A friend of mine linked this article to her Facebook page yesterday. At first the post seems innocent enough, but then when you read the title and the text it begins to feel a little sensational. You start to think OMG OUR KIDS CAN’T READ, but you swiftly realize after looking at the slideshow, our nation’s children are reading for fun! Here’s a quote from the article.

High school students today are reading books intended for children with reading levels far below those appropriate for teens, according to a recent report.

A compilation of the top 40 books teens in grades 9-12 are reading in school shows that the average reading level of that list is 5.3 — barely above the fifth grade.

“A fifth-grade reading level is obviously not high enough for college-level reading. Nor is it high enough for high school-level reading, either, or for informed citizenship,” writes Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.

Below the text there is a slideshow that reveals the hottest books and their reading levels. For example The Hunger Games is 5.3 reading level. My daughter is in second grade and reads 2.1, so she is behind because she is in grade two but the year is almost over, she should be at 2.6 by now. So our high school students are reading books in the 5.0 range and the nation is clutching its collective pearls.

But here’s what I see. Thanks to Harry Potter, and Twilight, and The Hunger Games I see a nation of children reading for entertainment. They are reading for fun! Haven’t we, the people of the book, been waiting for this day since Beowulf was first transcribed and became the first thing ever written in the English language?

I say we ease our hands off the pearls folks, and let the kids read.