Reading in English class

Why should kids read when they can just go on Wikipedia and look up the same information? You want me to learn about discrimination between blacks and whites? I won’t read The Color of Water; I’ll go on the internet and research it. Why do high school teachers force their students to read? It’s not the information about the book that teachers are trying to make you understand, it’s the lesson learned in the novel. In The Color of Water, James is a half-black, half-white child. His mother is white and his father is black. The book takes you through the journey and hardships of growing up in a black community when your mother is white. He’s half black so the whites don’t respect him and he’s half white so the blacks don’t respect him. Yes, you could learn about discrimination through research on Wikipedia or you could SparkNotes the book, but why do that when you can experience, first hand, exactly what it’s like to be a race that no one likes? SparkNotes doesn’t tell you about how the Chicken Man helped James realize the type of man he didn’t want to be. Wikipedia doesn’t tell you how someone feels when their mother rides a bike and sings to herself. Google doesn’t explain how a white woman feels when she is pregnant with a black man’s child, whom she loves, but can never be with. The fact that it’s James McBride experiencing the racism of his time doesn’t really matter. It’s the fact that you are applying knowledge you’re learning to an actual plot-based story.