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Like most parents who have, against all odds, preserved a lively and still evolving passion for good books, I find myself, each September, increasingly appalled by the dismal lists of texts that my sons are doomed to waste a school year reading. What I get as compensation is a measure of insight into why our society has come to admire Montel Williams and Ricki Lake so much more than Dante and Homer. Given the dreariness with which literature is taught in many American classrooms, it seems miraculous that any sentient teenager would view reading as a source of pleasure. Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class--the last time many students will find themselves in a roomful of people who have all read the same text and are, in theory, prepared to discuss it. High school--even more than college--is where literary tastes and allegiances are formed; what we read in adolescence is imprinted on our brains as the dreamy notions of childhood crystallize into hard data.
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The intense loyalty adults harbor for books first encountered in youth is one probable reason for the otherwise baffling longevity of vintage mediocre novels, books that teachers themselves have read in adolescence; it is also the most plausible explanation for the peculiar [1998] Modern Library list of the "100 Best Novels of the 20th Century," a roster dominated by robust survivors from the tenth-grade syllabus. Darkness at Noon, Lord of the Flies, Brace New World, and The Studs Lonigan Trilogyall speak, in various ways, to the vestigial teenage psyches of men of a certain age. The parallel list drawn up by students (younger, more of them female) in the Radcliffe Publishing Course reflects the equally romantic and tack tastes (Gone with the Wind, The Fountainhead) of a later generation of adolescent girls.
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Given the fact that these early encounters with literature leave such indelible impressions, it would seem double important to make sure that high school students are actually reading literature. Yet every opportunity to instill adolescents with a lifelong affinity for narrative, for the ways in which the vision of an artist can percolate through an idiosyncratic use of language, and for the supple gymnastics of a mind that exercises the mind of the reader is being squandered on regimenns of trash and semi-trash, taught for reasons that have nothing to do with how well a book is written. In facet less and less attention is being paid to what has been written, let alone how; it's becoming a rarity for a teacher to suggest that a book might be a work of art composed of words and sentences, or that the choice of these words and sentences can inform and delight us. We hear that more books are being bought and sold than ever before, yet no one, as far as I know, is arguing that we are producing and becoming a nation a avid readers of serious literature.
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Much has been made of the lemminglike fervor with which our universities have rushed to sacrifice complexity for diversity; for decades now, critics have decried our plummeting scholastic standards and mourned the death of cultural literacy without having done one appreciable thing to raise the educational bar or revivie our moribund culture. Meanwhile, scant notice has been paid, except by exasperated parents, to the missed opportunities and misinformation that form the true curriculum of so many high school English classes.
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My own two sons, now twenty-one and seventeen, have read ( in public and private schools) Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Melville. But they've also slogged repeatedly through the manipulative melodrams of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, thorough sentimental, middlebrow favorites (To Kill a Mockingbird and A Separate Peace), the weaker novels of John Steinback, the fantasies of Ray Bradbury. My older son spent the first several weeks of sophomore English discussing the class's summer assignment, Ordinary People, a weeper and former bestseller by Judith Guest about a "dysfunction" family recovering from a teenage son's suicide attempt.
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Neither has heard a teacher suggest that he read Kafka, though one might suppose that teenagers might enjoy the transformative science-fiction aspects of The Metamorphosis, a story about a young man so alienated from his "dysfunctional" family that he turns- embarrassingly for them- into a giant beetle. No instructor has ever asked my sons to read Alice Munro, who writes so lucidly and beautifully about the hypersensitivity that makes adolescence a hell.
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In the hope of finding out that my children and my friends' children were exceptionally unfortunate, I recently collected eighty or so reading lists from high schools throughout the country. Because of how overworked teachers are, how hard to reach during the school day, as well as the odd, paranoid defensiveness that pervades so many schools, obtaining these documents seemed to require more time and dogged perseverance than obtaining one's FBI surveillance files- and what I came away with may not be a scientifically accurate survey. Such surveys have been done by the National Council of Teachers Of English (published in the 1993 NCTE research report, Literature in the Secondary Schools), with results that both underline and fail to reflect what I found.
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What emerges from these photocopied pages, distributed in public, private, and Catholic school as well as in military academies, in Manhattan and Denver, in rural Oregon and urban Missouri, is a numbing sameness, unaffected by geography, region, or community size. Nearly every list contains at least one of Shakespeare's plays. Indeed, in the NCTE report, Shakespeare (followed closely by John Steinbeck) tops the rosters of "Ten Most Frequently Required Authors of Book Length Works, Graders 9-12."
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Yet in other genres - fiction and memoir- the news is far more upsetting. On the lists sampled, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are among the titles that appear most often, a grisly fact that in itself should inspire us to examine that works that dominate our children's literary education.
First published in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is what we have since learned to recognized as a "survivor" memoir, a first-person narrative of victimization and recovery. Angelou transports us to her childhood in segregated Arkansas, where she was raised by her grandmother and was mostly content despite the unpleasantness of her white neighbors, until, after a move to St.Louis, eight-year-old Maya was raped by her mother's boyfriend.
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One can see why this memoir might appeal to the lazy or uninspired teacher, who can conduct the class as if the students were the studio audience for Angelou's quest appearance on Oprah. The author's frequently vented distrust of white society might rouse even the most sluggish or understandably disaffected ninth-graders to join the discussion of racism; her victory over poverty and abuse can be used to address what on fan, in a customer book review on Amazon.com, celebrated as "transcending that pain, drawing from it deeper levels of meaning about being truly human and alive." Many chapters end with sententious epigrams virtually begging to serve as texts for sophomoric rumination on such questions as: What does Angelou mean when she writes, "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is rust on the razor that threatens the throat"?
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But much more terrifying than the prospect of Angelou's pieties being dissected for their deeper meaning is the notion of her language being used as a model of "poetic" prose style. Many of the terrible mysteries that confront teachers of college freshman composition can be solved simply by looking at Angelou's writing. Who told students to combine a dozen mixed metaphors in one paragraph? Consider a typical passage from Anglou's opaque prose: "Weekdays revolved on a sameness wheel. They turned into themselves so steadily and inevitably that each seemed to be the original of yesterday's rough draft. Saturdays, however, always broke the mold and dated to be different." Where do students learn to write stale, inaccurate similes? "The man's dead words fell like bricks around the auditorium and too many settled in my belly." Who seriously believes that murky, turgid , convoluted language of this sort constitutes good writing? "Youth and social approval allied themselves with me and we trammeled memories of slights and insults. The winds of our swift passage remodeled my features. Lost tears were pounded to mud and then to dust. Years of withdrawal were brushed a side and left behind, as hanging ropes of parasitic moss."
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To hold up this book as a paradigm of memoir of thought - of literature - is akin to inviting doctors convicted of malpractice to instruct our medical students. if we want to use Angelou's work to educate our kids, let's invite them to parse her language, sentence by sentence; as them precisely what it means and why one would bother obscuring ideas that could be expressed so much more simply and felicitously .
Narrated affably enough by a nine-year-old girl named Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird is the perennially beloved and treacly account of growing up in a small Southern town during the Depression. Its hero is Scout's father, the saintly Atticus Finch, a lawyer who represents everything we cherish about justice and democracy and the American Way, and who defends a black man falsely accused of rape by a poor white woman. The novel has a shadow hero too, the descriptively named Boo Radley, a gooney recluse who becomes the occasion for yet another lesson in tolerance and compassion.
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Such summary reduces the cook, but not by all that much. To read the novel is, for most, and exercise in wish-fulfillment and self-congratulate, a chance to consider thorny issues of race and prejudice from a safe distance and with the comfortable certainty that the reader would never harbor the racist attitudes espoused by the lowlifes in the novel. We (the readers) are Scout, her childhood is our childhood, and Atticus Finch is our brave, infinitely patient American Daddy. And that creepy big guy living alone in the scary house turns out to have been watching over us with protective benevolent attention.
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Maya Angelou and Harper Lee are not the only authors on the lists. The other most popular books are The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Cather in the Rye. John Steinbeck (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, The Grapes of Wrath) and Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon, Sula, The Bluest Eye, Beloved) are the writers - after Shakespeare-represented by the larges numbers of titles. Also widely studied are novels of more dubious literary merit: John Knowles's A Separate Peace, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Elie Wiesel's Night, and Rays Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Trailing behind these favorites, Orwell ( Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm) is still being read, as are the Brontes ( Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre).
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How astonishing then that students exposed to such a wide array of masterpieces and competent middlebrow entertainments are not mobbing their libraries and bookstores, demanding heady diets of serious or semi-serious fiction! And how puzzling that I should so often find myself teaching bright, eager college undergraduate and graduate students, would-be writers handicapped not merely by how little literature they have read but by their utter inability to read it; many are nearly incapable of doing the close line-by-line reading necessary to disclose the most basic information in a story by Henry James or a seemingly more straightforward one by Katherine Mansfield of Paul Bowles.
Posted by huff on October 24, 2007
Tags AP English Lang
, Charmaine from Egypt.
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