THE HERMIT WOLF
TRUTH LOGS
THE HERMIT WOLF
TRUTH LOGS
My grandson just got his summer reading packet for incoming 10th-grade AICE English in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The book? *The Secret Life of Bees* by Sue Monk Kidd. A perfectly fine, perfectly recent, perfectly *New York Times* bestseller from 2002. And with it comes the usual bureaucratic busywork: read it over the summer, take notes every couple of chapters, write short summaries of the “important events,” answer little psychological detective questions like “What do you *think* the author meant by this?”
They’ll “discuss it at the start of the school year.” Heaven help us.
I have four other grandchildren who already survived this same system. I watched it happen in real time. They came out the other side knowing *nothing* about Mark Twain. Nothing about Jules Verne. Nothing about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kipling, or any of the writers who actually built Western literature over the last two hundred years. But they can tell you all about whichever author the *New York Times* Book Review decided was “important” two summers ago. This isn’t education. This is cultural lobotomy with extra homework.
The assignment isn’t even subtle. It’s engineered to make kids *hate* reading. Every few chapters they have to stop, dissect, summarize, and then play amateur psychologist: “What was the author *really* saying?” Kid, how the hell should you know? The author isn’t in the room. She wrote the book twenty-four years ago and moved on with her life. But no—let’s turn literature into a therapy session so we can pretend we’re teaching “critical thinking” while we quietly euthanize any love of actual books.
I remember the COVID homeschooling era when one of my grandsons had to answer exactly those kinds of questions. He looked at me, dead-eyed, and said, “I don’t care what the author meant. I just want to read something good.” That was the moment I knew the system wasn’t broken—it was working exactly as designed.
They don’t want kids who devour *Huckleberry Finn* or *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea* for fun. They want compliant little note-takers who can regurgitate the approved contemporary novel of the moment. Safer that way. Less chance anyone will stumble across dangerous ideas like individualism, adventure, or—God forbid—*humor*.
And who exactly is making these decisions in Miami-Dade? Some curriculum committee that has clearly never finished *Crime and Punishment*? Some administrator who thinks “classic” means anything published before TikTok? I’d love to know. I’d love to sit them down and ask: when was the last time *you* read something that wasn’t on a bestseller list? When was the last time you handed a child a book that has survived a century because it’s *actually good* instead of “relevant”?
Because here’s the dirty little secret: kids *can* handle the classics. They *want* the classics. My grandson lights up when I talk about Twain or Verne. He just doesn’t get them in school. Instead, he gets another contemporary novel wrapped in good intentions and pedagogical jargon, and by September he’ll be as allergic to literature as the four who came before him.
This isn’t “diversity.” This isn’t “modern voices.” This is the quiet, systematic erasure of the literary canon so that future generations won’t even know what they’re missing. And it’s happening right now, in your school district, with your tax dollars, while the kids who actually love to read are being trained to hate it.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools: if you’re going to assign summer reading, at least have the courage to assign something that has earned its place on the shelf instead of the latest flavor-of-the-month paperback. Stop pretending psychological busywork is education. Stop killing the joy of reading before these kids even have a chance to discover it.
(Miami grandmother who has watched this garbage happen to five grandchildren and has officially run out of patience)
P.S. If you’re a Miami-Dade parent or grandparent staring at the same packet right now, you’re not alone. Drop a comment. I want to hear how many of us are sick of this.
