Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits

[XemaSab]

Source: New York Times

Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.

And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

(snip)

But some researchers and educators say that the series, in the end, has not permanently tempted children to put down their Game Boys and curl up with a book instead. Some kids have found themselves daunted by the growing size of the books (“Sorcerer’s Stone” was 309 pages; “Deathly Hallows,” will be 784). Others say that Harry Potter does not have as much resonance as titles that more realistically reflect their daily lives. “The Harry Potter craze was a very positive thing for kids,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who has reviewed statistics from federal and private sources that consistently show that children read less as they age. “It got millions of kids to read a long and reasonably complex series of books. The trouble is that one Harry Potter novel every few years is not enough to reverse the decline in reading.”

(snip)

Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. “If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it’s zero narrative,” said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. “I don’t want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we’ve overemphasized it,” he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.





Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/books/11potter.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

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That last paragraph ANGERED me. :grr:

Who is this jerk to say that kids don't need to read literature and stories, but instead should read for information so they can be good little worker drones? And arguing that kids can practice reading for information while chatting on MySpace...! Just WRONG. Just flat-out WRONG. :grr:

[Kelvin Mace]

1. I stopped reading at the point that began

"some researchers and educators..."

Since "some researchers and educators" does not constitute consensus and since "some researchers and educators" are idiots, the story has ZERO merit.

[LiberalFighter]

6. They used Yankelovich, a marketing firm to conduct their study

Sounds fishy to me.

[alcibiades_mystery]

9. If you wait for "consensus" on literacy research

You'll never read anything.

[Orangepeel]

2. did it have ANY effect?

if so, good for it. :shrug:

I've never read a Harry Potter book (I saw the first, and maybe the second movie, but I'm just not a fan). But, if millions of people worldwide and 100s of 1000s of kids enjoyed it, then great. Why is the story article so negative?

[LiberalFighter]

4. Because those researchers and educators think they are much smarter than everyone else

[Prophet 451]

16. Yep, provably so

Ask any librarian and they'll tell you that the Potter books have helped lead a good portion of kids into reading for pleasure.

Then again, I'm a Brit. The average Briton spends a touch over 400 hours a year reading for pleasure. The average American figure is 99 hours.This may be what comes of putting a guy in charge who doesn't read.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

20. I think you've got your cause and effect mixed up

We put a guy in charge who doesn't read because the average American not only doesn't read but is suspicious of those who do.

(After all, why would anyone ever want to read a gross book when they could go see the latest Michael Bay flick????? :sarcasm:)

[Prophet 451]

21. You're right, the effect is the same though n/t

[BeyondThePale]

3. Let's ask JK Rowling, "is our children learning?"

I think the bigger problem is that we have an administration that flaunts its "anti-intellectual" bias. Why study when the president was a legacy college student with mediocre grades.

[Igel]

17. The problem being that

(at least the claim is) reading's dropped off among kids at the same rate during the HP books as before.

Now, we're about to read year 7, and it's been a couple of years between some of them. In other words, the horrible baseline is what must have been the flaunting of the "anti-intellectual" bias during the Clinton administration.

Oh. Gee. That's almost certainly a wrong conclusion.

So it must be something else. The current "anti-intellectual" flaunting might have made it worse--"might", mind you--but there's something else going on that's far more important. If you only look for it from 2001 to the present, you might find it, but odds are you won't.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. I wonder if the drill-drill-drill approach to reading has turned kids off

I've seen some of the "stories" that elementary school children are expected to read, and they're dull, predictable, and didactic.

I remember seeing an article that recommended other fantasy novels that late elementary school children could enjoy. The one that jumped out at me was "The Princess and the Goblin," a 19th-century fantasy who finds the entry into a parallel world inside the palace where she lives. I found it at my grandparents' house when I was ten years old and just loved it.

You can find it here:

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/George_MacDonald/The_Princess_and_the_Goblin/

Around the same age, I read and enjoyed Pilgrim's Progress, which was intended to be read as an allegory of the soul's development but which I read as an adventure story.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

8. The Phantom Tollbooth is another excellent, captivating book.

MKJ

[ChazII]

13. My students enjoy this book w/its play on words.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

7. My daughter, in college, and her friends, are currently reading Vonnegut.

They are passing several of his books among themselves.

Books have such power, which can't be found on the internet. Especially narratives, whether fiction or non fiction.

MKJ

[gatorboy]

10. "Read for information"

That's a frightening thought. Sounds like the group that help put Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program on the map.

"Damn the Arts! Spit on the creative process! Imagination is for the terrorists!"

[Igel]

18. Problem is that there's a broad brush at work.

I have students in my literature class that really do still need to learn to read for information. They're not up to stylistics and the like. They understand it because it's been taught to them, but they don't spot it.

Today, in my survey of Russian lit, we covered Viktor Pelevin. His "Ontology of Childhood", whatever else you think of it, is clearly set in a prison. Guards in the halls, standard issue clothing, work gangs. Now, if you don't understand this you can't understand any of the possible readings of the story. The stylistics of the story don't matter, nothing matters if you don't get the core meanings.

The two upperclassmen didn't get it--one will be a jr this year, the other a senior. I asked them to read some Mayakovsky recently, and they stumbled over every word. They're not only unable to read for meaning, they're not fluent readers.

Meanwhile, an incoming 1st year from Sun Valley understood the story perfectly fine.

They've read 500-600 pages a week for the last six weeks. The lack of ability to extract meaning--whether from plays, from poetry, from short stories or novels--has been a constant. And this is *with* basing a 3rd of their grades on keeping a notebook--write down the plot, stylistics, thoughts on each work. Still no success.

I feel like making them outline paragraphs, but while it would help the college senior, it would bore the soon-to-be-fresh(wo)man to tears.

[XemaSab]

22. You don't think that that comes from a lack of experience with literature?

The best books, even for very young children, have allegories and hidden meanings in the words.

Not being able to understand the complicated metaphors in a complicated story comes from lack of experience with simple metaphors in a simple story. :shrug:

[Thirtieschild]

11. When I was in the sixth grade, lo those many eons ago,

our teacher read novels aloud to the class, usually connecting them to what we were studying in Texas history, Uncle Tom's Cabin when we studied the Civil War, etc. I would bet that most of us grew up to read. The teacher, btw, was my mother - there was only one sixth grade and only one sixth grade teacher.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. That was a traditional practice

When I was in sixth grade, we moved from one town to another.

At my new school, the teacher read to us first thing after lunch. The books she completed during the half year that I was in that school were The Secret Garden and The Yearling.

I had never experienced this before, but my parents said that their grade school teachers always read to their classes after lunch. Interestingly enough, this particular sixth grade teacher was older, so her tradition may have been a relic of a bygone era.

Yet what better way to both introduce the kids to good literature and to help them settle down after lunch?

Unfortunately, I suppose that the current NCLB era leaves no time for "wasteful" activities such as hearing literature read aloud.

[unpossibles]

12. goodness forbid people read creative stories outside of the internet

thn agin perheps reedng stuff onlin iz the ans3r!

[Javaman]

14. Stupid is as stupid prints...

Nice to see the vaunted new york times pull the sheet on an entire generation of people just because ONE series of books is ending.

yeah, you know, when I stopped reading tom sawyer when I was a kid, I burned the rest of the books I had because, you know, I thought, after that book, I have read it all and there possibly can't be anything else out there that will spark my interests.

so down I sat eating crap, watching tv and became a mouth breather.

what a bunch of fucking jerks. How insulting is that?

this is why I have stopped reading that propaganda tool. brought to you by: judith, rah rah rah, let's bomb Iraq, miller.

[erik-the-red]

15. My experience

I noticed mid-way through my junior year of high school that I wasn't reading as much as I used to.

I soon realized that I wasn't reading as much fiction as I used to. I had mostly been reading textbooks and study materials for AP exams.

Shortly afterward, I began to regain my interest in fiction. I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in the last two weeks of eleventh grade, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I then proceeded to read Black Boy. It was so well-written that I finished it in two days. Neither my ability to read nor my ability to enjoy fiction had been diminished by a few years worth of fiction inactivity.