This how we can take the road back to a love for literature

Another school year, another season of hope, but our society faces a nagging educational reality: Students' reading scores continue to sink to worrisome levels. And a love of books has become for many of our young people as outdated as rotary phones.

The pandemic may have something to do with the decline in scores, but the source of the problem surely goes well beyond any virus now or to come. There are many possible culprits: book bans, smartphones, the internet, the valuing of fame over accomplishment, the cluttered landscape of information and disinformation that clogs the collective brain. As the new school year starts, we should think deeply about how to help our children find the path back to a love of reading.

Remember the excitement of getting a new book for Christmas or your birthday? The mystery that you suspected lay hidden between the covers? The very scent of an adventure about to begin with those simple but resonant first sentences from Herman Melville’s "Moby Dick" or Charlotte Bronte’s "Jane Eyre" — “Call me Ishmael” or “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” The call of stories? The way a work of literature could tell us who we were and who we might become? For those hours in a given narrative we were Scout or Holden or Jo March. Their struggles were ours, and their experiences taught us how to live more authentically, or at least what questions we might ask ourselves. Those hours of reading were a fever dream, when we were drawn into a world both precise and impossible, something close to our everyday world, the one we suspected no one else could understand. And we woke up from that reading dream exhausted but cleansed.

Literature fed our dreams then, and it should serve our children’s now. As Steven Millhauser explains the experience of reading in his 1972 novel "Edwin Mullhouse," “We are shocked by distortion into the sudden perception of the forgotten strangeness of things.” And true literature grants us access to the world “that has been lost to us through habit and inattention.” This is what we want for our children — to see through the media muddle, to hear the sound of their own heartbeats amid all the rhetoric and shouting, to discover language and stories that are honest and humanizing.

I offer my own reading and writing life as an example here. I grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, a product for good and ill of an Irish Catholic neighborhood and a parochial school education. Early on, I wanted to escape from what seemed to me a stifling atmosphere, and books showed me the way. Even though I had not yet heard of Northrop Frye, I was his disciple before I exited St. Philip Neri Elementary School. And later, when I read his sentences, I knew they were mine — “No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the human imagination.”

Books kept me whole when it felt like everything in the world was contriving to confuse and fracture me. Books allowed me to breathe when life sucked the air from the room. When I suspected I was the only person on the planet who was afraid, baffled or isolated, books like "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or "Their Eyes Were Watching God" let me know I was in good company. They let me know that my alienation might be a badge of honor rather than a sign of disgrace. Books connected me to a world beyond the Bronx.

Reading saved my life. The liberation of reading led me to the catharsis of writing. Like reading, writing is an adventure, and as it has done for me, it can take our sons and daughters into worlds wider than they thought existed. My most recent book — "The Road to Dungannon: Journeys in Literary Ireland" — compelled me to explore the story of my maternal grandfather, Irish literature, its history and its culture. I learned a great deal about Irish writers past and present, about the Irish landscape, but I also discovered much about who I am and where I came from. And isn’t this what we want for our children — to find the answer to who they are and who they might become?

This is one of the great challenges for our society in the 21st century — to guide our children back to books, to lead them toward the strength of their own imaginations, to help them find in great stories a way to envision the future.

Michael Pearson, a professor at Old Dominion University, is the author of many books, including "The Road to Dungannon: Journeys in Literary Ireland."

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Back to school 2023: Rebuild love for literature