Remember all those parents of 'precocious' 5-year-olds who insisted on reading Phillip Pullman aloud?

This guy isn't one of them:

Why do teenagers need to read the "classics"? What on earth do they make of Henry James, whose late novels should be read at a funereal pace? James said this was essential. "Take, meanwhile, pray, The Ambassadors very easily and gently," he told a friend. "Read five pages a day - be even as deliberate as that - but don't break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step - and then the full charm will come out." Sometimes you read James and think you are going mad, so complex is the prose and intricate the thought: this is literature to be interrogated, not read. It is madness to instruct teenagers to read it, and will probably put them off reading for life. Certainly off James.

While I really like this bit, it seems that both he and the people responding to him (if you read the comments) are in the all-or-nothing mind frame.  Can't modern books be taught along with the classics?  There are so many that would work well paired up.  And does every HS English class necessarily have to be the same? 

AND. 

Classics don't have to be taught in a dull, dusty, stodgy manner.  My Shakespeare professor (college, granted, but there's no reason a HS teacher dealing with Shakespeare couldn't do this, too) used to regularly toss out pop cultural references -- he'd talk about The Simpsons, Star Trek, he even quoted a line from Total Recall to show that iambic pentameter was not a thing of the past -- it was a great way of showing that what we were reading was still relevant. 

Not just relevant emotionally, or because It Was A Classic, but because classics could be (big shock coming up) FUN and ENTERTAINING and ENJOYABLE. He kept us interested, which I'd imagine is hard to do with a sunny lecture hall full of students who'd just eaten large lunches. 

Comments

[steve]

When I first started posting a response, there was just the quote from the article up on your blog for some reason, and I started going on this rant... But then I saw that you said very much the same things I was going to say. So instead I will just mention that my senior year of high school, I read Hamlet-then we watched the Olivier AND the Gibson versions, Siddartha, The Plague, Beowulf, and Killing Mr. Griffin (among others, I'm sure, but these were the ones that stuck with me). I see nothing wrong with putting Lois Duncan alongside Shakespeare. In some ways, she was far more relavant to my experiences than was Shakespeare.
But at the same time, there is something to be said about having a guide through difficult works. I couldn't imagine trying to read Moby Dick or Finnegans Wake the first time through without some help from someone who had been there before.
When I think about what students should get from a literary education--I want them to let literature affect them on a personal, emotional, intellectual level. I also want them not to be intimidated by difficult works. I think achieving those goals has more to do with effective teaching than it does with a reading list.

[Adam]

Too true. I had a wonderful high school teacher who made On The Beach so much fun. We watched clips from Terminator 2, received hand outs on the effects of nuclear radiation, and even had a class conversation about bunnies. Not only that, but when we did get around to reading MacBeth, I learned that her favorite thing to say was "Lady MacBeth, constantly on her period."

And I remember Beowulf being fun as well. She made the epic seem like an action movie and less like a dull poem (for reference: I still pick up my copy from time to time and go over it, same with On The Beach, same with MacBeth).

Rare teachers like her are what made my times in high school fun.

[Chrissy]

I appreciate that you folks had good experiences and good teachers while learning the classics but I however did not, and I suspect that the article's author is speaking from an experience similiar to mine, or has a child with a similiar experience. I still have a knee-jerk reaction whenever someone tells me a book is a classic.

Tenth Grade: We had a book report due every two weeks. We had a list of classics to choose from expressly for these book reports. I remember maybe four books. That's 9 months of school, 2 books a month (vacation was not an excuse) and I remember maybe 4? We never talked about any of those selections. Also we read, as a class, 1984 and Juius Caesar. When we weren't handing in rough drafts of book reports, getting quizzed on vocab, or diagraming sentences, we were MEMORIZING passages from the classics being read as a class. That's two weeks at a time dedicated to 30 14-15 year olds getting up in front of the class and reciting Mark Antony's speech, which after the second stuttering rendition loses all meaning.

Eleventh Grade: American literature year in Shrewsbury. I remember reading Grapes of Wrath and Moby Dick. We never discussed the Great Depression or how it occured or the ramifications of it. We were quizzed. We were spoon fed that Moby Dick was a story about revenge, and were not allowed to come to any conclusions about it ourselves.

Twelfth Grade: Oh, this one was my favorite. I had one of the best teachers, by reputation, in the school. I was taking AP english. I thought we'd be reading and discussing, finally, because wouldn't that be what a college course did? I was disappointed. We had quizzes 3-4 times a week, on what we should have read the night before. Mind you this does NOT include the constant that was the Friday vocab quiz. When we were't being qizzed, we were writing timed practice AP test essays about the diction or the syntax of our classics. So when did we have time to discuss these rather thickly written books (eg. Crime and Punishment)? We didn't. It seemed to be enough that we could name the characters on the quizzes.

In summary, I went to Art School not so much becasue I wanted to be an artist, but because I was sick of "reading" classics and being forced to regurgitate names and places and essays on the successful diction. Despite my love of reading I never wanted to have to read classics ever again. My high school experience almost killed my desire to read. I can't imagine what it did to those folks who already didn't like reading. So while, yes, there are ways to teach them well, for many it is not the norm. I share the author's opinion. If you can't teach classics well, don't teach them. Teach kids to love reading. Don't teach them that some books are more worth reading than others because of a label. Just let them read.