The Problem With High School Literature

There is a lot of great literature out there. Unfortunately, you never get to discover it during high school. Mainly, because high schools are doing a great job of making you wish you were burning the book instead.

Something like that.

It starts when some person who would marry a piece of literature lands a job teaching English or reading. The state gives that teacher a big checklist with things you need to learn using literature.

That or the school buys a book from a program that's backed by loads of research - from a for-profit business.

Some of these teachers are allowed to choose what they teach. And what do they reach for? Something they've read forty-six times and cuddle with every night.

The first day you find out you're going to read it, the teacher spends the entire class talking about how wonderful it is and how much you'll love it. And the only thing you accomplish in that class period is to visually burn the cover of that book in your brain.

Then you're assigned the first 180 pages to read that night.

If I read twenty pages every hour I'll be done by 4 a.m.! [Source: Jayel Aheram]

That night, you discover your older brother's first girlfriend - the one that cheated on him with his best friend - had the same book you're reading now. Or pretending to read. You actually read the cliff notes for the first 180 pages.

The next day when the teacher starts reciting questions from her business-issued, school-purchased, reading guide to the book, you feel awesome knowing you understand everything about it because you bought the five-dollar version of that guide.

Except, your teacher is giving you all sorts of useless information about the thirty-second time they read it and how they love the line, "He lavishly devoured beets the color of ill blood for dinner (save for the one of happenstance that clutched its color despite the unfavorable conditions set against it), and proceeded in due time therefore to begin the regimen of flushing them down his sore throat, (which solemnly ran past the organs of his body, most notably his heart), with a mixture of liquid so murky and distasteful it made the consideration of sneaking sips from the sewage bucket leaned tenderly against the barn an oft considered choice dangerously bordering insanity."

Why do they love it? Because of the deeper implications regarding the inequalities of the social classes during the time.

That elaborate sentence above makes finding out the distance between the cliff edge and the rocks below very tempting. By the way, the deeper implication of the first sentence is death. [Source: Jennifer Boyer]

Why does your teacher do this? Because your teacher loves it and can't understand why you don't love it, too. And, now you're secretly vowing to yourself that you'll never read another book.

Your teacher can see you fading out, so there's this utter look of confusion and then a tirade about how you read magazines, and Internet articles, and texts, and phone numbers off bathroom stalls because Candy seems like a nice girl and she's promising a good time.

So why don't you love literature like you did when you were a kid? Why aren't you as excited about something Dickens wrote as you were about Green Eggs and Ham or Where the Wild Things Are or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Hatchet or even that one book about those two lonely kids who only have each other until one of them dies?

Why? Because when you read them you picked them out, and someone read them with or to you, and you read because the story was good not because you were going to answer some stupid questions about random moments in the story.

Even the book reports were better because you made a connection with that one kid who didn't believe in Santa until that stupid train ran down the middle of his street and the bell he lost ended up back in his pocket.

Instead of reading like that now you force 180 pages and 11 different characters into your mind in less than 24 hours only to get hit with the first question on the test:  

On page 132, the author writes, "The rain was wet." In a short essay, give the author's deeper implications of this sentence. Include three references from other sections of the story and two passages of dialogue from secondary characters that support your answer. 

Additionally, choose one word, other than suicidal, to describe how you feel at this point. [Source: Zach Klein]

"Rain is wet because it's made out of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen?" you write.

"Wrong!" your teacher says. Then, looking at the answer key, "The author says rain is wet because the protagonist is feeling rain for the first time after a miserable existence under the guise that his life was wonderful."

You look at your answer, the short essay with three references from the first 180 pages and two passages from secondary characters to support your answer. And the book, the damn answer book with the damn question answered it with one damn sentence.

"This is stupid," you say. 

"But these exercises help you formulate opinions," your teacher says. "They help you develop the skills to see the deeper meaning in things and read between the lines, enabling you to form your own opinions."

And it's at this point you want to remind everyone that you're being graded on whether or not your answer matches that of a single person.

It's at this point that you hate literature. You hate books.

If literature were a religion, your teacher would be a heretic. For the writers (let's think of them as disciples) who spent their lives fighting the system to voice their opinions about government and those who were oppressed, suppressed, and depressed, it's a disservice.

James (Joyce), the elder.

The books contain the works of writers who spent their lives forming their own opinions in rebellion against those who tried to keep them quiet, and now you're being told how to view these books. John Steinbeck (known as John by the other disciples) didn't have his taxes audited almost every year just so someone could tell you what to do.

Besides, sometimes what we're taught is is so completely wrong that it's become accepted. A group of students at UCLA actually told Ray Bradbury that he was wrong about the meaning of his own book, Fahrenheit 451, when he told them it wasn't about censorship. 

Wait. It isn't?

See?

Of course, that's not to say that there aren't wrong and right answers in literature.

So you're saying The Grapes of Wrath isn't a childhood biography of the California Raisins?

The teaching of literature has become so strongly focused on the deeper meanings and the addressed issues and the implied references that sometimes we forget that there are stories and characters involved.

We care more about whether Sam is going to eat those green eggs and ham rather than the idea that it's important to try things. (Or that Montag hates those wall screens his wife watches everyday, or that Santiago is going to catch that fish even if it drags him to the bottom of the sea and kills him.)

It's the problems of those characters that drive a story more than the issues of debate.

Instead, we're forced to read literature - literature that is sometimes hard to read because, while past authors weren't always paid by the word, they were some times paid by the pages. (And words help fill up pages.) Then, by asking questions about wet rain the writing that's already complex becomes quantum physics.

The idea that's enforced in our heads is that reading should only be about understanding the deeper issues presented in a book. (Who cares if Jay Gatsby's a fake, what does his life and the settings say about society at the time?) While those issues are important and we shouldn't shy away from pushing ourselves to handle complex ideas, we're missing out on something.

To find it, just ask someone to tell you the story of how they first met the person they love, or a scary time when they were a kid, or a embarrassing event (sometimes happening at the same time as the scary event). When they do, watch how the others share their enjoyment.

Your grandma was a nurse and we met after a harlot lied to me about her lady parts one night...

Or not.