NEWS

The Myths of Teenage

This piece comes from a conference on teenagers and reading that I organized at the New York University Publishing Program in March of 1999. The fact that we were able to hold such a meeting with a large, paying audience, and that we could find many speakers willing to travel across the country to discuss the subject showed how far we have come. Teenagers are clearly back on the map, and figuring out what they are reading, and how to match them up with books matters to librarians, book and magazine editors, authors, and critics. My introduction aimed at finding the source of our ignorance in our own adult assumptions. I give a broad overview of the rest of the dayís events at the end of this chapter.

Greetings. My name is Marc Aronson. As some of you know, I edit books, many of them aimed at teenagers. For years, doing that required a kind of faith ñ faith that there were authors who would want to write superb books in a genre that is often ignored or held in contempt; faith that there were readers eager for those books; faith, ultimately that books could matter in the lives of young people who have grown up with every other form of media and entertainment. Iíll be your host today. And this conference is a sign that many people share my blind and willful trust in both reading and adolescents.

This conference was born out of a myth ñ not Chronos, or Osiris, or ggdrasil ñ but the far more modern and pernicious kind of myth that shapes our lives. Not very long ago, Iíd come to the meetings in which new book acquisitions were approved by the higher-ups, and Iíd hear: ìblacks donít buy books.î This was astonishing. Important people running large companies were living in a myth-suffused haze in which prejudice defined perception. Hearing something like that stops you in your tracks. It is so far from reality, yet it is expressed with complete authority. And these beliefs matter. For a time, it was difficult to publish black-oriented books because of this reigning faith.

Luckily, the market, the talent of black authors and artists, the active interest of critics and librarians, as well as conscientious efforts by editors such as Phyllis Fogelman, did what I, as a powerless junior editor, was unable to do: show that the beliefs that were governing publishing and were deemed market facts were nothing but an amalgam of prejudice, fear, laziness, and stories. In other words, a myth was masquerading as a truth, and out of inertia, bias, or fear, people bowed down to it.

Today, there are myths in publishing that are just as powerful and just as pernicious, and that is why we are here. I believe that our state of knowledge about teenagers, and in particular about teenagers and reading, is equivalent to what it was when recycled prejudice about black Americans passed as market truth, and I can prove it.

Here are the statements that are most commonly made about teenagers and reading: ìTeenagers donít readî (sometimes modified to ìteenage boys donít read.î) ìTeenagers over the age of fourteen, fifteen, sixteenî (fill in the blanks) ìonly read adult books,î sometimes modified with the addition of, ìat least thatís what I remember.î Finally, ìTeenagers have too much to read for school; they have no time for recreational reading.

Listening to those three beliefs spoken out loud, you canít help seeing that they are contradictory. If you arenít reading, you certainly are not reading adult books. If you are reading adult books, it means you do have time after your homework is done. Contradictory as these statements are, they have provided a kind of comfort to publishers, booksellers, and library directors. They were a built-in set of excuses for not trying, for making no effort to reach teenage readers, especially older ones.

There may be some level of fact behind each one of these beliefs. That is one thing I hope we discuss and determine today. But that doesnít resolve the contradiction. The problem isnít that each statement may be partially true. It is, rather, that they are each stated as if they were total and final truths that set standards for how and what we should publish. In other words, whatever their origin in life, they have become sacred myths.

Why is that? Why do we treat these myths as truths? I think it is because they fit certain adult needs and attitudes. The first myth -- ìTeenagers, especially boys, donít readî -- is a mixture of fear and nostalgia. The fear is that teenagers will not replicate us, will not carry on the values and traditions we care about. It is an expression of our fear that we havenít done our job well. We havenít made reading central, so we donít trust that the next generation will treasure it.

I say that because a secondís thought will show that teenagers, especially boys, read a great deal. How could they install new programs, pass driving tests, select precisely the right clothing and look, know all about their favorite teams, stars, musicians, and even writers if they werenít constantly reading?

That is where nostalgia comes in. When we say reading, we mean literary fiction. Teenagers arenít reading, then, really means, ìI fear that even though I want to believe I loved great novels when I was young, I havenít loved them enough as an adult to pass that along to the young. Perhaps my regrets about not having read more will come back to haunt me in the form of a generation that doesnít read. If only teenagers read more, Iíd feel better about reading less.

Myth one shows nostalgia and anxiety about our heritage. Myth two, that teenagers over a certain age only read adult books, is a different kind of projection. It is another combination of fear and hope. The greatest anxiety teenagers inspire in adults is a fear of loss of control. This almost-child is being let out into the world just at the point where he or she could do or suffer real damage. Saying they only read adult books is another kind of resignation. It says, we canít hold them back, we are intimidated by them. They know too much already. Adult books, in that sense, means the whole adult world of experience, of media, of temptation that parents turn their teenagers over to.

It is true that teenagers are ever more sophisticated, which must be daunting to parents. Parents no longer have a clear line over what is or is not appropriate for a teenager who has certainly had sex education in school as well as on TV, through friends, family, and Calvin Klein ads. But this sense of being defeated by, and resigning in the face of, teenagersí difficult urges is nothing new. Shakespeare put it very well in The Winterís Tale, a play all about the bonds of love:

ìI would there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest, for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, [and] fighting.î

With Shakespeare, parents wish young people would sleep from before puberty until after college, when they can earn a living and help pay off debts. If reading adult books hurries along that happy day, all the better. Yet there is also a twist here. A parent might fight over, not merely accept, a teenagerís interest in other purely adult forms of media. Why not with books? Because books also still carry a kind of cultural authority and hope. Parents are proud to report that their children are reading adult books, while few would boast that cute kids are sneaking into X-rated movies. If the way in which teenagers are taking in the adult world, the formerly forbidden world, of sexuality, of deviance, of evil, or strange beliefs, is through adult books, at least there is a kind of maturity in that. By mentally passing the teenager over to adult books, and simultaneously agreeing to ignore him or her, the parent both givesup and hopes that the young person is moving on. If they are reading explicit books, at least they are adult explicit books.

In a singular cocktail of resignation and magical thinking, adults entrust their silent, uncommunicative, dangerous teenagers to adult authors, as if those writers could serve as a new kinds of nanny, ushering their progeny into the adult world. Adults would like to think that in as much as teenagers are reading, those books are helping them to get into college or to make adult decisions. A book or magazine directed at a teenager that engages with adult issues is somehow more threatening than an adult text that ignores the teenager and treats the same themes. One is seduction; the other is a healthy stretch.

Here another kind of prejudice enters the scene. We are just entering the generation of parents who read real YA books as teenagers, and now have teenagers of their own. Too many parents from earlier generations assume that any non-adult literature is just a weaker, watered down, less literary, thus less useful form of adult books. It would be the very rare parent who would say, ìMy sixteen year old wants to read adult books, but I really think heíd do better with Chris Lynch.î The adult wants to hold him back to Treasure Island, or send him on to Cold Mountain.

David Elkind, a professor of child and adolescent development, was quoted on the Internet describing another version of this strange squeeze, where parents want teenagers to grow up, and yet also not be adult quite yet. ìThe spaces for adolescents have vanishedÖMalt shops and soda fountains in drugstores are a thing of the past, as are large movie theaters, And though malls have proliferated, young people are not always welcome in these places. There are fewer and fewer places for young people just to congregate with friendsÖ.At the same time, there has been an explosion of space for adults.î

The one kind of space that there is for teenagers, and ever increasingly so, is in the media ñ on MTV, on WBN, on the radio, on the Net. Books could be, and magazines often are, that kind of space. They could offer a chance for congregation with friends as teenagers discuss them, but few adults see them that way. Adults donít recognize the need for teenage physical space, and so they donít see the need for teenage cultural space. Pat Hersch, the author of A Tribe Apart (Bantam, 1999), quotes one teenager as writing, ìthere is an unspeakable distance between youth and the grown-up world.î

One reason for this distance can be found in Elkindís insight about the growth of adult territories. Adults keep expanding the psychological space they need for self expression. Through confessional, memoir, therapy, talk show adults enter ever more deeply into their own conflicts over sexuality, abuse, relationships. They insist on working out their own adolescence as adults. All the more so as they go through divorces, with all of the antagonism they can bring, and create recombined families. But, at the very same time, these adults want their adolescent progeny to behave like children. They want rigid codes for schools, for literature, for behavior. What they are exploring in themselves is exactly what they want to prevent in their children.

Thatís one kind of parents. The other cannot set any standards at all, for they know all too well how they once broke their own parentsí rules, and even now struggle with their adolescent impulses. Monica and Bill, which read like a bad YA novel, is a perfect example of this teenage adulthood writ large. Whether through repression or resignation, adults simultaneously eclipse, erase, and ignore young peopleís reality. No wonder that, through college age, young people want institutions to set rules, to be in loco parentis for parents who werenít there before.

That harsh judgment leads directly to our third myth, ìTeenagers have no time for recreational reading.î To fear, nostalgia, ignorance and anxiety, we add rigidity. When I decided to hold this conference, I realized it was important to know what books schools assign to teenagers. I asked a librarian friend named Michelle Missner to conduct surveys, I put out the question on the Net, and I learned about Arthur Applebee. He is a professor at SUNY-Albany who has studied in great detail the required reading in nearly every kind of high school in this country: urban and rural, large and small, private and public, secular and religious. Not only that, heís found similar studies dating back to the turn of the century. (for an entry point to Applebeeís work go to http://cela.albany.edu, from there you can navigate to read individual studies, or see his 1993 NCTE Research Report Literature in the Secondary Schools: Studies of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States).

Applebee has found a core list of required books that is nearly invariant, and nearly immobile. The most recent book on the list is Lord of the Flies. William Golding was the last one let on board, for his combination of insight and talent. He was, you might say, the final gift of the last large and powerful generation of liberal teachers. Just after that came the multicultural splits. Books were subject to communal judgment and taste. Any book that one group might like, another would protest, so teachers were happy to freeze required reading in the past and the deep past. An April, 1998 article In Language Arts by Julie Wollman-Bonilla argued that middle school teachers and teachers in training most frequently objected to books that featured other than dominant beliefs, or stressed racism or sexism as social problems. If you are going to eliminate such books, you have effectively blocked off modern literature.

Yet Iím not sure we should blame current teachers or over-praise prior generations. Applebeeís long-term conclusion is that required reading in high school hardly ever changes; just a book or two is taken off every ten or twenty years, and another is added. Individual schools and teachers are much more adventurous, but Applebee was looking at the core reading list, the heart of the heart of the high school experience. He has proven that schools have codified, made permanent, an absolute division separating what teenagers are assigned to read, what they experience in daily life, and the literature of their time.

I am not reviving that old fight between ancients and moderns. And, personally, I am in favor of giving young readers a far greater exposure to classics. I just think they should read those classics alongside contemporary books. As several good teacher-oriented-textbooks, such as From Hinton to Hamlet by Ted Hipple and Sarah Herz, make clear, old and new comment on each other. Instead we erect a wall between them. The one good thing about this wall is that it creates a hunger in teenagers for texts that do speak to them. If the classroom cannot provide that, they seek it in the library, on the Net, at the newsstand, or in the bookstore.

If we really believed that teenagers had so much to read for school that they couldnít read anything else, every one of us would be at our local school boards fighting to expand the required reading list. It is only because we know teenagers are not limited to what they are assigned that we can tolerate the sclerotic conditions of the schools.

The myths Iíve just described show how scared we are of teenagers, and how ignorant we are about what they are actually like, or could be if they had the chance to fulfill their potential. But there is something a bit dated about all of my finger-waving. We are having this conference precisely because things are starting to change. Our sister -- media, television, music, magazines -- have begun paying more attention to teenagers, and book publishers are all trying to figure out how to getinto the act.

As many of you know, this year for the very first time the American Library Association will give out an award for the best book for readers ages twelve to eighteen, the Mike Printz medal, and the LA Times has already announced its first-time-ever prize for YA fiction. I even hear rumors that the chains might eventually reconsider their insane devotion to shelving teenage books deep inside the childrenís section. Could YA reviews in major newspapers be far behind?

What may, in the long run, prove even more exciting than any of our efforts is what is going on in the small but growing number of teenage reading groups. Whenever teenagers get to books, and get to talk about them, the results are amazing. I think that, with a little bit of organization, we could have a revolution our hands, as groups of teenaged readers around the country read books, discuss their reactions in person or by email, and create a national conversation in which the prejudices of adults have almost no role. When they read and talk, our most firmly held myths simply evaporate.

I began with myths precisely because we are now beginning to recognize these so-called truths as dubious, flawed, incomplete. The problem is we donít yet know what to replace them with, or how much truth they contain, or how to proceed once we wipe away our sleepy old habits. That is exactly what I hope we do today: isolate what is wrong, begin to think about what would be right, and leave in a fine state of puzzled excitement. My charge to you is to listen to everything not just as a set of commentaries about teenagers, but as the beginning of a set of questions we need to ask ourselves. If we have not been able to pass on the culture of reading, why have we failed? If we havenít failed, why are we so worried? If we are so worried, why are we so resigned? I suspect that by the end of the day, even if we know nothing more about how to bring teenagers and reading together, we will know a great deal more about our own assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes. And, as we saw in the sixties, consciousness-raising is always the best place to start.

The main theme of the conference turned out to be how little we actually know about teenagers and reading. Academics reported the lack of good research on teenage reading, and the absence of any at all on how teenagers read on the Net. Librarians tracked the disconnect between teenagersí interests in, say, nonfiction, and the books that get starred reviews. Media analysts from MTV and Phillips (a leading manufacturer of interactive devices) disclosed surveys which showed reading to be much more popular among teenagers than anyone had expected. They also revealed that Gen-Y kids are eager for all sorts of ideas and experiences, if sometimes overwhelmed by them al. They are quite different from their bleak Gen-X older siblings who were more alienated from any form of media they did not create themselves. Teen magazine editors reported truly fabulous hit rates on their sites, but had no clear policy on including book reviews in print or on line. Since then, one of the most popular magazines, TeenPeople, has given its name and support to a teenage book club.

The conference made clear that the long night of YA decline is ending. But that leaves it to us to clear away the encrustation of misinformation and mythology that had become enshrined as truth. That leads to a final question: why is it that publishing in general, and publishing for younger readers in particular seems so prone to establishing ìrulesî that authors and editors, reviewers and librarians, treat as proven when their origins are murky, their validity is tested only by personal anecdotes, and they are rarely subject to public debate? If nothing else, I would urge readers of this book to question what they ìknowî to be ìtrueî about teenage readers, and where that knowledge comes from. 		   

 

 




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