Seuss for the teenage mind

I was just reading an article about Dr. Seuss and the creation of "The Cat in the Hat". This paragraph stuck out to me: "In a 1954 article in Life magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey claimed that Johnny couldn't read because the Dick and Jane primers omnipresent in American schools were boring. Hersey challenged Dr. Seuss (who had already published nine children's books) and other authors to write an alternative reading primer that first graders wouldn't be able to put down."

Immediately I thought, And what about high school students? Don't they have the right to read books that aren't boring? There's little comparison between the banal Dick and Jane books and the renowned classics that make up a high school English class curriculm. But still, I find a correlation. Dick and Jane were the unquestioned reading material of elementary schools for years until people started to say, hey, wait a minute, why can't we have other choices?

Literacy at the high school level is very much threatened. Wouldn't it also make a difference to have stories that capture the older reader's interest? Although "Death of a Salesman" and Moby Dick are American classics and tremendous literary accomplishments, I don't know any teens who read them for class and just couldn't put them down. Frankly, I don't know one in thirty teens who when assigned them actually finish them. It could be argued that when the likes of Hemingway and Steinbeck and Hawthorne were assigned to high school English classes, they were the undisputed best books out there. But now there are so many more choices. Again I cry, why not offer teens some variety? Why not put some living authors on the list as well? Some stories with main characters a teenager today can relate to? Some genres besides "classic"? Some kickbutt stories that keep you turning pages while still offering quality writing and endless discussion topics? Why can't teenagers today, like the first graders in 1954, be offered books in school that they won't be able to put down?

Am I beating a dead horse? Sorry, horsey.