My mother has a reading log from when I was in kindergarten that clearly shows I read pages from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. As the story goes, I used what I read in the book to tell her what was wrong with Clash of the Titans, my favorite movie at the time.
Five years old and reading a college-level book. Is it any surprise I tested at college-level on many reading tests I took as a child?
I’m an extreme case. Through the course of my teaching, I’ve met middle schoolers who are working their way through early readers because that’s where their reading level is. In fact, today’s mainstream books are generally aimed at anywhere from a sixth- to eighth-grade level because that’s considered the average reading level of the nation’s adults.
Scary, huh?
I’m also an avid manga fan. There are actually now more manga than any other type of book on my shelves. Quite a few of my students also read manga, and it always terrifies me when one of my middle schoolers bounds up to me and tells me they loved Descendants of Darkness, one of my favorite titles. Manga has age ratings on them, and that particular one (like the majority of the titles I read) is labelled “Older Teen, 16+”. It’s not that the language is over my middle schoolers’ heads; it’s that the content is. Had they asked me first, I’d have steered them toward something better suited to their age.
There is a movement afoot to mark all children’s novels with age bands to show what group the story is targeting. Of course, some people are up in arms over this, but they feel the age labels will shut out potential readers in a society where a disappointing percentage of adults don’t read unless they have to. What I think is really going on here is that the books are being labeled for the content. The labels are just saying that the average child at that age will be able to digest what’s happening in the story.
Of course, you will always have the overly bright child who’s reading books far beyond their age, and the child who just needs a little more time to understand what they’re reading picking up a book below their age group. These bandings aren’t supposed to be used as a means to shun either of these groups; they’re just guidelines. Just like the movie and television ratings. Just like the age warnings on manga.
A college student enjoying a PG-13 movie isn’t stigmatized for watching something accessible to children, and I suspect the age bands won’t be quite the stigma some people think they will either.