Lisa is about to start teaching high school English and is a little surprised at what’s on the reading list: out with the old, in with the new, broadly speaking. It sounds more familiar to me, I’m afraid. She and I are the same age, but this trend had already hit Arlington County schools when I went through them — and Washington-Lee High School in particular.
I remember reading Alas, Babylon and Cry, The Beloved Country and other non- or neo-classics instead of the canon. And I have to say that I’m a little pissed off about it: I enjoyed those books, but once I got to college I mostly spent my credit-hours on computer science, neuroscience and philosophy. I wasn’t able to take a ton of literature classes to fill the holes in my Western education.
The result has been a consistent annoyance. I’m sure that these books work just as well as the classics for teaching the sorts of things high school English students need to learn. Beloved, for example, was not only enjoyable but also uses some of the same narrative tricks as recent internet favorite The Sound and the Fury. But I would be much better equipped to get highbrow jokes, make pretentious bon mots, and complete the New York Times crossword puzzle if we had read the latter instead of the former. Ultimately, that’s the real value of selecting one very good book instead of another. Either will suffice for the important stuff, but one will be more useful at cocktail parties.
I do think that teaching kids earnest liberal lessons about other cultures is a worthwhile goal, but I’m not convinced that novels are a very efficient way to do it. I suspect that better movie selection during those days when teacher is hungover could be just as effective. I think that the week in health class when we watched My Life would have been better spent on Roots. “How to die with dignity” is a lesson that can probably be delayed until sometime after graduation.
Of course, we did get some classics: I continue to enjoy making starvation and axe-murder jokes based on Crime and Punishment and The Grapes of Wrath. But I kind of had bad luck there, too, in that our prescribed classics tended to be either kind of shmaltzy (O Henry, lots more of the aforementioned Steinbeck) or redundant (we read a lot of Shakespeare, which is pretty much the only type of lit course that I did take again in college — my own fault, I guess) or just kind of beside the point (I’m convinced we only read this book because it was both Russian and short — a pretty rare combination — although other people insist I just missed the greatness of the novel).
Still, I have to give Arlington County Public Schools’ reading list policy credit for one thing: it was pleasantly easy to subvert. Along with friends, I managed to get both Ender’s Game and Snow Crash assigned to my classes, and it was awesome. What do you think YT’s high-tech skateboard symbolizes?
Oh man, we had to watch My Life in religion class. What schlock.
Other than that, I thought my high school did a good job of working some newer books into the curriculum while retaining the classics, mostly by pairing them. We did things like read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings at the same time as To Kill a Mockingbird, drawing common themes and contrasting the experiences of the main characters.
My biggest gripe about book selection was that they assumed the people taking Honors English would read all of the books on the regular English list for fun so the regular classes got all of the books you expect someone to have read in high school while we got books like The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Not being the type to read Silas Marner for fun at that age, I run into cocktail party problems.
Yeah, my h.s. did pretty much the same thing with the pairing books, except that the history teachers worked side-by-side with the english teachers to present curriculum. They would present themes and then work the whoel curriculum around the theme; it was engaging, and pretty much everyone who took those courses LOVED them.
That said, you only got that kind of enrichment if you were an honors or in AP classes, and my high school also had a LOT of money to pay teachers to do such things… my senior history teacher was the highest paid public school teacher in the state of Illinois. Meritocracy for the rich, woohoo!
I’ll bet nowadays they just use Oprah’s bookclub for the curriculum.
considering oprah’s book club has included such books as: east of eden, the good earth, the heart is a lonely hunter, anna karenina, and THREE books by faulkner (the sound and the fury, as i lay dying and light in august), i would say using her book club for the curriculum would be fantastic. also, i’m missing the connection between teachers’ salaries and curriculum decisions.