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You know, there's the canon, and then there's what gets taught in high school, and while those circles do overlap, they're not the same thing by a long shot, and I think that's part of the problem. Is anybody really going around saying that John Steinbeck is the epitome
of brilliant, gorgeous literature? And yet I had to read three books by him, one of them twice. Every time I say I hate Dickens, someone who loves Dickens tells me that I read the wrong ones, which, OK, but I read three of his novels, which is more of a chance than I've given
anybody else whose work I don't like, and two of those were assigned in high school. Does anybody argue that Salinger is peak literary achievement? But I had to read two of his books. Part of the problem with high school reading is that literary excellence is NOT part of the
standard. To Kill a Mockingbird? Again, is the writing really luminous or gut-wrenching? Not in my opinion. My guess is that high school privileges a) what they already own and can distribute b) texts that they don't consider TOO dense and literary or with language that is TOO
old-fashioned (with an exception made for Shakespeare and, for some reason, The Scarlet Letter) c) texts that aren't so controversial that they're going to get calls from irate conservative parents with money/pull. They stick to the middle of the road.
And that is going to equal pedestrian and boring at best, even for white kids. I have a knee-jerk reaction to defend the canon, because I love the Odyssey, and Shakespeare, and Jane Eyre, and In Memoriam. But the Odyssey translation they tried to make me read in high school was
Fitzgerald, and I was bored out of my mind until I spontaneously and voluntarily read the Fagles when I was in college; Shakespeare is amazing, even high school couldn't ruin that; and nobody in my high school got assigned Jane Eyre or In Memoriam. An attack on what high schools
assign isn't an attack on the canon, which is far more diverse and interesting, and includes James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison and Aphra Behn and Phillis Wheatley and a whole bunch of other interesting writers high schools don't touch.
It's an attack on the narrow picture of Americana that is presented to teenagers as "important." And that changes all the time. All fields do. Nobody learns cursive anymore, and nobody learns how to use a slide rule anymore either. Let Steinbeck and Salinger slide into the
oblivion that awaited the slide rule and Studs Lonigan, which was forced on my mother when she was a teenager. Nobody reads Studs in school anymore, and Western Civ, for it's worth, staggers on. And then in 20 or 30 years, students will resent the hell out of whatever texts we
decide are excellent and important and appealing. But at least they won't have to read Of Mice and Men twice. Fucking *twice.* And The Red Pony. And Grapes of Wrath. All from a dude who volunteered his services for the CIA and came out in support of the Vietnam War, fuck him.
(I hated the books before I knew that, actually. My mother told me that when I was feeling guilty about hating them because I thought I was supposed to love his politics. I just find his writing pedestrian and tedious, to say nothing of, in the case of OMAM, misogynist.
And why the fuck did I have to read three of them? Four if you count the two separate bouts of OMAM. My guess is that the answer is that my high school owned those books already.)
Anyway, if you made it to end of this thread, congratulations. Now go do something more rewarding with your time.)
