Summer’s too booked for reading

Brandt Seigfried, Reporter

Mid-August, the week right before school starts, we have all done it; our summer reading isn’t completed yet. What’s the solution? Pick out this random book off the list, skim it or Spark Note it before school starts. We won’t do anything important with it anyways, right?

When I was a kid, my parents used to read to me before bed. In elementary school, I was required to fill out an independent reading log signed by my parents to prove I was reading outside of school. In middle school, I completed several projects in Language Arts class on books that I was allowed to pick out myself. In high school, I am forced to read one book during my summer with little related work in class the next year.

I consider myself an avid reader and I try to make time every day to pick up a good book. I do not dispute the benefits of reading.  Researchers agree that summer reading helps with knowledge retention, increasing literacy and, according to Daily Mail, may even help you live longer by reducing stress and keeping the mind active.

These are great benefits, but we are in high school now.  We’re big kids, and capable of making our own choices with regards to reading. Everyone likes to read a different genre; that’s the great thing about books. We have about 130 million to choose from, so students should be free to decide what they read over the summer.  Reading provides great opportunities to learn and enjoy, but this is taken away from us when our teachers force us to choose from their narrow list of 24 books. We read enough school-chosen books during the regular year.

Reading is supposed to be fun. The very act of requiring it makes it a cumbersome task to be completed. We are teenagers, we rebel by nature, even when it doesn’t make sense. Therefore, if the goal is to encourage reading during the summer, it should become optional.

Fundamentally, required summer reading is a battle over whose business it is to dictate the activities of summer: you or the school? In the summer during high school, we are trying to work, discover and enjoy ourselves. I firmly believe that requiring students to complete required reading during the summer is an encroachment on the sacrosanct freedoms summer offers us, and that it discourages leisure reading on our own.