Lessons from the Corner Drug Dealer

By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

Every drug dealer on the planet knows the secret to success: Hook ’em when they’re young, and they’re yours forever. Even the tobacco companies learned the lesson and gave us Joe Camel a few years ago. Rumors continue to circulate among the high school set that smoking keeps you from gaining weight, and that’s like, um, the ga-reatest thing there is. Strategy, baby!

Someone needs to explain to me why, on the cusp of 2009, the publishing industry hasn’t yet caught on to what Bobby Two-fingers and his pals have known for decades. If we want the written word to compete with all the other flashy, passive forms of entertainment that are vying for our children’s attention, we need to make those words really relevant really early. We need to tune them in and turn them on to books when they’re most vulnerable so that we can keep them as customers forever.

In a very real way, then, we authors are desperately dependent upon the choices made by school librarians and curriculum planners. If they make the world of kiddie-lit interesting, there’s hope. If not, then we’re just marking time till we become as anachronistic as the buggy whip: a quaint memory from a simpler time.

On December 16, 2008, Washington Post Staff Writer Valerie Strauss posited that recent Newberry Medal winners—the Academy Award of young people’s literature—might be “so complicated and inaccessible to most children that they are effectively turning kids off reading.” The article goes on to explain that of the 25 winners and runners-up, four deal with death, six with parental abandonment, and another four with mental handicaps. Most, the article says, deal with “tough social issues.” Goodness gracious, I hope no children get trampled in the stampede to pull those stories off the shelves. What fifth-grader won’t walk away from his Wii to immerse himself in death and abandonment?

And what world did the judges grow up in that would make them believe that kids want to read that stuff? It’s literary broccoli with okra pudding on the side. Kids’ll choke it down because a grownup says they have to, but the pain of the experience will linger for years—perhaps for a lifetime.

When my son was in third and fourth grades, he devoured R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps series. I’m talking dozens of books; yet one of his teachers made it very clear to him and me both that she did not approve of him reading such trash. I told her that there’s only one important word in the phrase, “reading such trash,” and then I reminded her that she didn’t get a vote in what he could and could not read. Today, my son is 22 years old, and when I had the honor to meet Bob Stein at Thrillerfest last year, I thanked him for the books that inspired my kid to become the voracious reader that he is today.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the preeminent school districts in the country, they have (or at least had, a few years ago) kids reading The Scarlet Letter in 8th grade. No kidding, The Scarlet letter! As if, in the pantheon of modern-day accessible literature, there’s not a book out there that might be of good enough quality to teach the same lessons without the burden of language patterns that haven’t been used in my lifetime times three. It’s infuriating.

Teachers and administrators of the world, please wake up! We change mathematics methodologies to the point where I can no longer teach a fourth-grader to subtract “the right way,” we change history to demonize founders we once thought of as heroes, we change curricula to reflect the political whims of the day. Is it too much to ask to give kids books that will inspire them to read more?

It doesn’t have to be literary chocolate and ice cream, but how about the occasional literary pizza? You could even put some broccoli on it.