Jack Reacher should be taught in schools

[noblegiraffe]

Lee Child, the famous and prolific author of thrillers has been doing literacy workshops with prisoners based around his Jack Reacher novels.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/dec/19/lee-child-thrillers-uk-school-curriculum-literacy

He suggests that teaching children literary masterpieces is putting children off reading. "He said: “You should have whatever is compelling and whatever gets people into the habit of reading. Then you can have the fancy stuff later, of course, but don’t start with it.”"

I mean, he has a point, there is a crisis in reading among young people, particularly boys (65.5% of boys got a 4+ in English in the summer compared to 75.9% of girls and we know that being a reader improves outcomes across all GCSEs).

• "Just 1 in 3 (34.6%) children and young people aged 8 to 18 said that they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2024. Reading enjoyment levels have decreased by 8.8 percentage points over the past year alone.

https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-reading-in-2024/

But I'm not sure what to do with this - Lee Child is finding that male prisoners are engaging with Jack Reacher in prison when there's not much else going on for them, would those same young men have engaged with it at school? On the other hand, his books are certainly more engaging than Of Mice and Men.

Of Mice and men is used because it is short and is often taught to lower attainment groups.

I would argue, having just read it, The Grapes of wrath is a much better and more relevant book for today - a wider range of characters, more exciting and a very strange ending that lends itself to students providing alternatives.

I think lots of people have ideas of what should be taught in schools which doesn't really align with how much it's possible to teach in schools.

@OneWorthyTiger Very true, but English is a compulsory subject throughout school so it's not an addition like so many things.

Trying to adjust the whole English curriculum is very difficult because it covers so much ground - from preschool to GCSE and there are too many different groups that need to be consulted before any change can happen.

Lord of the Flies would be a good book for schools.

Totally agree with this. And they should kick it off with Alan Ritchson doing a reading tour in schools. I volunteer mine to start…

No no no. This is what I did! I hated every word by the end - the conch is democracy, Simon is Jesus. Just make it stop.

Although as I said upthread, studying any book would probably make me hate it. And I heard an interview with Meera Syal where they talked about her book which is used for GCSE, and she said some of the questions (“what was the author symbolising with X?” etc) she didn’t know because she wasn’t symbolising anything. Which just about summed up my feelings on the overanalysis of every word.

I taught in a school that had a policy of 'do now' which was on the board when the class come in, they had to come in to the room in silence and complete the 'do now'.

You could put anything in there but I often put 'silent reading' it helped that the school had a rule that you had to have a reading book on you, either your own or a library book.

If there were 5 lessons in the day and everyone did the silent reading then you are up to 25 mins reading a day.

I didn’t do any English classics in school and I feel all the poorer for it. Luckily I love to read and have filled in my own gaps as an adult.

I do think that the curriculum should be inclusive and there’s nothing wrong with a few modern trashy books to build a love of reading.

I mentioned Lord of the Flies because I found it a compelling read so more likely to engage pupils. You have a group of civilised boys who begin to turn savage! More interesting for pupils than other books I would’ve thought!

Indeed. I imagine William Golding picking up a modern study guide to Lordmof the Flies and learning about all the hidden meaning etc he supposedly crafted into the story and going “well that’s news to me!”

I wonder if it might be better to teach Shakespeare more like the poetry section of English Lit GCSE. Rather than the whole play the syllabus could cover specific sections or speeches, perhaps ones with famous phrases and dissect those.
To be or not to be
Cleopatra's barge
The 3 witches.

I'm sure some would see this as dumbing down, but there are so many specific pieces of Shakespeare that are used day-to-day in our language and most kids probably don't become aware of them.

Dear god..NO!
I did it in yr7 many years ago and bloody hated it.

My son's school has just adopted Sparx Reader as their preferred English homework scheme. You complete a quiz to get a reading age/ability, you get a few book choices to read on the app ( not very exciting, mostly YA with all human misery is here themes, plus a bit of LGBTQ+ for good measure) . You read a few paragraphs, then have to answer 3 or 4 questions to earn points. They have to earn 300 points per week, which generally equates to around 6 reading and question blocks. If the story gets vaguely engaging, you immediately have to stop to answer questions.
I can see from a teacher's point of view it proves the children are reading, but if the Dementors had invented a reading app, they would have invented Sparx. 🙄

Yes, I agree with this I think. People should read what they like. I read a lot and it varies from classics to Lee Child.

But things like book tok have muddied the water I think and now a lot of people read the viral stuff, which I also feel is inorganic in a different way to snobbery

I read it in year 7 too and liked it!

Reading a few paragraphs and then stopping to answer questions doesn't seem to address the 'reading for pleasure' bit at all, nor the building up reading stamina.

We want kids to be able to get lost in a good book, however that needs to be achieved.

I had the same argument with my GCSE music teacher about 'Beethoven changes key here to build tension' - how do we know Beethoven didn't just change key here because he thought it sounded good?

I was on another thread recently where some people were saying The Bronte sisters were so depressing and dreary and they much preferred Jane Austen. I like the darker themes so that’s probably why I liked Lord of the Flies!

I have a vague recollection, and can’t remember what year this was in (somewhere in Y7 to Y9) of having homework to write reviews of books we had read / present our reviews to the class. From what I remember this could be of anything.

I don’t know if this still happens, but actually I think it was a good idea. IIRC it was in Language lessons rather than Literature lessons, though.

I loved Lord of the Flies but I didn't study it for GCSE.
I am on the fence really about ' dumbing down'. I can see my own attention span has shrunk.

I think the Of Mice and Men comparison isn’t particularly fair - the female character doesn’t have a name for a good reason and Steinbeck himself wrote about why he wrote her as he did/what her backstory would be.

And schools aren’t doing OMAM anymore for GCSE. The current options are actually pretty varied.

Plenty of schools teach age appropriate “thriller” type novels (Anthony Horowitz’s young spy series as one example). Being able to have lots of novels to offer students requires buying new stock etc. I can see why schools would be reluctant to buy sets of books that are just for “fun”. There are plenty of great YA thriller books, but I wouldn’t say the curriculum as it is at the moment provides enough space for reading for pleasure.

Sparx sells itself as helping to build up reading stamina. It turns reading into a disjointed chore.
The reviews on Trustpilot from actual users tell you all you need to know.

I hope it isn't an expensive scheme for the school to buy. Although, it's probably much cheaper than real books.
I can only presume our school is bankrupt, next term the children are on mini white boards and white board pens ( one pen each for free) instead of exercise books. It's all rather Victorian.

Sparx for every subject is how to put a kid off. It's awful. DS loved maths until bloody Sparx homework and he had meltdowns about it. (Autism).

I actually think lots of books at school have been good for YA. They did Noughts and Crosses, Hunger Games and ( DSs favourite) The Woman in Black.

Just a shame that the Shakespeare was Much Ado about Nothing which I think is harder for boys to get into than Macbeth or Hamlet.

I also agree with this. I hated the over analysis and the texts we had at GCSE, totally killed the enjoyment of “To Kill a Mockingbird” that I’d read before GCSE.