Summer Reading, Kids Choose

Two recent New York Times columns refer to research by University of Tennessee scholars on the value of allowing children in Florida to select their own books for summer reading.

Tara Parker-Pope:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/summer-must-read-for-kids-any-book/

David Brooks:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DEFD81E39F93AA35754C0A9669D8B63&ref=davidbrooks

Citing also work from Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy on the negative correlation between North Carolina middle-schoolers' high-speed Internet access and math and reading scores, David Brooks proceeds to contrast the Internet with "the literary world."

Brooks argues the latter "is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer's world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher. Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students. It's better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious. Perhaps that will change. Already, more 'old-fashioned' outposts are opening up across the Web. It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning."

One example of the kind of "old-fashioned outposts" Brooks envisions on the Web is the New Haven Review, mentioned in posts to this blog on January 3 and May 5 of this year.