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.

We did Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected for part of our GCSE coursework. There is a degree of latitude, but it relies on having a teacher (and head of dept/head teacher) who will allow it.

Gcse coursework ended 10 years ago?

The English syllabus is so dull!!! Yes I very much agree.

No latitude at GCSE these days

But lots of books, better written and more age appropriate are available. My children went through phases of loving different books - and the love of reading is imbedded long before they are being made to read ‘classics’.
Actually my DD, 20, loves reading now more than she ever did as a child. My son also reads more now, though he prefers nonfiction, like autobiographies and history books.

At school we did it in what would be year 9. Then it turned up on the O level syllabus.

I hated it so much that after I passed English Language O Level I somehow managed to get the school to let me drop English. This was in a girls' school, not a female character in the book.

Oh and the teacher we had was also a problem.

Offering more exciting books is a good idea, it might help some children/teens get more into reading so long as they don't have to overanalyse it - just having reading lessons where they can read the exciting books but not have to analyse them sounds brilliant, I would have loved that lesson the most! (though actually I still enjoyed all the set texts I read at school despite dissecting them to pieces, and kept my anthology and reread it many times too, but I know most youth aren't like I was)

My daughters school does tutor reading - several mornings a week the class are read to and they discuss.

These books are more modern - Trash (Andy Milligan), The Graveyard Book (Nail Gaman) and Refugee Boy (Benjamin Zephaniah) are a few on the list for lower years.

the idea is to keep them reading and expose them to a wider range of books than the set English texts.

We’ve listened to some of the Reacher books on Borrow Box. They’re unabridged and great for long car journeys. The narrator brings out the humour that I often missed when reading the books.

This is all true but the target isn't children who have already developed a love of reading, it's those who avoid it at all costs.

Kids have to actually want to sit and read a book to start with. So often, you carefully choose a book that should engage them, but they don't even give it a chance.
I love reading, but if you told me that at 11am on a Tuesday I was going to have to sit in a classroom and read for an hour, even a book of my choice, I would probably not feel like it. I'm doing nothing today. I will read later, but if you told me to read now, I wouldn't because I'm not in the zone.
I've been in schools where the librarians have had a huge selection for kids to try, but inevitably some kids would try to flick through the front pages of a number of books because they didn't actually want to sit and read anything.

I had to read some shite in high school, but I was already a reader, so I just read what I wanted at home. And I read a lot at home because I wasn't mad keen on being outside and there was very little else to do. I also grew up watching parents and grandparents on both side read. And I come from a v wc background.

I find it telling that ds, who is my reading child, only really reads voraciously on holiday- when he has nothing else to do. Cormac Mccarthy has captured him this year.

In terms of analysis, we didn't really hit it until yr 9 when I was in school, then yr10 properly and I loved it. Mainly because my friends and I suddenly saw loads more meaning in the music we listened to.