Why the "classics" don't suck

[Wingates_Hellsing]

Woah woah woah. Entertainment, new or old, and in any shape does not =crap.

The purpose of a curriculum on literature is to learn about the mechanics and importance of literature. It's not that literature is better than other reading-related art forms, it's just that that is the the focus and as such that's what should be included.

I think that schools should also teach students about art in all it's forms including literature, comics, graphic novels movies and TV and so on. and it's important that in any given area the concentration needs to be on that area. If you're in a class about comics, you don't pick up a copy of Hamlet or que up some Hitchcock, you read a comic in the exact same way as you would choose a book when studying books.

It's just that students should be allowed some choice as to what specifically they read so they can use something that interests and entertains them.

P.S. Comparing the teaching of literature to the teaching of math is BS. Literature is entertainment and commentary, math is a science. You should learn about geometry whether you like it or not because it works whether you like it or not. This is not true of subjective fields like art. What constitutes good in science is entirely different than good in literature.

[Android Kaeli]

I'll freely admit that I got bored with these classics, only because the teachers in question were taking too damn long to baby the rest of the class because they couldn't understand the first two paragraphs of any given book. Granted I didn't understand everything, but at least I got some of it whereas some of my fellow class mates had to be held by the hand to get things.

Yes I read ahead, I had done that for every single book that was given to me by a teacher in high school. The teachers went too damn slow in going over books or plays or whatever the class was working on at the time. That's the main problem I had, the teachers had to make sure everyone understood it before the entire class could go on. Nevermind that half of the class already got certain elements the first time around and had to wait for everyone else.

I think the problem is that there are kids who love to read, that get it the first time around, but aren't challenged enough because the rest of their classmates can't grasp their minds around simple concepts in books. And teachers quite often have to go by a certain agenda the school wants them to, because if they introduce another point of view into the mix, some parent is going to go all bonkers, be offended by it, and get their underwear in knots.

That, and/or another book would be banned for something stupid that was in said book for a billion years already. In Huck Finn's era, that's how people talked and acted and yet I believe that classic book was banned in some schools because of the wording.

[Rageaholic]

Wingates, what you said makes more sense.

Especially the math, literature analogy. I was afraid to comment on those because it may come across as "math is superior to literature", but in terms of objectivity, it is. 2 plus 2 will always equal 4 no matter who's solving the problem, but one person could read Catcher in the Rye and love it while another would hate it. So that's not an accurate analogy.

What I'm seeing on here is "We can't allow kids to pick books because they might pick something crappy like twilight". Now while I agree that twilight sucks to me, it may not suck to the students reading it. With that kind of attitude, it becomes a class on "why these books are better".

[Hobbs]

Twilight isn't good because it isn't written well. Also, in letting students choose a book, I would teach a class where the students choose a book along a certain genre (ie. if someone reads The Red Badge of Courage another student could choose Cold Mountain or maybe even Guns of the South but not a manga from the library or a Heinlein novel.

Going back to the mathematical analogy. In a math class, you wouldn't expect students to be able to learn about sine and cosine while others get to choose quadratics or some other thing, would you? If I don't like math, why can't I choose which math I want to take?

[the_std]

What I'm seeing on here is "We can't allow kids to pick books because they might pick something crappy like twilight". Now while I agree that twilight sucks to me, it may not suck to the students reading it. With that kind of attitude, it becomes a class on "why these books are better".

No, it's really more of a "we can't allow kids to pick books because there has to be some uniformity to what they're learning" as has been said already. You can't have a whole classroom of kids constantly reading different books. It's okay once in a while, for things like book reports, but to teach literary tools and subjects, there has to be something cohesive in the classroom. The easiest, most effective way to do that is to make them all read the same book. That book is generally a classic because they have well-known examples of the things kids need to be taught, plus there's a whole support network of teacher literature and materials to make accessing the knowledge in these books easier. It doesn't really matter too much if the kids like the book, as long as they're learning the same thing.

[Lace Neil Singer]

I made an analogy with art, which seems have been ignored. I said that when I studed art, I disliked having to do still art; however, it was part of being taught about art. Some people in my class hated doing pop art, others yet hated surrealism. At the end of being taught all that, everyone was allowed to choose an artist and make a picture in the style of.

Since I hated still art, should I have been allowed to skip it? Should my friend have been allowed to skip pop art, cuz she hated it? Sorry, but no. It's all part of learning about art, just as the classics are part of learning about books. Also, altho a good teacher does help a lot in making the set texts interesting, it's not up to schools to instill a love of reading in the kids. That's the parents' job. And in any case, if you want, you can always pick up a book you like out of class.

As regards banned books, the only book that was somewhat banned from my school was The Wasp Factory. So, of course, I wanted to read it all the more.

[AdminAssistant]

It's not only music. In Shakespeare's time, theater was not thought to be a high art. From what I remember from high school, Shakespeare had to seek royalty to sponsor him to stay in business - eventually having the favor of King James. Most of Shakespeare's plays weren't published until after his death.

Theatre didn't become a "high art" until the popularization of film. Before then there was always a form of theatre for the masses. When theatre became 'legitimate' differs from country to country. It took longer in America, because just as theatre was becoming widely accepted, a hotshot actor assassinated President Lincoln at the Ford Theatre during a performance of Our American Cousin.

In the Elizabethan/Jacobean era, playwrights like Marlowe and Shakespeare did rely on royal sponsorship to help pay for the theatre building and to provide legitimacy. The company that Shakespeare belonged to was originally the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Although Elizabeth I did attend performances of Shakespeare's works (at the private Blackfriar's theatre, not the public Globe) and supported Shakespeare, she would not sponsor that company. James I, however, happily took on the company.

Very, very, very few plays were published at all during that time period. Plays were constantly being rewritten (that's why there are multiple versions of most of Shakespeare's plays), and plays were written at a rate that suggests that most were written by multiple authors. Occasionally quartos would be published, and after the death of Shakespeare two other members of the King's Men gathered the quartos and published the 'collected' works, which luckily survived the Reformation.

ETA: I'll probably add more later, but I just got back from vacation and I'm catching up.

[Wingates_Hellsing]

Who said that they should be allowed to skip classical literature?

The problem isn't that students can't skip things, that's the way it should be. The problem is that, in most cases, classical literature is the only one taught at all.

[Lace Neil Singer]

You know, you can read other books outside class. It's not hard. Saying that cuz you were made to read classics in class puts you off reading is a stupid viewpoint. That would be like saying being made to wear a uniform put you off wearing clothes.

And sadly, a lot of modern books tend to be poorly written compared to the classics. Also, a lot of the time, teachers' hands are tied as far as what books are on the curiculum. So bawling out the teachers is a waste of time; if it bothers you so much, then go to the people at the top who make the curiculum and choose the books.

[HYHYBT]

Part of the problem, to me, is this: who decided that, say, Catcher In The Rye or Moby Dick is such a wonderful and significant book in the first place, and when does the list get pruned as new books are written? Or, more specifically, the most awful, no-redeeming-points-whatsoever book I've ever read I cannot remember the title of, but the author was James Joyce. This was college, not high school, but could anyone tell me, please, why anybody would either enjoy his books so much, or else find them so valuable to the language or to literature as a whole, that generations must be tortured by exposure to them? Why would it be wrong to throw him out entirely and make room for something, almost anything, else?

As for high school, I was divided. I'd read anything (except the poetry; I understand that it's good and all, but have never been able to develop a taste for it) in the textbook during breaks between classes, at the end of lunch, etc., and the same for basically any class except maths, and be done by sometime in October... but assigned reading that we had to find elsewhere, I sometimes completely forgot about. 10th grade we had "quote tests," a series of passages from the book where we were supposed to explain who the characters were, what was going on, etc. I have heard my answers said back to me from later students with the same teacher; apparently she used them as counterexamples, because I'd put things like "if I'd known the book was going to be this interesting, I'd have read it!" Though there was one (a book report, rather than a test) where I did remember to read the book, but completely forgot about writing a report on it...

[Hobbs]

Moby Dick, as I remember, was one of the titular books of a new genre emerging in that time period. Similarly, Catcher in the Rye is renowned for, 1) using a first-person narrative, and 2) for being (again) a new type of literature that picked up on the despair etc. of the time. It might be an emo book now, but at the time, people simply didn't write like that-let alone depict school-aged children having feelings like that. Ulysses by James Joyce used prose, parodies and other literative methods that, at the time, weren't considered mainstream (experimental in some aspects). It's one of the best novels of the Modernist genre.

Each of these books is selected because it shows an evolution in literary prose. Putting it simply, without these classics, we wouldn't have books like Lord of the Rings or writers like Stephen King or James Patterson or...to a lesser extent...Stepanie Myers and Twilight.

[joe hx]

Although Elizabeth I did attend performances of Shakespeare's works

I'm sorry, I read this as "Elizabeth and I"

[Wingates_Hellsing]

Maybe it's just the way I think, but to be honest, I see no reason why, without these books we wouldn't have that type of thing. If those authors hadn't done it someone would eventually have done the same thing, or something else progressive. We should learn about them because they were progressive, and specifically those that successfully pioneered a genre or style. But first =/= better, not by a long shot.

[Hobbs]

Maybe it's just the way I think, but to be honest, I see no reason why, without these books we wouldn't have that type of thing. If those authors hadn't done it someone would eventually have done the same thing, or something else progressive. We should learn about them because they were progressive, and specifically those that successfully pioneered a genre or style. But first =/= better, not by a long shot.

The point is, no one else did the works. They did the work. If someone else had written Ulysses then we would have to discuss what Tennyson meant instead of Joyce.

[AdminAssistant]

P.S. Comparing the teaching of literature to the teaching of math is BS. Literature is entertainment and commentary, math is a science. You should learn about geometry whether you like it or not because it works whether you like it or not. This is not true of subjective fields like art. What constitutes good in science is entirely different than good in literature.

Literature and art are far more than entertainment and commentary; they are history in another form. My overall research interest is the relationship between theatre and history. Believe me, you can learn a lot about a society from the art and literature produced during an era. What was popular, and why? What was controversial? Who was literate? Who was going to the theatre, and what were they going to see?

No, it's not a 'science' like math or chemistry. But it does not hold less value in education or society. Or, at least, it shouldn't. But considering chemistry TA's make more than twice what I do for basically the same job, apparently it does.