are plenty of other children's or young adult books geared towards the rougher sex. What about The Jungle Book or some of Grimm's scarier fairy tales? Plenty of children's books are not about bunnies and rainbows--but are still age-appropriate for 5-, 6-, 7-year-olds. Yes, you might be keeping your son from blowing things up on his PlayStation, but isn't reading a book about blowing things up just as bad? I would argue that the nuance of the English language and the rampant imagination of a typical child would make reading about something gory and inappropriate worse than seeing it on television.
The moral of the story is simply that we need to get all kids to keep reading, not by writing books that make them into adults that much sooner, but by being active and engaging parents who can relate The Pushcart War (a favorite!) to the contemporary world. This is about parents taking the easy way out, not about classic literature being outdated.
