lillibet | Choice

There's an article in the New York Times talking about some English teachers trying to give their students more choice in terms of what they read.

Reading was always very easy for me, but I was the top student in my school, so I don't think I'm much of a metric. Looking back at what we read, it does feel as though a lot of it was poorly chosen and too mature for us. I mean, I think Crime and Punishment is a great book, but it was a very hard read at 16.

As I think I've mentioned, my school did a cool thing where they'd pick a theme with four books to it (alienation, death of innocence, etc.), divide the class into teams to read and present on the books, so we got a significant exposure to more books than we could have covered doing them one at a time.

One of the things this article touches on, but doesn't have any answers for is: what is the goal? Perhaps the answer is to give kids much more choice in earlier grades, to develop their love of reading and then switch in later years to either direct assignment or narrowing the field of choice in order to develop the shared cultural literacy.

I'm curious what other people think about this.