Friday, March 29 2024

Certain novels can be found on the shelves of our bookstores long after
they were written. Novels that tell a good story never go out of style. We
have the great classics of international literature that we often find
ourselves rediscovering¾they always have something more to teach and reveal
to us. Today’s youth need to pick up these classic tales and rediscover the
beauty and wisdom found within their pages.

How is it possible to rediscover the classics in this day and age, where
the continuous development of technology and the limitless advancement of
social media seems to leave not an ounce of spare time for reading? As
McLuhan demonstrated, every new medium of communication introduces a
cultural gain and loss at the same time. Today’s generation, through the
enhancement of audiovisual technology and the use of the internet, has
radically changed the way it imagines, learns, and reasons. Therefore, we
must admit that we are in the midst of an educational crisis¾starting with
the way literature is studied in school and college. We need to analyze how
it is we read and how we do not read.

Reading seems to play a truly minimal role in teenagers’ lives. However,
the pandemic has posed a challenge to our downtime, leading us to uncover
unexpected data about young peoples’ reading habits.

GoStudent: research reveals young people’s reading habits

The online learning platform GoStudent found that, for
more than half of the Italian teens surveyed, the pandemic has positively
affected their reading habits: 51% read more and only 8%
experienced a decline in reading as a result of Covid-19. This positive
trend also affects young people in other countries, such as Turkey, Mexico,
and Spain; however, a more dire situation was found in Greece and Germany.
A survey conducted in seven international areas, through which about 1,000
parents of teenagers ages 11 – 18 were given a survey about their
children’s reading habits and preferences.

That survey showed that the top-rated genres are fiction and adventure.
Some of the most popular books in these genres are the Harry Potter series
and the Lord of the Rings series, as well as books by Agatha Christie and
Stephen King. Following these two genres, in terms of popularity, we have
science fiction, comics, and manga.

The surveys showed that many young people take up reading because the
school requires it. This is not necessarily a negative finding, but it
makes us reflect on how important the role of schools is in educating
adolescents to read the classics of universal literature, which continue to
fill a fundamental role in the education of young people.

The challenge is to teach youth how to read the great novels of literary
history not simply by studying the relationships within each piece, but by
connecting the relationship between the story and the world. After all,
literature expands our horizons, leading us to imagine new ways of seeing
and understanding the world around us.

Research on youth and literature

The importance of the classics has also been addressed in a study conducted
by Family and Media, exhibited in the book

Educating young people through the classics – Love, Friendship and
storytelling

. This book emphasizes the educational potential that stories have in the
character development of today’s youth. Similar to GoStudent’s research, Family and Media

seeks to discover which movies and books young people prefer,

recognizing “narrative intelligence” as a proper response to today’s
educational crisis.

The original goal of the research focuses on six great classics which were
reworked for the big screen. The study focused on the themes of love and
friendship and how they are presented to young people in a new and profound
way, stimulating them to think, read, and rediscover their appreciation for
good literature.

Adolescence is a time in all our lives that defines our character and
personalities. That is why it is so important to offer youth the right
tools to help them along through these years. We can offer them tools that
will help them “read” reality and come to understand the inner world that
each work brings.

Forming a young person’s taste in literature, film, music, etc. is a
daunting task that is mostly controlled by parents. However, schools
contribute a lot, too, as they offer youth plenty of opportunities to read
and get to know what sort of literature they like¾perhaps even presenting
them with books that would have otherwise been lost. There is such a need
for capable, passionate teachers¾capable in the sense that they are
knowledgeable and can passionately convey this knowledge to their students.
It is this virtuous loop that allows a teenager to mature and develop his
or her own consciousness and critical spirit. Only then does one
truly learn. Otherwise, one learns by memory and sooner or later forgets
everything.

All that remains, then, is to wish for what Todorov proposes regarding the
education of young people: “What better introduction to understanding human
behavior and feelings than to immerse oneself in the works of the great
writers who have dedicated themselves to this task for millennia? What
better preparation for all professions based on human relationships? If one
understands literature in this way and orients his or her learning in this
way, what more valuable aid could the future student of law or political
science, or the future social worker, or those involved in psychotherapy,
the historian, or the sociologist study? Wouldn’t having Shakespeare and
Sophocles, Dostoevsky and Proust as teachers be like taking advantage of
truly exceptional teaching?”

Previous

UPCYCLING, FASHION MEETS CREATIVITY AND SUSTAINABILTY

Next

Talking to young people about marriage: social media, testimonies and listening

Check Also