It's Pick a Fight Day on LJ!

[swan_tower]

(No, it isn't. Just on my LJ.)

So, I'm mostly okay with this article in the Telegraph about how it's okay not to have read John Updike, or for that matter other literary greats. It's certainly true that it isn't possible for even the most well-intentioned of book lovers to have read all of the Great Literature that's been published in the last two hundred years, even if you aim only for the top tier.

But here's where the writer and I part ways:

This is not an argument against the literary canon. I do believe there are certain key authors – most of them Dead, White, European and Male – who jolly well ought to be studied at school by virtue of the quality and intelligence and depth of their writing. And I certainly don't believe in the modern anything-goes approach to teaching novels to children in school where they're served up in gobbets of "text" (whole books being considered too challenging for the Xbox generation) and where literary merit is thought of less importance than "relevance" or "accessibility".

All I mean is that once you've had a reasonable grounding in sufficient "proper" literature to form your taste, you should never again read a book out of duty.

Er.

Okay, middle first. I'm with him on the distressing notion that a whole book is too much for kids to read; God, I hope there aren't many schools doing that. But. But.

Dead, White, European, and Male. The blithe assumption that they've got a majority share on "quality and intelligence and depth." Gyah. I won't even waste space on arguing that one; you all can do that for yourselves.

The end; the end is where I start talking back to my monitor. The idea that you should form your taste by reading "proper" literature. That literary merit (as judged by, I presume, highly-educated White European Males) should be our primary criterion for handing books to kids -- because "relevance" and "accessibility" are silly little concerns, not something we should be wasting their time on.

How the hell does he expect anybody to learn to love reading, with that approach? How does an education in which you're forced to read books out of duty incline anybody to go on reading them when the duty is removed?

A couple of months ago, I finally managed to articulate one of the things that bothered me about high school English lit classes: I think they force-feed students lots of things the students have no particular reason to understand or care about, and they do it because this is the last chance society has to make you read those books. So who cares if Death of a Salesman is about a guy decades ago having a mid-life crisis and you're a sixteen-year-old barely aware that traveling salesmen once existed? Who cares if you have any reason to find Willy Loman's pain sympathetic or even comprehensible? You'll read it because we think you should do so before you die, and once you graduate our chance to enforce that is gone.

I don't think any power in the 'verse could have made me like that play, but I've got a tidy little list of authors I should give a second chance, because I might enjoy them now that I'm ready for them.

But I formed my taste by reading books I liked, books I cared about. It probably isn't the taste Mr. Dellingpole thinks I should have; it's okay for me not to read Updike, but probably less okay if the reason I'm not reading Updike is that I'm reading George R. R. Martin. But I submit that quality, intelligence, and depth exist as much in one's interaction with a book as they do in the text itself: all the literary brilliance in the world doesn't matter if my eyes are glazing over as I turn the pages. You want to know how I learned close reading? By obsessing over Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books and piecing together the fragments of prophecy and foreshadowing scattered through them. And it's entirely possible I never would have become an alert enough reader to survive Dorothy Dunnett had I not gone through those baby steps first. But if somebody had convinced me I ought to be spending my time on Zadie Smith instead of Jordan, it's also possible I would have never picked up Dunnett in the first place -- or, y'know, other books in general.

If I were in charge of high school curricula, you know what? Literary merit would not be my overriding concern. I would set out to give kids books they might enjoy, and then once they're engaged, teach them how to pay attention to what they're reading. Everything else can follow from there, because once you've done that, the chances of there being an "everything else" get a lot higher.

It's a fine irony when Mr. Dellingford decries readers who pick up literary books only out of a sense of obligation -- while also telling us we should obligate kids to do just that.

Comments

[tessagratton.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of the idea of YA literature. It seemed to me that when I was in elementary school we were reading (in school) a bunch of books that teachers thought were great, AND we all enjoyed and wanted to understand because we could relate to the protagonists. But then, once I hit high school, we were supposed to jump into Adult Books, which did NOT mean all the McCaffery and Rice and Jordan I was reading on my own, but meant those cannonical White Euro Male books that nobody cared about for all the reasons you suggest.

Having a genre dedicated to readers between children and adult, if it can be recognized in places like high school, can only be a good thing. It won't keep anyone who wants to from reading adult novels (with "proper" literary merit or no), but maybe, if it achieves acceptance it has a chance of bridging that gap where we lose so many readers for the rest of their lives.

(I'm busy imagining how cool it would have been to read Midnight Never Come or Elizabeth Bear's Ink and Steel as companion pieces to my history textbook my sophomore year... which aren't YA so don't really fit my point, but... still. Look kids: what books can do!)

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately most of the canonical authors are dead, white, european and male. Shouldn't be that way. But it is. And schools often choose them rather than non-canonical authors. Thank Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot for the impetus for that (a rant I'll not include here).

The worst part to me is that the school boards pick out books that teachers don't necessarily like. I mean, I hate Steinbeck and Hemingway (and Updike). If I had to teach them, I think that dislike would come through. On the other hand, other teachers would hate what I love--Poe, Dickens, Faulkner and so forth. They would steal all the fun from those.

I think there's a lot of writing out there that could be more accessible if the teachers loved what they were teaching. The love is catching.

There's this fabulous Gerald Graff essay called "Disliking Books at an Early Age" that tackles this a bit. Look it up sometime.

Di

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree with what you're saying re: the importance of teaching fun, relevant literature etc. I think there's a division, though, when it comes to teaching reading (which is what you're really talking about) vs. teaching the history of English literature (which is what most upper level English courses do.)

At the elementary school level there really is more of a focus on teaching "fun" accessible books, because the students need to learn a) to read and b) how to read a book. At the high school level there tends to be more of a move towards teaching the canon, so that students (allegedly) learn more about where those fun books fit in within a cutural history of the form.

Given the decline of readership overall, I'm all for turning people into readers by giving high school students good books. But, playing devil's advocate here, what the chances are of a person who does not yet read for fun at age 16 deciding to turn off the tv and start reading for pleasure? Most people I know who are readers were reading for pleasure from a very young age. I have yet to hear a person say "I didn't read for fun until Grade 11, when my English teacher gave us this great book to read in class, and that's what got me into reading."

Now, maybe that's because most Grade 11 teachers assign boring books (although I've heard of plenty who assign "popular" authors like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King). Or maybe it's because reading is one of the harder forms of entertainment to process, and if someone hasn't developed a taste for it by age 16, they're probably not going to.

About teaching the "canon" - i.e. all those old books that are considered "good for you" but which few people (even English teachers) read for fun. Well, they aren't being taught to make people enjoy reading. They're being taught because educational institutions figure that students should have a grasp of the history of literature; that they should have read a bit of Chaucer, and at least one Shakespeare play, and a Romantic poem or two, so that they have a body of cultural knowledge to draw upon when these things are referenced outside of school.

Maybe that knowledge isn't particularly valuable, but I do believe that if, as a school or state, you do think it's valuable, you ought to teach it. I wouldn't want curriculums tossed out in favor of delivering pure entertainment. I mean, think of a subject like history. Is Ancient Rome relevant to most 16 year olds? No. Does that mean that in the interest of making students like history, history teachers should not teach anything prior to the 21st century? That maybe WW2 should be taught because it's exciting, but all that stuff about the Babylonians and the first code of laws should go unmentioned because it's dull?

I know there are some people who make exactly that argument. I just can't agree with it. Education is not just about teaching skills; it's also about teaching certain foundational aspects of culture. We expect most high school graduates to know who the American president is, and who the Naxis were, and what geometry involves, and where the line "wherefore art thou Romeo" comes from. That's not to say that they do know, or that they remember, or that they care. But it's nice to have a common kind of culture; perhaps in a geopolitical sense, it's also necessary.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

My problem with this is that "literature" and "literary writing" has been put on a pedestal by a particular group of self-perpetuating authorities. Certain aspects of writing are considered better and more important than others, not for any good reason I can see other than "that's the sort of thing I like, and I've got these other English professors to back me up".

I've had a theory for a while that brain structure might have a significant influence on what aspects of writing individuals like and/or consider more important in their reading. Certainly the science/engineering culture of Snow's Two Cultures seems to value plot and novelty of ideas and concepts much more than the humanities culture.

[oddsboy.livejournal.com]

I would say the reason schools push the Late, Great, Whiteys is partly as a hold over from older, more conservative days where these *were* good books, and heretics were burned at the stake. However, there is also the idea that students should already be reading stuff themselves by the time they get to the end of high school. Therefore mucking through the craft of and cultural significance of, say, Shakespeare or Faulkner (damn his fish and damn his mother, grrr), comes at a time when students are already at least somewhat versed in literacy and their own preferences are taken care of privately. F'rinstance, much as the events of the Antebellum South may not be of any interest to the high schooler, he should already appreciate something of a historical context about the world at large, or perhaps know something of geography. This is, of course, not terribly true in what people have been bemoaning is becoming an increasingly illiterate age since, well, the 1700's. Or maybe Homer. The problem we face is that students need to be already somewhat versed in literacy by the time they get to late high school. The great downfall of 'new' or 'fun' or 'counter stodgy old farts' methods of teaching is that, at least in my experience of public schools, these helpful, easy-going activities fall into a jungle of student's active dislike of doing anything. Most days start out with the teachers desperately trying to get more than a tenth of their class to actually pay attention, where the larger probability is that students will do whatever they can, to the least amount that they can to get through their classes and go home, so that they can rail against the fact they can't go out on their own. I usually found that out of a thirty student class, maybe 3 people paid attention and actually took things in. I'm being dire, of course, but the truth is that the majority of any one class takes absolutely nothing in, and doesn't want to. Give them the option of choosing their own reading and they will wheedle, like prisoners for cigarettes, for the lowest stress, easiest, most passing grade insuring text that they will likely not read. What needs to happen is that these students need to, for some reason, find it culturally weird to not have, at least, read something or have a literary preference by high school. I think it's good to still teach saavy and complex literature, and 'the greats' (in a vein of cultural significance alongside other, less well known greats) to high schoolers, but the only way to get the horse to water is to try an make him think it's just as viable as Mountain Dew (namely, Xbox). I, of course, think that such a change is possible, but mostly as a fluke of fate or cultural fluctuations.

-Crow

[lowellboyslash.livejournal.com]

Let me play devil's advocate here. What are your feelings on kids reading:

- street lit?
- Stephanie Meyer?
- old-school erotica (I'm thinking Lady Chatterly's Lover, or hell, parts of Ulysses)?

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

Based on what my kids are reading in public high school, I think that the standard of reading the "classics" is dead and gone. My son is reading Staggerford. My daughter gets to choose from a list of memoirs, none of them over 20 years old (for some reason, Al Gore's book An Inconvenient Truth is included on that list.)

My freshman daughter has read My Sister's Keeper and The Secret Life of Bees this year for her Honors English class. If my son were in the class, I'd probably have the teacher up on charges of abuse.

[(Anonymous)]

I have some strong opinions (big surprise) about the teaching of "literature" in high school. I hate it. I cannot stand it, and if I ever have children I hope they don't have to go though it.

Allow me to explain.

When I was in high school, I had one of those, "why do I have to learn this stuff," moments with my parents about a book I was reading for an honors english class. After a lengthy discussion my parents got me to realize that the purpose of the class wasn't to learn the plot in these books but ultimately to teach me how to think, and critically analyze. I have always stuck with that as the ultimate purpose of english classes so, a lot of my opinion is based on that. If you disagree with that then I suppose you'll probably disagree with my whole point.

The problem with the whole, "teaching me how to critically think," thing is, they were trying to do it with books that I found difficult to read and just didn't care about. Instead of learning how to critically think, I learned how to write papers about books I never read. I had it down to a system by my junior and senior years.

At the most I'd read about a quarter (sometimes a little as one chapter) of whatever book was assigned, keep in mind it's not because I was lazy, I tried to read each book, but they were all so hard for me to read, that I couldn't make it though much more than that. Then when there was a class discussion about the book I'd make sure and take really good notes about what people said regarding characters' actions, and themes etc. When anyone would offer a quote in class to support their statement I'd write down a paraphrased version of the quote and the page number it was on, so I could find it later to use. Then I'd write my paper from those notes. Basically each paper I wrote was an amalgamation of the ideas of four or five other students' ideas. I never got less than a B on any paper.

This didn't teach me how to think, it taught me how to ride off of other people's work. Also since I didn't like any of these books, it did not form any sort of collective literary basis for me to later draw on. I have no idea, except in a very very basic (almost useless) sense of what those books were about.
A Tale of Two Cities: I don't know, I remember someone got run over by a carriage at one point.
The Scarlet Letter: It was about a chick who committed adultery and had to wear a red A on her chest because of it. The only thing I remember from that was getting into an argument with my english teacher because he said that a rosebush outside of a jail in one scene symbolized hope, and got angry because, "Who the hell says it represents hope? Why doesn't it represent love, or hate, or blood, or pickles? What great authority decided the it represents hope?"
The Sound and the Fury: To this day I have no idea what that book is about, I don't even remember where it was set. I remember that there were people in it, and they may have even done stuff. That's about it.
The Great Gatsby: It was about a rich guy, and there was a billboard with a pair of eyes on it that was supposed to represent God.
The Fountainhead: It was about a guy who was an architect, that wanted to do his own non-conformity thing.

The Fountainhead is where I start to make my point. I didn't understand a single significant thing about The Fountainhead, or Ayn Rand until earlier this year, when the developers of a video I really want to play said there's a lot of Ayn Rand influence in their game. So I went to wikipedia and read a bit about her, and now I have a basic idea of what her beliefs are and what she wrote about in The Fountainhead and her other works. It is because of a video game that I learned this. Or more specifically it's because of something I am actually interested in that I learned this.

-Continued in next post because I'm too long winded for LJ's character limit.

Tony

[(Anonymous)]

The whole time I was in high school and not reading whatever book was assigned in english class, I was tearing through any Stephen King book I could get my hands on. Now if someone had sat me down with say, Needful Things and said, "Okay, now why are these characters doing these things? What does this event/thing mean? Should you take it at face value, or look for some deeper meaning, and if so what might that deeper meaning be?" I probably would have paid attention. I would have paid attention because it was about something I actually liked.

I posted a response to this LiveJournal a few weeks ago about how I found myself doing a lot more critical thinking about the things I read and watched than I used to. The more I think about it, I think that's because I didn't really get into critically analyzing the things I read and watched until I moved to Bloomington, and a lot of my friends did that (more so than previous friends ever had). I got the habit from them. The reason I got the habit from them is because they were doing it about things they were interested in, which many times were things I was also interested in. I have now learned what I was supposed to have learned in back high school. I am almost 30. Kinda' seems a little late doesn't it?

Also interestingly enough, now that I'm almost 30, and have started to critically think about and analyze every thing I read, I'm planning on going back and reading a lot of that literature I was supposed to have read and got something out of in High School. I'm actually quite looking forward to it. I'm going to start with Mark Twain (just 'cause) and go from there.

My ultimate point being, if they had tried to teach me these critical skills in high school using something I was genuinely interested in I probably would have picked them up a lot sooner. That is why I hate the forced teaching of "literature" in high school. That curriculum didn't teach me what it intended to teach me, unless it actually intended to teach me how to piggy back off the work of other people to achieve a good grade.


Tony

[schreiberchen.livejournal.com]

Am I late?
I think they force-feed students lots of things the students have no particular reason to understand or care about, and they do it because this is the last chance society has to make you read those books.

I completely agree. Speaking as a fairly well-read highschooler, a lot of books at the "high school level" are really pretty bad. Classics come in two levels, I think, and those are matters of personal taste: "wonderful" and "oh God, let it stop." I could not even finish reading the first chapter of Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" but one of my favorite classics is "A Christmas Carol." "Moby Dick" is text-blob of horror and Tolkien is so much worse.

I think we should be trying to work our way back ... start with something like "The Giver", "The Phantom Tollbooth", "A Wrinkle in Time" (yes, fantasy and science fiction... sue me), "Flowers for Algernon", "Fahrenheit 451", "Alice in Wonderland", because, let's face it: literature is not something you can dive into. It takes time and coaxing and dipping toes into the water to test the temperature. You don't toss little kids into the deep end and say, "There you go, swim."

[c0untmystars.livejournal.com]

How does an education in which you're forced to read books out of duty incline anybody to go on reading them when the duty is removed?

It doesn't, is how, and it infuriates me that this is how kids are taught, just as it infuriated me as an elementary-school-aged kid/preteen that my local library didn't have Nancy Drew or any other popular books because the head children's librarian thought that they were of insufficient merit. When I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, at least where I'm from, "of merit" meant "about realistic kids dealing with Real World Problems"... anything imaginative or what I would consider "fun" was looked down on. Fortunately for me, I was home-schooled, so while I did have to read some of the White European Male Canon (Hawthorne and Orwell; also Shakespeare and Sophocles, who I did like) I also had to read Edith Wharton, the Brontes and others, and had lots of time in which I was encouraged to read whatever captured my imagination, instead of being forced to read some School Board's idea of What Kids Should Learn.

The "White European Males are best, but if they can't be white, European or male, they have to be Obscure and Serious and Only Understandable by the Literary Elite" attitude is also what drove me away from majoring in English in college... I knew if I spent four years being told that that was the One True Way To Write, I'd never pick up a pen or a book voluntarily ever again. My second semester, one of my professors started a class by saying "There's GENRE fiction and then there's GOOD fiction"; she then proceeded to spend the following fifty minutes expounding on that -- that if a genre story is good, it can't possibly BE genre, it SURPASSES genre and thus becomes something worthy of notice. And this wasn't even in a class for English majors, this was the American Lit survey that EVERYONE took. I wasn't courageous or articulate enough at that point to challenge her in a substantive way, but it was at that point that I started to question my choice of degree program. (My questioning was validated when my [white, male] advisor told me in so many words that if I wrote what I wanted to write -- i.e., genre fiction -- instead of what they taught I would end up working at McDonald's; I changed majors and never looked back.)

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Reading the posts of Tony, akashiver, and mrissa, I tentatively conclude:

For teaching reading skills, or just getting kids interested in reading, you should use books they'll be interested in. This may have tension with having all of a class on the same page with a single teacher, but you should try.

For teaching cultural literacy, you try to make them read the damn Holy Books, by testing or what not, but perhaps shouldn't try to be teaching deep analysis at the same time if they don't like the books. It's an open question how much one should be trying to force kids to absorb the Favorites of the Elders as some cultural binding glue, but don't let it hurt other goals.

[silme.livejournal.com]

I'm late to the party due to illness.

Okay, in KS3 classes in England and Wales (think middle school in the US) students mostly do read extracts, not whole books, in English classes. I taught in the best state school in the county (and one of the best in the country -- number 11 last time I checked) and in Year 7 (6th grade), the students read ONE novel as a class, although I encouraged them to read more outside of class. I always did book talks, brought in new books etc. In Year 8, we didn't read any novels as a class, nor did we in Year 9. Sad, but true. We read extracts.

As one of my colleagues used to say, we read a lot more literature before we had the literary scheme. :(

Of course, I encouraged them to read outside of class. And in Year 9 (8th grade), when we had a six-week enrichment session in the final summer half term and students signed up for a 'roundabout' where they'd meet with different teachers for different projects, I ran one on reading. The students would read self-chosen books and create web page book reviews for the school web site. I had kids thank me -- and tell me they'd never read that many books ever (some read a book a week -- or more; we ravaged the library and the librarian gave them first dibs on new books). They appreciated being able to read full stop, but they particularly appreciated being able to read what they wanted. I had kids reading everything from JK Rowling to Jane Austen.

For GCSE (US 9th and 10th grades), they tend to read one novel, usually Of Mice and Men. My colleagues thought I was nuts for choosing To Kill a Mockingbird from the list when I wasn't teaching an advanced class. But my kids did fine on the exam. They'd read one complete 20th-century play (usually A View from the Bridge or An Inspector Calls. The advanced group would read an entire Shakespeare; most of the others would read a few scenes. The advanced group would read an entire pre-1914 novel, such as Great Expections. The rest would read a couple of chapters and watch the movie.

I'm now teaching sixth-form college and A-level English Literature. I have students who struggled with The Great Gatsby. It was a real challenge for some of them. Of course, they're the kids who barely read what's required and don't read anything outside of class. They've not read many whole books -- they mostly have read extracts. :( (English and English lit are not required at A level. I don't know why non-readers sign up for lit, except that they managed to perform well with GCSE English Lit.)