Post 6: Readicide

                I think that Readicide is a major problem in school because for so many students, school is the only place where they read. Once they have bad experiences reading in school they don’t want to read at home because they assume they won’t like it because it will be as boring as in school. Also the schools are only showing a narrow selection of books and aren’t exposing student to all types of books. I think genre fiction is just as worthy of being read because many books that are genre fiction are very good and student will get more out of reading them. I don’t think we should continue to teach literary fiction so exclusively because many kids don’t even read these books; they will just Spark note them. If every now and then they taught literary fiction, I think kids would have more of an appreciation for books and would be able to compare literary and genre fiction.

            I think we should add more genre fiction into the curriculum because there is hardly any genre fiction being taught. Schools are teaching books that are irrelevant to this day and age and although it is good to keep that part of our culture alive, it doesn’t need to be the only thing taught. I think swapping out classic literature for more modern books can be good and bad so we should only swap out some books. I think if we take away all the classics student will be missing a major topic but I think they teach too many classics and should only teach us a few so we understand how literature used to be. A 21^st century English class reading list should contain popular books so kids will be excited about reading but also one or two classics. Literary fiction isn’t really relevant to our culture anymore but it think it shows how literature how evolved and changed so it is still important. Kids should read books because it teaches them comprehension, new vocabulary, and other skills that are greatly benefitted by reading so I think it is very important that kids enjoy reading so they will do it more often.