Answer ONE of the following questions after reading Francine Proses.docx

Answer ONE of the following questions after reading Francine
Prose's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read." Your
response should be well thought out with very few if any
grammatical or sentence errors. Your response should be 200-
300words in length. It is due Thursday before 11:59pm.
#1: Prose is highly critical of the quality of both I Know Why
the Caged Bird Sings and To Kill a Mockingbird. If you have
read either, write an evaluation of her criticism of the book. Is
she setting up this book to be unfairly judged?
-OR-
#2: Prose is skeptical of using literary works to teach values.
Write a journal entry in which you support or challenge her
position using specific examples to support your position.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read
How American High School Students Learn to Loathe
Literature
Francine Prose
Francine Prose, who was born in the late 1940s, is a reporter,
essayist, critic, and editor. She has also written more than
twenty books, including poetry, fiction, and children’s
literature. Her novel
Blue
Angel
(2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her
nonfiction works

The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They
Inspired
(2002) and
Reading
Like
a
Writer:
A
Guide
for
People
Who
Love
Books and
Those
Who
Want
to
Write
Them

(2006) were both national best sellers. She has received
numerous grants and awards, including
Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. She is most recently the
author of the satiric novel
My
New
American
Life
(2011). Prose is currently a book reviewer for a number of
magazines and periodicals, including the
New
York
Times
Book
Review
and
O
. The following essay, published in
Harper’s
in September 1999, is a critique of the quality of required
reading in American high schools.
Books discussed in this essay include:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou. Bantam Books, 1983.

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee. Warner Books, 1988.
Teaching Values through Teaching Literature
by Margaret Dodson.
Eric/Edinfo Press, 1993.
Teaching the Novel
by Becky Alano. Eric/Edinfo Press, 1989.
Teaching Literature by Women Authors
by Carolyn Smith McGowen.
Eric/Edinfo Press, 1993.
ike most parents who have, against all odds, preserved a lively
and still evolv- ing 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 dreary notions of childhood crystallize into
hard data.

176
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 may
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
,
Brave New World
, and
The Studs
Lonigan
Trilogy
all 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 tacky tastes (
Gone
with
the
Wind
,
The
Fountainhead
) of a later generation of ado- lescent girls.

Given the fact that these early encounters with literature leave
such indelible impressions, it would seem doubly 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 gym- nastics of a mind that
exercises the mind of the reader is being squandered on
regimens of trash and semi-trash, taught for reasons that have
nothing to do with how well a book is written. In fact, less and
less attention is being paid to what has been written, let alone
how; it’s become 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 of avid readers of serious
literature.
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 revive our moribund culture. Meanwhile, scant notice has
been paid, except by exas- perated parents, to the missed
opportunities and misinformation that form the true curriculum
of so many high school English classes.
My own two sons, now twenty-one and seventeen, have read (in
public and pri- 5 vate schools) Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and
Melville. But they’ve also slogged repeat- edly through the
manipulative melodramas of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou,
through sentimental, middlebrow favorites (
To Kill a Mockingbird

and
A Separate Peace
), the weaker novels of John Steinbeck, the fantasies of Ray
Bradbury. My older son spent the first several weeks of
sophomore English discussing the class’s sum- mer assignment,
Ordinary People
, a weeper and former bestseller by Judith Guest about a
“dysfunctional” family recovering from a teenage son’s suicide
attempt.
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.
In the hope of finding out that my children and my friends’
children were excep- tionally 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.
What emerges from these photocopied pages distributed in
public, private, and Catholic schools 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, Grades 9–12.”
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 the works that dominate our
children’s literary education.
First published in 1970,
I
Know
Why
the
Caged
Bird
Sings
is what we have since 10 learned to recognize as a “survivor”
memoir, a first-person narrative of victimiza- tion 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.
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 guest 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 a discussion of racism; her
victory over poverty and abuse can be used to address what one
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 truly alive.” Many
chapters end with sententious epigrams vir- tually 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 South-
ern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is rust on the
razor that threatens the throat”?
But much more terrifying than the prospect of Angelou’s pieties
being dis- sected 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 para- graph? Consider a typical passage from
Angelou’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 dared 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, con- voluted language of this sort
constitutes good writing? “Youth and social approval allied
themselves with me and we trammeled memories of slights and
insults. The wind of our swift passage remodeled my features.
Lost tears were pounded to mud and then to dust. Years of
withdrawal were brushed aside and left behind, as hang- ing
ropes of parasitic moss.”
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; ask them precisely what it
means and ask 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
Mock- ingbird
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 democ- racy 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.
Such summary reduces the book, but not by all that much. To
read the novel 15 is, for most, an exercise in wish-fulfillment
and self-congratulation, 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.

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
Catcher
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
largest number of titles. Also widely studied are the novels of
more dubious literary merit: John Knowles’s
A
Separate
Peace

, William Golding’s
Lord
of
the
Flies
, Elie Wiesel’s
Night
, and Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit
451
,
Dandelion
Wine
,
The
Octo- ber
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 Brontës (
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane
Eyre
).
How astonishing then that students exposed to such a wide array
of masterpieces and competent middlebrow entertainments are
not mobbing their librar- ies 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
under- graduate 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 straight- forward one by Katherine Mansfield or
Paul Bowles.
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 the sopo- rific 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.
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 man- dates 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 transgen-
der, 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 frivo- lous,
suspect, and elitist even to mention.
Thus the fragile
To
Kill
a
Mockingbird
is freighted with tons of sociopolitical 20

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 our 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 Prince- ton 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-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?” With its chilling echoes of New Age psycho- babble,
Margaret Dodson’s
Teaching
Values
through
Teaching
Literature
, a source- book for high school English teachers, informs us
that the point of Steinbeck’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.”
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.”
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 rea-
son to study
Huckleberry
Finn
was to decide whether it was a racist text. Instruc- tors
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. ”
Luckily for the teacher and students required to confront this
fictional equiva- lent 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 “free” 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.
In the most unintentionally hilarious of these lesson plans, a
chapter entitled 25
“
Ethan Frome
: An Avoidable Tragedy,” Dodson warns teachers to expect
resis- tance to their efforts to reform Wharton’s characters and
thus improve her novel’s outcome: “Students intensely dislike
the mere suggestion that Ethan should have

honored his commitment to Zeena and encouraged Mattie to
date Dennie Eady, yet this would surely have demonstrated
greater love than the suicide attempt.”
Thus another puzzle confronting college and even graduate
school instructors— Why do students so despise dead writers?
— is partly explained by the adversarial stance that these
sourcebooks adopt toward authors of classic texts. Teachers are
counseled “to help students rise above Emerson’s style of
stating an idea bluntly, announcing reservations, and sometimes
even negating the original idea” and to present“a method of
contrasting the drab, utilitarian prose of
Nineteen
Eighty-four
with a lyric poem ‘To a Darkling Thrush,’ by Thomas Hardy.”
Why not mention that such works have been read for years —
for a reason! — and urge students to fig- ure out what that
reason is? Doesn’t it seem less
valuable
to read Emily Dickinson’s work as the brain-damaged
mumblings of a demented agoraphobic than to approach the
subject of Dickinson, as Richard Sewell suggests in his
biography of her, on our knees? No one’s suggesting that
canonical writers should be immune to criticism. Dickens’s
anti-Semitism, Tolstoy’s overly romantic ideas about the peas-
antry, Kipling’s racism, are all problematic, and merit
discussion. But to treat the geniuses of the past as naughty
children, amenable to reeducation by the children of the present,
evokes the educational theory of the Chinese Revolution.
No wonder students are rarely asked to consider what was
actually written by these hopeless racists and sociopaths.
Instead, they’re told to write around the books, or, better yet,
write their own books. Becky Alano’s depressing

Teaching
the Novel
advises readers of Sylvia Plath’s
The
Bell
Jar
to construct a therapeutic evaluation of its suicidal heroine
(“Do you think she is ready to go home? What is your prognosis
for her future?”) and lists documents to be written as
supplements to
Macbeth
(a script of the TV evening news announcing the murders; a
psychia- trist’s report on Lady Macbeth, or her suicide note to
her husband; Macbeth’s entry in
Who’s Who
, or his obituary).
How should prospective readers of Anne Frank’s
The Diary of a Young Girl
prepare? Carolyn Smith McGowen’s
Teaching
Literature
by
Women
Authors
suggests: “Give each student a paper grocery bag. Explain
that to avoid being sent to a concentration camp, many people
went into hiding. Often they could take with them only what
they could carry Ask your students to choose the items they

would take into hiding. These items must fit into the grocery
bag.” A class attempt- ing to interpret an Emily Dickinson poem
can be divided into three groups, each group interpreting the
poem based on one of Freud’s levels of consciousness; thus the
little ids, egos, and superegos can respond to the Dickinson
poem according to the category of awareness to which their
group has been assigned.
Those who might have supposed that one purpose of fiction was
to deploy the powers of language to connect us, directly and
intimately, with the hearts and souls of others, will be
disappointed to learn that the whole point is to make us examine
ourselves. According to Alano,
The
Catcher
in
the
Rye
will doubtless suggest an incident “in which you felt yourself
to be an ‘outsider’ like Holden. Why did you feel outside? What
finally changed your situation?” Stephen Crane’s
The
Red
Badge
of
Courage
should make us compare our anxieties (“Describe an event that

you anticipated with fear Was the actual event worth the
dread?”) with those
of its Civil War hero. And what does
The Great Gatsby
lead us to consider? “Did you ever pursue a goal with single-
minded devotion? Would you have gained
your end in any other way?” Are we to believe that the average
eleventh-grader has had an experience comparable to that of Jay
Gatsby — or F. Scott Fitzgerald? And is it any wonder that
teenagers should complete these exercises with little but
contempt for the writer who so pointlessly complicated and
obfuscated a personal true story that sixteen-year-olds could
have told so much more interestingly themselves?
I remember when it dawned on me that I might, someday, grow
old. I was in the 30 eleventh grade. Our marvelous and unusual
English teacher had assigned us to read
King
Lear
— that is, to read every line of
King
Lear
. (As I recall, we were asked
to circle every word or metaphor having to do with eyes and
vision, a tedious process we grumbled about but that
succeeded in focusing our attention.) Although I knew I would
never ever resemble the decrepit adults around me,
Shakespeare’s genius, his poetry, his profound, encyclopedic
understanding of personality, man- aged to persuade me that I
could
be

that mythical king — an imaginative identifi- cation very
different from whatever result I might have obtained by
persuading myself that my own experience was the
same
as Lear’s. I recall the hallucinatory sense of having left my
warm bedroom, of finding myself — old, enraged, alone,
despised— on that heath, in that dangerous storm. And I
remember realizing, after the storm subsided, that language, that
mere words on the page, had raised that howling tempest.
Lear
is still the Shakespeare play I like best. I reread it periodically,
increasingly moved now that age is no longer a theoretical
possibility, and now that its portrayal of Lear’s behavior so
often seems like reportage. A friend whose elderly boss is
ruining his company with irrational tests of fealty and refusals
to cede power needs only six words to describe the situation at
work:
King
Lear
, Act One, Scene One.
Another high school favorite was the King James Version of the
Book of Reve- lation. I don’t think I’d ever heard of
Armageddon, nor did I believe that when the seals of a book
were opened horses would fly out. What delighted me was the
language, the cadences and the rhythms, and the power of the
images: the four horse- men, the beast, the woman clothed with
the sun.
But rather than exposing students to works of literature that
expand their capacities and vocabularies, sharpen their
comprehension, and deepen the level at which they think and
feel, we either offer them “easy” (Steinbeck, Knowles, Angelou,
Lee) books that “anyone” can understand, or we serve up the

tougher works predigested. We no longer believe that books
were written one word at a time, and deserve to be read that
way. We’ve forgotten the difference between a student who has
never read a nineteenth-century novel and an idiot incapable of
reading one. When my son was assigned
Wuthering Heights
in tenth-grade En- glish, the complex sentences, archaisms,
multiple narrators, and interwoven stories seemed, at first, like
a foreign language. But soon enough, he caught on and reported
being moved almost to tears by the cruelty of Heathcliff’s
treatment of Isabella.
In fact, it’s not difficult to find fiction that combines clear,
beautiful, accessible, idiosyncratic language with a narrative
that conveys a complex worldview. But to use such literature
might require teachers and school boards to make fresh choices,
selections uncontaminated by trends, clichés, and received
ideas. If educators continue to assume that teenagers are
interested exclusively in books about teenagers, there
is
engaging, truthful fiction about childhood and adolescence,
written in ways that remind us why someone might like to
read. There is, for example, Charles Baxter’s precise and
evocative “Gryphon.” And there are the carefully cho- sen
details, the complex sentences, and the down-to-earth diction in
Stuart Dybek’s great Chicago story, “Hot Ice.”
If English class is the only forum in which students can talk
about racism and 35 ethnic identity, why not teach Hilton Als’s
The Women
, Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,”
or any of the stories in James Alan McPherson’s
Hue and Cry
, all of which eloquently and directly address the subtle,
powerful ways in which race affects every tiny decision and

gesture? Why not intro- duce our kids to the clarity and power
of James Baldwin’s great story “Sonny’s Blues”?
My suspicion is that the reason such texts are not used as often
as
I
Know
Why the
Caged
Bird
Sings
is precisely the reason why they
should
be taught— that is, because they’re complicated. Baldwin, Als,
and McPherson reject obvious “les- sons” and familiar arcs of
abuse, self-realization, and recovery; they actively refute
simplistic prescriptions about how to live.
Great novels can help us master the all-too-rare skill of
tolerating — of being able to hold in mind— ambiguity and
contradiction. Jay Gatsby has a shady past, but he’s also
sympathetic. Huck Finn is a liar, but we come to love him. A
friend’s student once wrote that Alice Munro’s characters
weren’t people he’d choose to hang out with but that reading
her work always made him feel “a little less petty and
judgmental.” Such benefits are denied to the young reader
exposed only to books with banal, simple-minded moral
equations as well as to the student encouraged to come up with
reductive, wrong-headed readings of multilayered texts.
The narrator of

Caged
Bird
is good, her rapist is bad; Scout and Atticus Finch are good,
their bigoted neighbors are bad. But the characters in James
Alan McPherson’s “Gold Coast” are a good deal more lifelike.
The cantankerous, bigoted, elderly white janitor and the young
African American student, his temporary assistant, who puts up
with the janitor’s bullshit and is simultaneously cheered and
saddened by the knowledge that he’s headed for greater success
than the janitor will ever achieve, both embody mixtures of
admirable and more dubious qualities. In other words, they’re
more like humans. It’s hard to imagine the les-
son plans telling students exactly how to feel about these two
complex plausible characters.
No one’s suggesting that every existing syllabus be shredded;
many books on the current lists are great works of art. But why
not
tell
the students that, instead of suggesting that Mark Twain be
posthumously reprimanded? Why not point out how
convincingly he captured the workings of Huck’s mind, the
inner voice of a kid trying desperately to sew a crazy quilt of
self together from the ragged scraps around him? Why not
celebrate the accuracy and vigor with which he translated the
rhythms of American speech into written language?
In simplifying what a book is allowed to tell us— Twain’s novel
is wholly 40 about racism and not at all about what it’s like to
be
Huck Finn— teachers pre- tend to spark discussion but actually
prevent it. They claim to relate the world of
the book to the world of experience, but by concentrating on the

student’s own history they narrow the world of experience down
to the personal and deny students
other
sorts of experience — the experience of what’s in the book, for
start- ers. One reason we read writers from other times or
cultures is to confront alternatives — of feeling and sensibility,
of history and psyche, of information and ideas. To experience
the heartbreaking matter-of-factness with which Anne Frank
described her situation seems more useful than packing a paper
bag with Game Boys, cigarettes, and CDs so that we can go into
hiding and avoid being sent to the camps.
The pleasure of surrender to the world of a book is only one of
the pleasures that this new way of reading— and teaching—
denies. In blurring the line between reality and fiction (What
happened to you that was exactly like what happened to Hester
Prynne?), it reduces our respect for imagination, beauty, art,
thought, and for the way that the human spirit expresses itself in
words.
Writers have no choice but to believe that literature will
survive, that it’s worth some effort to preserve the most
beautiful, meaningful lyrics or narratives, the record of who we
were, and are. And if we want our children to begin an extended
love affair with reading and with what great writing can do, we
want
them to get an early start— or any start, at all. Teaching
students to value literary masterpieces is our best hope of
awakening them to the infinite capacities and complexities of
human experience, of helping them acknowledge and accept
complexity and ambiguity, and of making them love and
respect the language that allows us to smuggle out, and send
one another, our urgent, eloquent dispatches from the prison of
the self.
That may be what writers— and readers — desire. But if it’s not

occurring, perhaps that’s because our culture wants it less
urgently than we do. Education, after all, is a process intended
to produce a product. So we have to ask ourselves: What sort of
product is being produced by the current system? How does it
change when certain factors are added to, or removed from, our
literature curriculum? And is it really in the best interests of
our consumer economy to create
a well-educated, smart, highly literate society of fervent
readers? Doesn’t our epi- demic dumbing-down have undeniable
advantages for those institutions (the media, the advertising
industry, the government) whose interests are better served by a
population not trained to read too closely or ask too many
questions?
On the most obvious level, it’s worth noting that books are
among the few remaining forms of entertainment not sustained
by, and meant to further, the interests of advertising.
Television, newspapers, and magazines are busily instilling us
with new desires and previously unsuspected needs, while books
sell only themselves. Moreover, the time we spend reading is
time spent away from media that have a greater chance of
alchemically transmuting attention into money.
But of course what’s happening is more complex and subtle than
that, more 45
closely connected to how we conceive of the relation between
intellect and spirit. The new-model English-class graduate— the
one who has been force-fed the gross oversimplifications
proffered by these lesson plans and teaching manuals— values
empathy and imagination less than the ability to make quick and
irreversible judg- ments, to entertain and maintain simplistic
immovable opinions about guilt and innocence, about the
possibilities and limitations of human nature. Less com-
fortable with the gray areas than with sharply delineated black

and white, he or she can work in groups and operate by
consensus, and has a resultant, residual distrust for the
eccentric, the idiosyncratic, the annoyingly . . . individual.
What I’ve described is a salable product, tailored to the needs
of the economic and political moment. What results from these
educational methods is a mode of thinking (or, more accurately,
of
not
thinking) that equips our kids for the future: Future McDonald’s
employees. Future corporate board members. Future special
prosecutors. Future makers of 100-best-books lists who fondly
recall what they first read in high school — and who may not
have read anything since. And so the roster of literary
masterpieces we pass along to future generations will continue
its downward shift, and those lightweight, mediocre high school
favorites will continue to rise, unburdened by gravity, to the
top of the list.

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