Expose every kid to novels. Some will love them for life. The rest aren’t failing.
Every few months the alarm goes off again. Kids can’t read. Kids don’t read. The Nation’s Report Card says only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day. In 1984 it was 35%.
Those get treated as one problem. They aren’t.
This piece isn’t claiming kids shouldn’t read, or that novels are worthless. It’s claiming something narrower: reading fiction shouldn’t be a yardstick for a good student or a good education.
Two Problems, One Alarm
The first problem is real. A child who can’t decode words or follow a paragraph in a science book is in trouble, and so is the school that keeps promoting him.
The second problem is a taste. A kid who would rather watch a movie than read a novel can still read a lease, a manual and a textbook. He just doesn’t like novels. That isn’t a literacy crisis. It’s a preference.
The alarm folds the second problem into the first, and the novel gets sold as part of the cure.
Latin
For centuries Latin was required. Oxford and Cambridge demanded it for admission until 1960. The case wasn’t that students would use Latin. It was that Latin trained the mind. Logic, discipline, memory, precision. Learn it and you’d be better at everything else.
In 1924 the psychologist Edward Thorndike tested that claim on high school students. The Latin students gained no more general reasoning ability than students who took other subjects. Later research has largely backed him up.
The requirement outlived the evidence by decades.
Schools eventually stopped requiring the classics. Then they gave the name to something else. “The classics” now means Dickens in English class, and the requirement came with the name.
Fiction’s defense sounds familiar. Novels build empathy, imagination, attention. They’re good for you whatever you do in life. In 2013 a study in Science reported that reading a short passage of literary fiction improved people’s ability to read others’ minds. It got wide coverage. Most of the replications that followed failed to find the effect, including one with far more participants. A couple confirmed it.
The empathy story is starting to look like the mind-training story.
I’ve known plenty of lifelong literature fanatics who weren’t particularly creative or imaginative at all, nor solid thinkers. But they really enjoyed reading novels through their whole lives.
Dickens Was Television
Dickens wasn’t homework in his day. His novels came out in monthly installments that sold for a shilling each, when a bound book cost more than thirty. Working families could afford him. Some pooled their money for one copy and read it aloud. Readers waited for the next installment the way people now wait for the next season of a show.
He was the popular entertainment of his time. His stories haven’t gone anywhere. They moved to the popular entertainment of ours, and get retold on film and television every few years.
A kid who knows Scrooge from a movie knows the story. What he’s missed is the prose. That’s a real loss for anyone who loves prose. It isn’t a skill gap.
You might learn just as much, if not more, from watching Pulp Fiction, or The Talented Mr. Ripley. In my opinion that movie is much better than the book.
Many books have a great premise and became great movies, but they drag as prose. The movie was a better and more engaging presentation of the premise.
I Love Opera
I love opera and classical music. I sat through years of required music classes in school and university, listening to it and learning about it. None of it took. I found it on my own, long after. Most kids never learn to like Mozart, and years of music class don’t change that.
Some will take to it on their own. For the rest, start where the kid is. A kid making beats in music class is learning rhythm, structure, and how a piece builds and resolves. In 2002 Nas built “I Can” on Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” A kid who loves that track might go find the original. A required listening of Beethoven was never going to send him there.
Fiction works the same way. Hand every kid a good novel. Some will read it and never stop. Others will always prefer their stories from movies or elsewhere. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
What Forcing Teaches
School doesn’t have to be fun. A kid who never gets fractions loses algebra, and a long list of jobs with it. Fiction doesn’t.
But kids can tell the difference between a skill they’ll use and a taste someone is grading them on. Gallup has surveyed millions of students since 2009. About three-quarters of fifth graders are engaged with school. By 11th grade it’s about a third. Older students are far less likely to say adults at school care about them, or that teachers make them feel their schoolwork is important.
Essential skills get taught even when they’re boring, with a reason attached. Tastes get offered. When both are treated as non-negotiable, kids conclude that school has little to do with their lives. Then they tune out the algebra along with the novel.
Who Keeps the Requirement
English bachelor’s degrees fell 43.8% between 2012 and 2025, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Humanities degrees are at their lowest number since 1991.
A required course is the one enrollment a department doesn’t have to compete for.
Honest Caveats
Books are richer in language than screens. A 1988 study counted rare words per thousand and found children’s books had more than prime-time television or conversation among college graduates. A kid who reads a lot picks up vocabulary a movie won’t give him. Nonfiction gives it too.
Kids who read for fun score higher on reading tests. That runs both ways. Good readers enjoy reading.
Exposure matters. Some kids find out they love novels only because a teacher handed them the right one. That’s an argument for a sampler, not a mandate.
Tube Amps
Vacuum tubes were once the future of electronics. Then transistors replaced them.
Tubes didn’t disappear. Guitarists still swear by tube amps, and audiophiles pay a premium for tube stereos. The people who love them keep them alive. Nobody has to take a course in them.
Fiction will be fine. Some kids will always love the adventure of reading and filling in the details with their own imagination. The rest can get their stories somewhere else.
It just shouldn’t be the yardstick.