The minute I wrote last Friday’s “miracle” blog about educators wising up about comics, a number of somebodies — most prominently Stephen Krashen, author of The Power of Reading — came out of nowhere, thankfully, to set me straight. Glad these posts hit a nerve, I wondered when I’d get the chance to broach the subject once again.
So, it was indeed a bit of serendipity to find this Sunday interview in The Press-Enterprise with Jeffrey Kahan and Stanley Stewart, co-authors of the 2006 book, Caped Crusaders 101: Composition Through Comic Books, that demonstrates how comics featuring Spider-Man, the X-Men and Fantastic Four “tackle themes such as race, ethnic cleansing and terrorism and suggests comics could improve declines in student literacy.”
In fact, Kahan believes the message of Caped Crusaders 101 may help educators erase the decline in reading among kids between ages 9-15. A couple of choice quotes from Kahan:
- “We thought someone may like approaching students with subjects that delight them. That goes back to the Renaissance. They believed literature was supposed to delight as well as educate.”
- “We’re not arguing that comics can replace great literature. But that great literature can be found in the comics.”
May 8th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Sorry, but there has been no decline in literacy. I have written several short papers showing this (on my website at sd. krashen.com). A big report came out last year claiming that people aren’t reading as much as they used to, but their definition of “reading” was narrow: books only. And other data even disputes that book reading is on a decline. Every other measure I could find of intellectual life in America (writing, visiting museums, libraries) has stayed the same for decades. By the way, there were complaints about the decline of literacy can be found in the nineteenth century, when Harvard complained of the low level of quality of writing by freshmen. This was in 1874.
The “problem” with literacy in the US is that children of poverty have little access to reading material. They live in homes with far fewer books (and comics), their schools have poorer school libraries, and the public libraries in their neighborhoods are inferior. This has been well documented.
We need to think about how to get comics to children of poverty.