March 23 is generally not a particularly memorable date. But this year, it is a day of incredible importance for a multitude of children and young adults: At 12:01a.m. on Mar. 23, 2012, the first Hunger Games movie premiers. The first book of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy appeared in print in September 2008 and has since become a critical success, having been named one of the New York Times’s “Notable Children’s Books of 2008,” translated into 26 languages, and published in 38 countries. But all this hype begs one very important question: does The Hunger Games deserve of all its acclaim?
The Hunger Games is set in a future after the destruction of North America, in a nation called Panem which consists of a wealthy capital that controls 12 surrounding, devastatingly impoverished districts. Mostly as a means of controlling the populace, the capital selects one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to represent each district in the “Hunger Games,” a sporting event in which the participants kill each other until only one remains. By the end of the novel, 22 children are dead, and by the end of the series, the death toll is in the thousands. Collins’s novels present violence apathetically; the books are filled with so much assault and murder that the reader stops identifying emotionally with any of the deaths. I once heard someone say that The Hunger Games is like The Departed, only five times worse, and with children. The statement was meant as a joke, but there is some truth to it: the characters are viciously massacred, and those children lucky enough to survive rarely meaningfully reflect on the deaths. The Hunger Games desensitizes people to violence to an absurd degree, particularly for the age group for which it is targeted.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Adult Literacy Survey, about 70 percent of high school students need some form of reading remediation, and 42 million adult Americans cannot read. Clearly, there is a problem in the United States regarding literacy, which forces concessions to be made. When the majority of kids who are behind in third grade are doomed never to catch up, it is easy to dismiss quality of literature for the sake of kids reading at all.
The middle of an educational crisis, however, is not the time to give up on education. How can teenagers be expected to read and appreciate Wuthering Heights when Twilight is celebrated as the ideal of young romance? (Never mind that every girl now wants to marry Edward Cullen and live happily ever after in an unhealthy relationship completely dependent on only one man who dictates the minutiae of her life.) On a more basic level, Twilight is a poorly edited book, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, which cannot even pretend to be educational. The Hunger Games is not overall a poorly written book, but the subject matter leaves much to be desired. A friend of mine commented recently that when she was 11, she wanted to go to Hogwarts, and now children want to marry a vampire or participate in a murder for others’ entertainment. The Hunger Games is not necessarily a bad book, and I am by no means advocating a ban. I’m simply challenging the amount of praise bestowed upon it.
It is easy to praise books like The Hunger Games and Twilight because they encourage kids to read who otherwise wouldn’t, but in doing so, these books are placed in undeservedly high esteem. Twilight is not equivalent to Wuthering Heights, and The Hunger Games does not meet the same standards as A Farewell to Arms. Publishing is a business, and any book can become best seller. It is not fair to expect students to challenge themselves when they receive the message that they should be satisfied and entertained by Twilight and The Hunger Games. A publisher’s greed—or an author’s ego—is not worth the sacrifice of a child’s education. It’s excellent that children are reading, but quality is just as important as quantity. We want a world of intellectual thinkers who are able to interact constructively with a text.
I’m simply asking that we take a reality check before praise for these books becomes too lofty. When we lower the quality of literature that we expect children to be satisfied with, we are disrespecting them as individuals who have the potential to become critical thinkers. Children should be encouraged and have the opportunity to read authors like Hemingway, Twain, and Shelley. At 12:01 on Mar. 23, 2012, I will be sitting in a theater watching The Hunger Games and I’m sure the movie will be fantastic, but on Mar. 24, I will be back in my room reading Thoreau, because that is the reading required at an education institution of this caliber.
