Parents urged to teach classics

A book club account that reads Augustine, Dante, William Shakespeare, and Fyodor Dostoevsky told parents this month to give children “a lot more classics” and a lot fewer self-help books, and the post quickly drew hundreds of likes and dozens of replies. The account behind it, Athenaeum Book Club, says its mission is to recover “the great texts of Western Civilization” through slow, communal reading. (substack.com) (athenaeumbooks.com) The argument landed in the middle of a real reading slump. In the National Literacy Trust’s 2025 survey of 114,970 children and teenagers, just 32.7% of 8- to 18-year-olds said they enjoyed reading, and only 18.7% said they read daily in their free time, both the lowest levels the group has recorded since 2005. (literacytrust.org.uk) (eric.ed.gov) That drop is not just a British problem. The National Endowment for the Arts has long tracked a broader fall in literary reading in the United States, and its 2024 review of federal data said the share of 13-year-olds who read for fun almost every day fell by 13 percentage points between 2012 and 2023 while reading scores also slid. (arts.gov 1) (arts.gov 2) So when people argue about “classics,” they are really arguing about what should fill the shrinking space that books still occupy in childhood. Athenaeum’s answer is old, demanding books that have lasted for centuries, not newer books built around quick advice or immediate utility. (athenaeumbooks.com) (substack.com) Supporters of that view usually mean more than prestige. A 2022 integrative review covering 21 studies found repeated links between children’s and adolescents’ fiction reading and empathy, with some studies suggesting reading helps develop empathy and others suggesting empathy also supports reading comprehension. (pepsic.bvsalud.org) Newer work points in the same direction for family reading habits. A 2026 article by a neuroscientist describing a study of 38 families in central Virginia said caregivers who read one storybook nightly to children aged 6 to 8 were testing whether regular shared reading could build empathy and creativity during a period of intense social development. (theconversation.com) The harder question is which books actually keep children reading. The National Literacy Trust’s 2025 data found that children were most motivated by books tied to favorite films or television series, books that matched their hobbies, and the freedom to choose for themselves, which cuts against any one-size-fits-all canon handed down from adults. (literacytrust.org.uk) That is why the fight over classics keeps resurfacing. One side sees Homer, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain as a mental inheritance worth passing on early; the other sees reading habits as fragile enough that the first job is simply to make sure a child wants to open the next book. Athenaeum’s post was one more skirmish in that older argument, arriving at a moment when fewer children are reading for pleasure at all. (athenaeumbooks.com) (literacytrust.org.uk)