17
The explanation, it turns out, lies in how these books, even the best of them, are being presented in the classroom. My dogged search for reading lists flushed out, in addition to the lists themselves, course descriptions, teaching guides, and anecdotes that reveal how English literature is being taught to high school students. Only rarely do teachers propose that writing might be worth reading closely. Instead, students are informed that literature is principally a vehicle for sophomoric moral blather they suffer daily from their parents. The present vogue for teaching “values” through literature uses the novel as a springboard for the sort of discussion formerly conducted in civics or ethics classes—areas of study that, in theory, have been phased out of the curriculum but that, in fact, have been retained and cleverly substituted for what we used to call English. English—and everything about it that is inventive, imaginative, or pleasurable—is beside the point in classrooms, as is everything that constitutes style and that distinguishes writers, one from another, as precisely as fingerprints or DNA mapping.
14
The question is no longer what the writer has written but rather who the writer is—specifically ,what ethnic group or gender identity an author represents. A motion passed by the San Francisco Board of Education in March 1998 mandates that “works of literature read in class in grades nine to eleven by each high school student must include works by writers of color which reflect the diversity of culture, race, and class of the students of the San Francisco Unified School District…The writers who are known to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, shall be appropriately identified in the curriculum.” Meanwhile, aesthetic beauty—felicitous or accurate language, images, rhythm, wit, the satisfaction of recognizing something in fiction that seems fresh and true—is simply too frivolous, suspect, and elitist event to mention.
5
Thus the fragile To Kill a Mockingbird is freighted with tons of sociopolitical ballast. A “Collaborative Program Planning Record of Learning Experience,” which I obtained from the Internet, outlines the “overall goal” of teaching the book (“To understand problems relating to discrimination and prejudice that exist in our present-day society. To understand and apply these principles to out own lives”) and suggests topics for student discussion: “What type of people make up your community?” Is there any group of people…a person (NO NAMES PLEASE) or type of person in your community that you feel uncomfortable around?”
A description of “The Family in Literature,” an elective offered by the Princeton Day School—a course including works by Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill—begins: “Bruce Springsteen once tried to make us believe that, ‘No one can break the ties that bind/You can’t for say-yay- yay- yay- yay- yay- yay-yake the ties that bind.’ He has since divorced his wife and married his back-up singer. So what are these ties and just how strong are they, after all?” Will its chilling echoes of New Age psychobabble, Margaret Dodson’s Teaching Values through Teaching Ltierature, a sourcebook for high school English teachers, informs us that the point of Stenbeck’s Of Mice and Men is “to show how progress has been made in the treatment of the mentally disadvantaged, and that more and better roles in society are being devised for them [and to] establish that mentally retarded people are human beings with the same needs and feelings that everyone else experiences.”
3
An eighth-grader studying Elie Wiesel’s overwrought Night in a class taught by a passionate gay-rights advocate came home with the following notes: “Many Jews killed during the Holocaust, but many many homosexuals murdered by Nazis. Pink triangle—Silence equals death.”
12
It’s cheering that so many lists include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—but not when we discover that this moving, funny novel is being taught not as a work of art but as a piece of damning evidence against that bigot, Mark Twain. A friend’s daughter’s English teacher informed a group of parents that the only reason to study Huckleberry Finn was to decide whether it was a racist text. Instructors consulting Teaching Values through Teaching Literature will have resolved this debate long before they walk into the classroom to supervise “a close reading of Huckleberry Finn that will reveal the various ways in which Twain undercuts Jim’s humanity: in the minstrel routines with Huck as the ‘straight man’; in generalities about Blacks as unreliable, primitive and slow-witted….”
5
Luckily for the teacher and students required to confront this fictional equivalent of a minstrel show, Mark Twain can be rehabilitated—that is to say, revised. In classes that sound like test screenings used to position unreleased Hollywood films, focus groups in which viewers are invited to choose among variant endings, students are polled for possible alternatives to Huck’s and Tom Sawyer’s actions—should Tom have carried out his plan to “fee” Jim?—and asked to speculate on what the fictional characters might have or should have done to become better people and atone for the sins of their creators.
Posted by huff on October 30, 2007
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