It’s summertime, and soon millions of teenagers across the country will be swimming at the beach, attending camps, and maybe working a summer job or two. They probably won’t be reading much (and I say this as an English teacher; as a teen, I only lightly skimmed my required summer books, yet always managed to Sparknote my way to a decent essay grade in September). Summer reading, in short, has always been a lesson in futility. Some things never change.
But something will be different about this summer. There’s a new internship presenting itself as a viable option for young people in the coming weeks: activism.
In a recent piece, Troy Worden called attention to the upcoming March for Our Lives tour, a 60-day, 75-stop monstrosity, and how it “ought to make us question the current state of student activism, not unthinkingly praise it.” A fair point, indeed, and as someone who’s in the business of pushing kids to be anything but unthinking, it’s something I can get behind. But a second article makes another, more disturbing observation, and offers a bleak outlook for anyone hoping to improve the quality of discourse surrounding the gun control debate.
Jack Elbaum recently wrote about why contemporary American students feel so politically empowered, and cited the overwhelmingly positive images of them in mainstream media as one potential culprit. I tend to agree. How would any normal teenager respond to being called a hero on national television for a few months? It almost demands that they become more confident. And that’s great. Adolescents around the country need to feel empowered, or else there’s no hope at all for a revival of our politics.
But unfounded confidence benefits no one, and Elbaum also notes how the media has unscrupulously taken advantage of these kids, using them as pawns to further a narrative that “paint[s] conservatives as unfeeling, awful people.” The kids, Elbaum warns, either “cannot or choose not too see past the surface” of this thinly veiled scheme.
While Elbaum’s argument is on track, allow me to take his point one step further. The adults, not the kids, bear the most significant responsibility here. And until now, they have failed miserably as protectors of our nation’s youth by only allowing them to skim along the surface of what any sensible person recognizes as a delicate, nuanced political issue. News anchors, realizing they won’t get the answers they’re looking for, refuse to ask hard-hitting questions about the technicalities of gun-control legislation. Teachers (and even teachers unions), however well-intentioned they may be, push their own agendas by pressuring kids to leave school during the walkouts, implicitly shutting down one side of this debate. Simply put, not enough adults have encouraged students to read in order to absorb quality information on this complex topic so that a civil conversation can take place.
So I call upon these students and, more importantly, the adults in their lives, to engage in some truly “deep reading” between June and August. Take Patrick Sullivan’s “An Open Letter to High School Students About Reading” as the perfect place to begin. In it, the Connecticut community college professor highlights why this type of reading is so important, and how it could prevent kids from having the rug pulled over their eyes by the media. “Deep reading,” according to Sullivan, requires “reflection, curiosity, humility, sustained attention, a commitment to rereading, consideration of multiple possibilities, and what the education scholar Sheridan Blau has called ‘intellectual generosity.’” The opposite of this engaged examination of words is “surface learning,” where the reader cruises through a text “to finish rather than to understand what they have read.”
Take a step back from this debate and ask yourself if you’ve seen character traits like curiosity and humility, an academic attribute like the ability to consider multiple possibilities, or anything that resembles “intellectual generosity.” If you haven’t, and you’re raising, working with, or advising children in any way, take a day to read something alongside them this summer. It doesn’t have to be War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. Make it a short story, a poem, or maybe even an opinion piece. Just make sure they understand it.
Michael O’Keefe is a boarding school English teacher and football coach. A native New Englander, he has worked in both northeast Ohio and the Mid-Atlantic region for the last five years.
