The Kids Are, In Fact, Alright
Gen Z is fine so everyone just calm down already
In November The Atlantic magazine published an article titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”. The crux of the article was professors at prestigious institutions of higher learning lamenting that their students could not read and process classic literature. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth about how Gen Z has no attention span and does not read for fun. But as a public librarian that wildly contradicts with the trends I see. In fact Gen Z and Millennials are some of our biggest library users, with the ALA publishing a report in 2023 about the rise in Gen Z library users and their preference for physical books.
So which is it? Do we have a generation of people who can only read short passages of text and not digest an Austen classic? Or do we have an emerging generation of luddites who want paper books and well worn library cards? Neither. And also both? Here’s what I think is happening and why Gen Z is getting a lot of hate and anger for something they didn’t create. As an “elder millennial” (see also: geriatric millennial and my personal favorite “Oregon Trail generation”) and librarian I have seen a lot of trends in literature come and go and these are just my observations, but I think they can help explain what’s going on and why we don’t really need to despair just yet.
When I was growing up YA (young adult) books were a slowly growing market. They existed, but only in small quantities and usually by award winning authors like Cynthia Voight and Katherine Patterson. These were books that were meant to be challenging and also win awards. Entertainment was a distant secondary goal for a lot of these books. By middle school I had pretty much blown through that entire catalogue and moved on to adult authors. Was it appropriate for a 7th grader to be reading “Pet Cemetery”? Probably not, but everyone was just impressed I was reading such a big book. It was a source of pride if your kid was reading “adult” books. Nobody cared about whether the content was “appropriate”. My classmates were reading John Grisham, Michael Crichton and King, and by high school most of my books came from the ever present “Oprah’s Book Club” selections. Since I was already reading books meant for adults it wasn’t too much of a stretch to be asked to read authors like John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even Dickens and Austen were challenging from a language perspective, but we had cultural references for both. You could not shake a stick in December without hitting a tv show re-telling of A Christmas Carol and the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (heavily referenced in elder millennial fave Bridget Jones’s Diary) came out in 1995. We also had kid-friendly adaptations of A Christmas Carol in the form of the Muppets and the king of the classics, Wishbone. Wishbone was a jack russell terrier who reenacted classic books for his PBS show. Say what you will about the 90’s, but our public television was at its peak.
Let’s compare this to our millennial and gen-Z friends. The YA market skyrocketed in the 2000’s. Suddenly we had entire sections of bookstores and libraries devoted to teens. The teen years started to look less like a John Hughes movie and more like an extension of childhood. Kids didn’t want to read about adult things because adult things in the late 90’s/early 2000’s seemed very far away. College rates soared and adulthood could be delayed a bit longer. If I am a baby millennial why do I want to read a book where the main character is worrying about his marriage and his mortgage when I am 15 and probably another 15 years away from both? So I read The Hunger Games and Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girl and Vampire Academy and Libba Bray, and books that may not resemble my life any more than a Grisham novel did, but the characters were my age and my maturity level.
So those kids grow up never having to leave the bubble of books for them. Then suddenly they hit high school or college and you want them to read The Grapes of Wrath? Really? Of course they can’t pay attention to it. It’s not because they are dumb or lazy, it’s because they have had zero training in the art of reading classic literature. They don’t even have the Wishbone version.
So what to do? Well, for starters stop revering so-called classic literature like that’s all we have. I know that sounds like sacrilege, but there a so many wonderful modern books from diverse voices and perspectives that can teach students the same things you thought Ernest Hemingway would teach them. We can also start training them to read these texts at a younger age. My fourth grade teacher read us The Secret Garden aloud and we were mesmerized. To this day I say that my love of gothic mysteries started with that book. A lot of parents and teachers are hesitant to read older titles because they worry about racist or troubling stereotypes and that is a valid concern. However, there a lot of books that hold up. Anne of Green Gables is still a delight, the Ramona books (written in the 50’s and 60’s) have a more “old-fashioned” sound but Ramona is universal. It also would not hurt us to worry less about content in books and just be happy kids are reading. Don’t worry about things being on grade level, and definitely don’t stress about something as stupid as Accelerated Reader points. Let kids enjoy the act of reading and as they progress let them progress. Yeah maybe Stephen King isn’t a great choice for an 8th grader, but Stephen King is also a GREAT writer. Kids can learn more about the craft of writing from King than they ever can from a boring textbook.
Finally, what is our goal? Is it to have all students be competent in the classics? Or is it to raise people who love to read and think critically? Because if our goal is the latter let’s meet them where they are. Be excited that bookstores are booming and people are reading. Get out of your own head and your own biases about what titles they are reading. Lord knows we will always have English majors so someone will always be able to explain the damn turtle allegory in The Grapes of Wrath. (The turtle is the Joads! We get it Steinbeck!) We love assigning blame to the generations below us like they were raised in a vacuum. (My generation did not “kill” Applebee’s Karen, we actually loved that appetizer plate. Wages that didn’t keep up with inflation and lowered discretionary spending, THAT is what killed Appelbee’s.) Gen Z has their share of problems, but books are not one of them.