There's an interesting discussion about high school reading lists happening at the Victoria discussion list. The thread began with one reader writing in to ask why it is that George Eliot's Silas Marner, once a staple of the high school English curriculum, has disappeared from it almost completely; that led to some more general reflections on pedagogical trends at the secondary level, and a very intriguing post from a long-time high school teacher who offered some generalizations about what used to be taught, what's taught now, and why the shifts have taken place.

To paraphrase: Silas Marner, she says, used to be assigned because it was short, well-written, and centered on family-oriented themes appropriate for adolescents. As such, it was one of the few British novels to break the stranglehold anthologies--and the poetry that is so well suited to them--had on the curriculum. Things changed a bit during the 1970's and '80's: The emphasis shifted from poetry to fiction, and Victorian fiction tended to get displaced by more contemporary fiction that spoke more directly to teenagers (Salinger, Harper Lee, Golding). The curricular move away from classics toward the popular was in turn tempered by the rise of Advanced Placement courses and exams. Noting that many younger high school English teachers have not read much in the way of Victorian fiction themselves, and are thus not highly motivated to incorporate it into the curriculum, she concludes by listing off some of the authors and works that are commonly assigned in high schools today: the Brontes, Jane Austen, Conrad (Heart of Darkness, which is popular because it is short and because it is a good springboard into discussions of race and imperialism), Wharton (the ubiquitous Ethan Frome), Hawthorne (the even more ubiquitous Scarlet Letter), Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Along the way, she drops several more interesting comments--that students don't seem to like Heart of Darkness (could it be that what they don't like is actually the politically pedantic way it is taught?), that Dickens has dropped off most high school reading lists, and that longer epic poems have all but disappeared from the curriculum.

The anecdotal information outlined above dovetails neatly with this USA Today report on how high school English teachers are increasingly substituting popular fiction--much of it of highly dubious quality--for more serious literary study: "Faced with declining reading scores on national tests and the steady buzz of movies, TV and video games, teachers trying to entice students are increasingly turning to contemporary literary fiction and non-fiction, often picked fresh from best-seller lists." Wally Lamb is right up there with Hawthorne these days, and the working assumption is not only that high school students won't read anything that they can't "identify" with, but that they should not have to (Great Expectations is singled out as a novel that has never really worked in a high school setting because teens just can't connect with it). The premise seems to be that if a teacher can get kids hooked on reading by assigning something light and fun and contemporary (Tuesdays with Morrie, The DaVinci Code), then they will be much more open to reading more difficult, more substantial older works. There's some excellent commentary on this philosophy at The Reading Experience.

My own feelings about it all are mixed. I certainly see the argument for luring people into serious literary study by way of lighter, more accessible initial assignments. But I also see the severe limitations of that approach. You can only cover so much material in a given term; the time spent with the fluffy stuff is time that cannot be devoted to the more serious stuff. Time spent with fluffy stuff also reinforces the expectation that reading literature ought to be a lot like gobbling junk food--easy, quick, immediately pleasurable, not requiring much beyond a passive willingness to swallow what's there. The habits of thought and styles of attention encouraged--or discouraged--by devoting serious class time to books you can read with one eye on the tube are not those that prepare you meaningfully for Hawthorne, or Homer, or Shakespeare. My guess is that the promise of the bait-and-switch pedagogy is much greater than its actual payoff.

At the same time, what teachers are pretty transparently trying to do with these fluffy reading assignments is make up for years of lost time--in prior English classes, where the groundwork for grown-up reading wasn't laid, and at home, where reading was always already displaced by TV. Many of their students just don't have either the reading skills or the imaginative range necessary for Dickens, let alone for Shakespeare. But many others do. All are being shortchanged by the condescension of a curriculum that treats them like narcissists who can never be expected to transcend their own self-absorption. What is reading for, if not for that?

I was an avid, addicted, unstoppable reader as a child, and I still struggled when I encountered Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade, The Scarlet Letter in tenth grade, Heart of Darkness in eleventh. But what I needed was not to set these works aside in favor of reading a bunch of bestsellers. What I needed was steady, serious guided study in which my teacher and I both assumed that of course I was mature enough to grapple with these works, and that what stood between me and an easier relationship with them was nothing more than my own patient application. I was lucky: I got it. For what it's worth, I was assigned Great Expectations as a high school freshman. I absolutely loved it.

I'd love to hear from readers--teachers, students, parents, people of the world--about what kinds of reading they were assigned in high school and how it was taught, about what they think ought to be assigned and how they think it should be taught, and about what they make of the present trend toward using popular literature--and sometimes even pulp fiction--in the classroom.

Once again to extol the merits of independent schools, but the summer before my first year, they required us to read Of Human Bondage and a book about Spinoza (for biology class) and to come to school prepared to discuss them. I have a strong recollection of getting the books and realizing that the bar had just been raised.

I was in high school about 45 years ago and we had the Shakespeare plays, Dickens, Twain, Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder. I won't say that all the students were up to the job but we did have some good discussions and this was a small town farming community public school.

I think that the teachers of today need to take a leaf from the teacher in "Stand and Deliver" (I think that was the one where the teacher in a black, lower class high school got his students involved in mathematics by challenging them and telling them that of course they could do it). I think young people are capable of doing almost anything if they are challenged properly. If the teachers assume that the kids are not going to go for something and so they scale down the courses, guess what - the kids are not going to go for it. You need to challenge them to get them working. That is why I am so against the whole concept of "feelgood" education where the kids are promoted even when they can't do the work because otherwise they wil feel bad. Not a good idea for the kids or the community at all. I think it all goes together. You have to build up the kids ability to do what they are challenged to do and you don't do that by lowering the bar.

In high school, and even college, I rarely had the impression that the teachers would really demand what they assigned.

There was little, "You MUST read this or your grade will suffer acordingly."

Reading--like other intellectual pursuits--is an aquired taste. Initially it must be ram-rodded down the students throats.

I am warming to the idea of "lighter" reading in high school (at least early high school). You need to get the kids trained to do something other than TV or video games. You mention that you were an "unstoppable" reader as a child. Unfortunately, reading does not come naturally to many and slapping Victorian literature on them as their first foray into reading probably turns a lot of them off.

I had an English teacher during my senior year of high school who wouldn't write me a college recommendation letter until I provided him with a list of all the books I'd read recently.

When he saw the utter crap I was reading--and when I say "crap" I mean novelizations of Japanese cartoons and some really sub-par sci-fi--he responded by handing me a list of books to read on my own time. They included _Utopia_, _Brave New World_, Plato's _Republic_, and _1984_. My assignment was to understand the difference between a utopia and a dystopia.

At the time, _1984_ and _Brave New World_ were the only ones I understood; Plato and Thomas More baffled and bored me. Nonetheless, I went to college that fall with a sense that a much broader world of thought was waiting for me--all because a teacher wasn't afraid to imply, rightly, that my tastes were deficient and that I needed to be pushed towards works that offered a long-overdue challenge.

Part of the problem, which I see constantly, in all different settings, is that wanting to be liked overwhelms wanting to teach well as the Number One Goal.

It's understandable enough; I want to be loved as much as the next meg, and by as many people as possible. But it's got to be secondary to being a good teacher.

I too was I thought unstoppable, until one year in high school ('70s, public, Chicago northshore burbs) nearly put me off serious reading by a technique akin to Ludovico's (oh, yes, Burgess should be on the list, if not this then Nothing Like the Sun or ABBA ABBA). Attempt to graft together USHistory with USLiterature foisted Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth along with the UptonSinclairLewis Sherwood-Norris Dry-Sir ilk upon us (after the obligatory Hawthorne -- why him, when Poe [long maligned] and Melville [not necessarily Moby; short stories shortshrifted; The Confidence-Man pairs up nicely with Huck] are more suited to modern [and postmodern] sensibilities?) -- it made the early 20th century make Victorian pulp look aesthetic, even (not to demean Twain, earlier James). Is the (probably accurate) theory that if not read then under duress then never read?. There's enough social commentary embedded from F. Scott to Papa (want a light dessert? Palin's Hemingway's Chair -- but much real contemporary literature can be tied in by allusion to forebears, an often neglected aspect of HS Lit's period capture; and if we're talking college prep, how about some academic satire?), Faulkner, Steinbeck (dos Passos may be better but time is limited) ...

I'm not going to go off into loose canonical listing here. But the greatest deficiency seems to have been in literature in translation. It shows in the publishing market these days.

I attended a large high school in a predominantly workig class town on Long Island, NY during the mid-80's. I recall in 11th grade one of my fellow classmates wanted to write a paper on some work by Stephen King and the teacher rebuffed him with a paroxysm of rage--or at least it seemed that horrible at the time. It would have never occurred to me to read popular literature. Here's a sample of works I enjoyed:
Julius Caesar, King Lear, Othello, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, Red Badge of Courage, The Odyssey, The Aeneid (I was a Latin geek), All Quiet on the Western Front, Mrs. Dalloway, etc.

Part of the problem, IMHO, is the fact SOME high school English teachers do not know enough about literature in order to get students excited about reading, nor do they themselves have any intellectual curiosity. By teaching emphemeral works, they are taking the path of least resistance! I can think of about 10 different short stories and novellas from the traditional canon that would garner some interest among the video game generation. Last semester, I taught a bunch of comatose students Russian literature at the college where I am employed as a librarian. All of my students, were taking this course as a general education requirement and most of them read 90% of the required works. At a college where most students here do not read, this is a small success.

Stand and Deliver is about an engineer who teaches Hispanic students in an "inner-city" SoCal school math as a way to escape. Very powerful, all in all.

My daughter's school assigns a lot of interesting books. I read a fair number of them (The Color of Water and Cold Mountain come to mind). She also reads classics and some good SF/F writing.

A lot of issues there, a lot.

HS students will have the rest of their lives to read popular fiction/bestsellers. Most HS students don't realize the magnitude of what preceded them (anything before their birth is un undifferentiated morass) and thus take civilization as a given. I think that one goal of a HS curriculum should be to remedy this shortcoming by providing a template/timeline into which new knowledge can be incorporated. The HS then should proceed to populate it with everything from Greek/Roman mythology & oration to Shakespeare to Federalist writers to 19th century English & American fiction to Victorian poetry to mid-20th-century dystopian fiction.
Just my 2-bits...

Growing up in rural Mississippi during the 60s, reading was my outlet to the world. We had all of the normal assigned books for high school, but I read 10 times the number of required books, although much of it was fluff historical novels and westerns. I am a firm beliver that reading words from a page as a leisure activity is an important habit to acquire. It makes the more rigorous assigned reading easier to understand.

I have a reading requirement for my 12 year old son in addition to any school assigned work. He must read one book every 3 weeks during the school year and one a week during the summer. A modest report setting forth what lesson he learned is required.

Most of what I assign is light, age appropriate books like Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Treasure Island. The most recently completed book was The Diary of Anne Frank which was assigned because we'll attend the play this weekend. We may go to a Shakespere Festival this summer, and if so, he will be assigned to read the plays we will see in the weeks before.

I certainly hope that I will be able to instill a love of reading before he stops listening to dad. Parents owe their children more in education than they will ever recieve in schools.

On why Conrad's Heart of Darkness isn't better liked: I've noticed this in teaching the novel too.

Certainly, I do bring up the race/imperialism issues in my teaching on the second or third session--if students haven't already initiated the conversation. But both of the times I have taught the book the dislike (which was really a mask for confusion) appeared right away. It seemed to me that the students simply had a hard time following a story of such wrought abstraction.

Also, you can't get around the slipperiness of Conrad's language and his formal complexity (massive amounts of information withheld; flashbacks within flashbacks; very long sections of the narrative in quotation; ponderous allusions to unidentified traumas). If these various difficulties are kept in mind maybe it would be easier for teachers to get around the problems: focus on the disruptions in the narrative, keep close track on who is speaking, etc. I did this with "Lord Jim" last fall, and was pleased with the results.

I went to high school (a smallish orthodox jewish all-girls, non-judaic studies were clearly second-priority high school in brooklyn) not more than 10 years ago, and I don't remember much "best-seller" fiction at all - we did a some of Shakespeare, Dickens, Steinbeck, Twain each year, with other "random" additions that reflected teachers' tastes/NY state curriculum requirements - those that I recall offhand include Lord of the Flies, Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, Les Miserables, and Cry the Beloved Country. Also, we had this graduation requirement that consisted of two short "book reports" each year (8 total) on "approved classics" that were not assigned for a class.
Needless to say, I was somewhat surprised (although, not being a voracious consumer of english literature, not unpleasantly so) when my entire "intro to english lit" syllabus in college consisted of readings from a short story/poetry anthology that contained primarily contemporary selections.

In grades 5 & 6, my English teacher had us read Macbeth & The Tempest (one a year, but I don't remember which order). She allowed us to have fun with it -- we read in a circle, so you didn't have one person with lots to read and a whole bunch with nothing, and she let us use fake accents, etc. We didn't discuss in great detail, and a lot of it went over our heads, but she created a group of kids with an enduring love of Shakespeare.

And again with the great books -- you can make them enjoyable, *especially* if you read parts aloud. But I think it's also good to focus on good contemporary novels, too, so kids don't think it's a choice between Dickens or the Brontes and John Grisham or Dan Brown. (I enjoy them all -- light, fast, readable stories have times when they're better than a good, well-written novel. But it's sad when people are shocked that interesting books that are worthwhile studying are being written right now.)

Focus might be too strong a word: have each give a report on a different contemporary novel. There are good mysteries and SF/Fantasy around; it's not impossible to allow kids to be genre-specific.

I realize I might start a firestorm here, and I apologize in advance, but I think that these books are not assigned because they are simply uninteresting and dense to most students. To expect Dickens or Tolstoy to catch the imagination of more than a few adolescents is folly. And arguing that the kids aren't being challenged doesn't change this reality. These writings appeal to a very narrow subsection of the population (adult or adolescent) simply because they are not that interesting to most people. I am a voracious reader, but have never been able find any joy in reading the "classics," despite many attempts.

This hardly stems from a lack of ambition, intelligence or work on the part of the students. For example, I attended West Point, earned a degree in chemistry and practice law in one of the largest firms in the country. (I provide this information not in a fit of hubris, but only to demonstrate that not everyone who eschews literature is living in their parents' basement.) And, as to the argument that popular media is destroying the ability to enjoy literature - hogwash. We didn't have a computer, TV or video game when I was growing up. And while I was always reading, the classical canon never intrigued me.

However, my real problem with this discussion in general is the tone of condescension I hear in all those who brag about their reading lists while looking down their noses at those of us who read *GASP* pulp fiction. I probably know more about law and chemistry/biology than most of you, but I don't spend my time bemoaning your lack of education. From a lay person I will try to state the problem with literature -- it is the self-importance of (some of) those who read and write Literature. Outside a small group of academics and connoisseurs, reading is an activity undertaken to educate or entertain. Very few of us want to engage in the navel gazing and in-depth analysis required to digest most literature. For example, when I read ìThe Correctionsî it felt like the book had been written merely to demonstrate Frazen's gravitas and to appeal to those who wish to meet and discuss such literature. It wasn't written to be consumed and digested by most of us. Let's be fair; this stuff is niche writing and, (much like opera) while beautiful and worthwhile, it should not be forced on anyone.

My wife taught junior high Spanish and English in one of the smaller cities in the LA area. It's a solid, middle class town with what is considered a decent school system. She quit teaching when our daughter was born more than 25 years ago. Two years ago she was hired by the town's high school to teach English. Not a good experience.

The assigned texts for English were The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. The students (as a group, some were better, some worse) couldn't keep the characters straight in Gatsby, and couldn't decode the dialect in HF. My wife ended up reading much of Twain aloud to the class so they could understand what was going on. Some students had been so sensitized to racism that the fact that Jim was a slave, let alone use of the N word stopped them dead.

We've talked about this and the only cure we can see is that reading has to be the absolute first priority in school. Starting from first grade the students' reading ability needs to be tested and whatever remediation required must be provided. By 11th or 12th grade it's too late.

Enough rant.

Steve, I don't look down my nose at sci-fi or genre fiction at all, but the point is, teachers have a responsibility to push students farther and higher. It would be ludicrous for us to offer credit and grades to students who are doing nothing more than reading contemporary, easily-understood works of fiction for pleasure. May as well fire all English teachers if that's the case, because no student needs me to lead him through _A Spell for Chameleon_. However, he does need me to help guide him through more difficult works. Knowing how to read, understand, and evaluate difficult material is useful far beyond the English department.

(And for what it's worth, I'd hardly fault you if you criticized humanities types for scientific ignorance. In a world full of misinformation about nutrition, pharmaceuticals, and health issues, we could all stand to be less ignorant about biology and chemistry.)

I teach English at the College level and most of the majors in my department are Education majors who plan to be high school English teachers. I can't believe what they didn't read in high school and how many of them really don't like to read themselves. I have had more than one student tell me that he or she "hates to read" and yet still wants to teach high school English!

Many of the people teaching English literature are simply not doing a very good job. So many of my students dislike a particular book because they were forced to read it in high school. The way books are taught in high school might explain why students don't like to read very much. I am a voracious reader, but I can remember hating my English classes in high school because we were quizzed on ridiculous things like naming all of Miss Flite's birds in Bleak House. I liked to read despite my educational experiences. As to Silas Marner--that book simply sucks and I am a Victorianist who works on Eliot.

"I have had more than one student tell me that he or she "hates to read" and yet still wants to teach high school English'...what a sad thing!

Laura, I'm sure you ask them *why* they want to follow this career path when they hate to read..what do they say?

The problem with Conrad, Dickens, Chaucer, and Shakespeare is that they are devilishly difficult to read, due either to style or changes in the English language. If you are trying to introduce high school students to the classics, why do it with these books which will immediately convey the idea that literature is cumbersome, boring, difficult, and means something only to the select few?

The solution is not to use bestsellers, but to use those classics which are more likely to appeal to students: books by Orwell, Vonnegut, Salinger, etc. I am not saying that students will like these because they can "relate" to them more; but at the very least they won't have to face the language barrier.

High school readings for me (non-residential Catholic prep school near Chicago, 1965 - 1969):

summer before freshman year

Treasure Island
Captains Courageous
Mutiny On the Bounty
Call Of the Wild
another novel that I can't remember

summer before sophomore year

The Crucible
The Great Gatsby
The Virginian
Ivanhoe
The Sun Also Rises

at various other times:

Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Of Mice and Men
Animal Farm
Hiroshima (actually for history class)
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Little Foxes
various short stories by Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Stafford, Faulkner, Joyce, and others
Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Aeneid (senior year, in Latin)
Intruder In the Dust

and about as much additional stuff that I can't remember specifically

As I recall, we were required to write book reports about four of the assigned summer readings on the first day of freshman year (our choice of four). There was no follow-up on the summer reading lists for any other year.

Teaching ranged from classroom discussion that seemed directed more to determining who had read the material than anything else to detailed examination of symbolism (my junior year English teacher was very big on this, and he was a very good teacher, as well).

I attended a magnet high school in Philadelphia for the "mentally gifted," and I can say with absolute certainty that the prescribed reading very rarely proved challenging. I should, however, mention one exception. When I attended my first high school English class, I expected it to replicate the insufferable ones I sat through during middle school--where students did nothing but sit for forty-five minutes, sporadically glancing at the dilapidated anthologies sitting before them. Needless to say, my expectations were not met.

Ms. Herr, my freshman English teacher, was of the quirky sort. She had thick, black hair cut on the bias, wore poly-blend chartreuse shirts, and twitched when she spoke. Nevertheless, she understood the importance of introducing quality work to her students and demanding from them the same. During our first class meeting, she distributed copies of Robert Burns's "To a Mouse" and asked us to discuss how the poem worked thematically and aesthetically, how our summer reading, Steinbeck's *Of Mice and Men,* did the same, and how Steinback's novel invoked Burns's poem. Although I had always been an avid reader, at the time I remember thinking myself barely literate. I had no conception of writers' aesthetic philosophies; in fact, I'm not sure I even knew what aesthetic meant. I did not let Ms. Herr's inquiries discourage me from thinking more carefully, however. If anything, her formidable questions and difficult reading list compelled me to become a better reader and writer.

When she assigned *Romeo and Juliet,* I decided that I needed more Shakespeare. Independently I read *King Lear,* *Hamlet,* and *Othello.* My rapacity for Shakespeare soon developed into an absolute obsession with the Renaissance. Ms. Herr suggested that I read Spenser and Milton, and I did. In essence, she cultivated my ardor for books; she allowed me to believe that I could make a career of this passion; she shaped me into a moral, thoughtful individual by encouraging me to read works that emphasized the importance of morality and thoughtfulness.

The following years, then, could be nothing other than disappointments. I could easily prove why Coleridge's *The Rime of the Ancient Mariner* could be classified as Romantic poetry, why *Henry IV, Part One* could be called a play that pits solipsism and communalism against one another, and why George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" could be deemed an expression of its author's own ambivalence about the colonial venture. And yet, I felt that there was something fraudulent about my success: I felt like my good grades did nothing but conceal my lack of familiarity with most things literary.

Looking back at my own experiences, I can say that it is important for students to be pushed academically. Fluffy bestsellers may be more entertaining for most teenagers, but they ultimately dull the brain and, in turn, the character. They allow students to feel utterly satisfied with their intellectual pursuits when, in most cases, they have absolutely no cause to do so. Some of you may call this statement fascist, but I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. As Plato reminds us, reason grows from discipline. We cannot expect the youth of our society to act rationally and morally without first demanding some hard work from them.

I think teenagers' understanding of literature is different from older people's. I can reread books I know I read as a teen, and even though I remember parts, the book as a whole is virtually unrecognizable.

I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings for the first time last year. My daughter had to read it for school. I loved it, she hated it. I think the reason is that I identified with the adult narrator looking back at all the events of her childhood and the people who were important to her when she was a little girl, and how they made her into the adult she became. My daughter identified with the little girl as the stories unfolded, and if you read it that way it's just about unbearable.

I agree with some of the others that while it is not easy to inculcate good reading habits in students or a desire to read better books, if you never at least introduce them to better books they will think that some of the pulp fiction is the best thing going. If you never have to think while you are reading, then reading is just taking up time, not gaining anything. It is like eating nothing but junk food. People have a tendency to take the easiest route in life. If you don't challenge then how are you going to teach them anything. If all you are doing is taking up a class period with reading crap, then why bother.

I teach college prep (ha ha hahahaha) sophomores and AP juniors and seniors in a nice, down-to-earth, interested in somewhere-just-above-middle-of-the-road-academic-success suburban town. Whew! I have just finished a unit on Tale of Two Cities with the sophomores. I am not really cynical at all, despite the outburst of laughing above, about teaching or my students. I am in my sixth year, but started lateó28.

Is there anything worse than trying to sell Dickens to 10th graders? I do try to sell it (although I donít genuinely like it). Forget vocab. The kids donít get: tone, irony, subtlety, sensibility(!), allusion . . . etc. Sven Birkerts, in his ìGutenberg Elegiesî has a great discussion about reading in the modern age and the young studentís problems with anything that isnít literal, due to many things, including time, silence, distraction, practice.

I do not want to trivialize the curriculum, but I do want to dump Dickens. I also appreciate our curriculum more, now. Five or six Shakespeare plays during high school, along with many classics and not too much fluff.

I just taught Heart of Darkness to AP seniors. They thought it was the hardest thing theyíd (tried to) read in high school, after Crime and Punishment, and maybe Wise Blood. Conrad requires a genuine intellectual curiosity! They did enjoy class discussion: we talked about problems with and interpretations of meaning, deconstructionism, hermeneutics, morality, pretense, etc (there is a fabulous web quest on Heart, and critical theory: http://www.msu.edu/user/rozemaro/quest/home.htm )

I really get bored with the same old teacher criticism: if only high school teachers were this, or taught this, or taught this way blah blah blah. Most of my peers are excellent. In English anyway. As with social problems, etc., student attitude toward reading or learning has to do with the home and/or social factors, 97%.

I really sell the books I teach, most of which I love, and I do it with ideas. If a student lacks even a modest amount of intellectual curiosity, it isnít my deficiency.

Letís talk about one real deficiency: English, above all other disciplines, suffers from the Internet: Sparknotes, Classicnotes, etc. The slightly motivated student, and some arenít even that, can get summary and commentary, detailed enough to participate in a discussion, or answer some test questions. With Heart of Darkness, I went to handing out important bits of text, and did passage passes, jigsaws, etc., and then went over them, line by line, in detail on the overhead. At least they encountered, with understanding, *text* . I am going to go to this much more.

A very fortunate childhood started me off right. My parents read to me. Read and read. Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, (and Through the Looking Glass) David Copperfield, The Last of the Mohicans, Hiawatha, tales of fairies and brownies, Wizard of Oz--enough to give me an idea that there were perfectly wonderful stories in all those books, so that it was a great incentive to learning to read.

By the time I was 7 or 8 I was astonished to learn that at the library they'd let me take home any story book I wanted, so I took full advantage of that. Also, friends and relatives now and then gave me an odd assortment. One was Tom Sawyer (the cave scene scared the hell out of me, but I got through it nevertheless); also The Prince and the Pauper. Someone gave me Moby Dick (!) and because it was there I read it too. Bless whoever that was. I thought it was a great story about how to catch whales, even though it ended sort of downbeat. Similarly, there was a child's version of The Odyssey, which also laid down a foundation for later and fuller enjoyment. So all these and many other books prepped me for what was to come.

My high school English experience in the early '40s began with Ivanhoe, and went on, sure enough, with Silas Marner--about the only HS assignment I found irretrievably dull. Had some Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffins; some Dickens too. Of contemporary fiction I remember only Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Poetry: Browning, Emily Dickinson, Sandburg, Lindsay, Cummings, and Tennyson's Idylls of the King--which finally taught me how to read poetry.

Then Shakespeare. I'd had Julius Caesar in 7th grade, but when Miss Stedman in Senior English assigned us Hamlet I was prostrated. How could we possibly be expected to understand something so far above us, I wondered. I sat down gloomily and figured on laboring through it one way or another. Twenty minutes later I sat up thunderstruck. I realized that I was ACTUALLY ENJOYING it--strange language, strange world-view and all--that there was something compelling here. In the final semester, Macbeth therefore was no problem, just something meaty and absorbing to get your (mental) teeth into.

Is there any moral? Perhaps, although I know no one size fits all. Start kids off early, and not just with pap. Don't let them know anything is supposed to be a challenge; just that they'll be entertained and rewarded. Why else why do they suppose that some of these books have been around for many lifetimes, if not for the fact that many lives have been delighted and enriched by them?

Oh, and your TV set? Burn it.

Question for the West Point grad:
How do you know the readings are not interesting to most people if you proclaim to be not well-read in the classics yourself? Isn't that demonstrative of hubris?

Also, I think it's safe to assume that most people who read this blog have other knowledge besides literature. For myself, I know quite a bit about exercise physiology and nutrition and am married to a semi-elite distance runner.

one of my concerns with "pulp" or "popular" fiction is that so much of it - at least, the straight novels rather than the genre fiction - is that it seems so much to be a mirror of the person reading it, that they don't experience thoughts or sensations or ideas different from their own. I don't have a problem with the inclusion of *some* but I don't think it should be the only thing. Or that a lot of it is wish-fulfillment literature, and it's not stretching the reader.

I do think there are some problems with the Victorian novels and especially Shakespeare in that the language is not 'transparent,' it takes work to figure out what is going on (I find myself in my own reading having to go back and re-read paragraphs some times). Perhaps judicious use of glossaries or explanations of passages could help. I do think there's value in reading works from other times and other places, as well as the "classics" that are alluded to in so many contemporary works.

I will say I read some genre fiction (especially love mystery novels) but I also enjoy Trollope (who I guess was the pulp novelist of his day), Dickens, Cather, Eliot... I like a challenge when I read.

In high school, we did a Shakespeare play each year, the choice of the particular English teacher. We were able to get, from the library, books with "glosses" on the opposite page, that explained the more obscure vocabulary or passages, which helped a lot and made it more enjoyable for me. Also, in some classes the teachers showed us movies made from the plays (The Kate Hepburn "Taming of the Shrew" for example) or allowed us to act out scenes - the more extreme we went with it, the better. (The eye-gouging scene in King Lear, for example, was acted out with the "victim" facing away from the audience and grapes used as stand-ins for the eyes.).

We didn't read any Dickens, or any Victorians that I can remember - I came to Dickens later, as an adult. I do remember reading Huck Finn (and also reading a lot about book banning along with it), The Awakening (which I didn't care all that much for), Catcher in the Rye, Kafka's Metamorphosis (which I loved), Greek plays (and we were allowed to write parodies of them for creative writing assignments), mythology, the Bible (this was a private school), the Odyssey, some poetry (and also writing our own), various short stories...

I wonder if perhaps the writing assignments helped - we were allowed to do parodies, or to write poetry, or to write "continuations" of stories in addition to the typical 5-paragraph expository essay. I don't know for sure because I was an avid reader already, and I lived to do creative writing, but maybe for some folks, that helped.

trailgirl:

I have read many of the "classics" and found them uninteresting personally. As to my generalization, let's just say I don't see any of the classics flying out of the bookstores.

I never suggested anyone here is suffering from a lack of knowledge. I am quite sure that anyone posting here has a large breadth of knowledge. Quite the opposite, I have a problem with those who assume that a failure to read "literature" is a moral failure and can be taken as an indicia of someone else's lack of knowledge.

As to your expertise in exercise physiology and nutrition, I can only assume you didn't glean this information from ìThe Brothers Karamazov.î You only prove my point, we all choose our own paths to knowledge. Literature is not the only path. My only request is that others not criticize my choices based on their own biases.

Erin, your post convinced me (if I needed further convincing) that I am lucky to have undergone a narrowly focused but beneficial curriculum. I was educated in Singapore, where students take the Cambridge GCE 'O' and 'A' levels. For 'A' level Literature, students have to sit for three exams over the course of about two weeks, and each exam is three hours long. Each school chooses different subject areas--our school prepared us for "papers" 1, 4, and 8. Paper 1 involved the study of a number of texts, and our teachers picked Hamlet, a collection of Andrew Marvell's poems, and John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi". Paper 4 involved Gothic literature--we read Horace Walpole "The Castle of Otranto", Ann Radcliffe, Mathhew Lewis's "The Monk", Mary Shelley, Poe, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market", and Angela Carter. Paper 8 was "Practical Criticism".

I'll admit that there were times when I wanted to poke my eyes out--Andrew Marvell is too subtle and complex for an eighteen-year-old; Radcliffe's lyrical landscapes were lost on me, and Webster's Duchess was not eloquent enough for my liking. But in hind sight, I am grateful that someone (Cambridge curriculum-setters and my literature teachers) had a clear idea of what students should be reading.

Narrow as my focus on literature might have been, I have to say that 'A' level exams (and the preparation for them) are the most character-building of my experiences. I worry that younger students (e.g. my younger sister, who is studying in LA now) will not experience the benefits of reading and analyzing some good ol' LITERATURE.

I certainly agree that reading is an acquired taste, but one must also remember that there was a time when classics were serialized, and people read, and anticipated, each installment with great interest.

These days (a year after graduating from college), I have been reading Fielding, Thackeray, and Tolstoy on my daily commute. I wonder if my fellow commuters think me pretentious? The truth is, I cannot find my way around contemporary fiction (I have no idea where to begin), and am much more comfortable in the company of classics.

I once (in a college class) used the word "penchant" in a sentence and was met with a universal declaration of "Huh?" They claimed to have never heard or read the word before in their lives. That evening I was watching a world series game and the announcer, discussing a particular hitter's tendencies, said so and so "has a penchant to swing at low-inside pitches, and he needs to lay off those." Later, in the same class, I used the word "omniscient" to characterize a 3rd person narrative voice. The reaction, sadly but predictably, was "omni-what?" And then, "man ... why don't you speak English ... this is English class and you don't speak no English. Where you getting all these big words from?" I tried to deflect this with a pointed joke by saying, "uhh ... the dictionary, Don Delillo, ... and major league baseball."

What struck me from this was a recognition of just how divorced today's students are not just from the language, but from any notion of a wider culture beyond their own self-contained, and self-absorbed ethos and its rather limited vocabulary and range of expression.

I don't know any techniques, or well-founded theories on how to break through this limit. What I did was refuse to compromise or condescend, and continued to speak the way I always do. I did, however, urge them to 1. ask me what a word means if they don't understand it; 2. and I required them to purchase a dictionary --and several grumbled about this last requirement.

Without assigning blame to one or another faction or element, I do feel that it's important for those of us interested in and concerned with these issues to recognize that the basic function of education in this country is to produce citizens able to function in a techno-capitalist work-force. Schools apparently feel they have done their job if their students are able to read street signs, product labels, and directions-for-use. And if I ask my students for a "reading" that goes beyond this minimal level, I am met with an admixture of resentment, anger, confusion, and 'WTF'. They are just not able to do it, and moreover, do not see the point in beaing able to read critically. Reading, they constantly explain, is for the sake of information and no more.

Given this, I suspect reading Austen or Shakespeare is a long way away.

I graduated from a small high school in realtively rural north-central Pennsylvania in the mid-1960's. My senior year I had two English courses from the same instructor. One was "regular" senior English and one was "advanced" English (a college-level literature course). The instructor was a terror. I went to class each day with my stomach in knots. I sweated all the "hidden meanings" and literary and mythological allusions that he had us struggle with as we read some of the finest of classic literature. Behind his back we called him "the old man". I hated it, and if I ever meet him again... I WANT TO HUG HIM!!!

He not only blessed me with a more solid preparation for my college years, but he opened my eyes to the vast and rich world of literature that to this day enhances my life (and I work in a technological field!). Like a runner who comes to the point of pain and wants to quit but is encouraged by a coach to push on to the high level, so I was pushed by this teacher beyond the "pain" and beyond my own little world to find the rewards of good, solid literature and learning.

When will we learn that we do our children no favor by dumbing down our educational requirements to the low level of what they already understand? When will we learn to challenge them so that they might grow and mature and find a world of ideas far beyond the boundaries of their parochial lives?

My parents were readers, and my mother is still a pretty serious reader at age 86. When I learned to read I became a reader and as a boy books were my main form of entertainment, apart from playing soccer. We didn't have TV in Israel back then. School reading was no more than a nuisance, except for one year when I had a good teacher in highschool. Bible was another matter. In Israel you learn a lot of Bible, and I was lucky to have some good Bible teachers. The Bible's Hebrew can be very difficult, and much of it can't be understood without commentary. Nevertheless I enjoyed it as it has awsome writing. This example leads me to believe that Shakespeare can be taught in highschool as well.

I think long novels are logistically problematic to teach - too few people can be made to read them, and besides there's plenty of short and medium sized writing which is wonderful. I say, Bleak House out and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide in. Anna Karenina out and The death of Ivan Ilich in.

I find that serious readers will always be a small part of the population. Good teaching cannot change this statistics because there are few good teachers.

Class of '71 at a major Dallas h.s. Started with Twain in 8th, proceeding with Shaw, Huxley, Melville, Sinclair, Dickens, Poe, Orwell, Thoreau, Steinbeck, Shakespear, to mention a few.

Most interesting teaching method occurred in high school where lit & history were team taught. In addition to needing to understand the basics of a novel, the history teacher would discuss with us the author's background, the nature of his/her world at the time the work was written, and what would have prompted the work to have been written.

My biggest struggle was with, "Great Expectations." It was a struggle to get through, but to this day I consider it the best classic I ever read.

Interestingly, a year after I read it, my grandmother, a retired english teacher, asked a question about that novel that I had never considered, "Why the title?"

I'm going to start another firestorm here, but I'm recently out of high school, and just finished with college. I happen to love reading, and so I have a bone to pick with the entire English establisment.

Freshman year, I was assigned a mix of obnoxious written-for-high-school freshmen books, along with some more serious reading matter like Julius Caesar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Sophomore year, more of the same kind of mix, but with the added bonus of The Great Gatsby. I picked up Lolita, loved it, and started to ignore English class. Junior year was AP Language & Composition (not lit), so we read a lot of essays, Didion, Dillard, White. We also read some literature, like Dorian Gray. That's about when I started writing for myself. Senior year's summer reading invovled a book culled from Oprah's book club (another AP class, to boot). We had the kind of teacher that read Achebe before Conrad, and who replaced Faulkner with Keri Hulme's The Bone People. When a few of us "cultural imperialists" started to bitch about how utterly horrid the book was, she told us that this book was taught in English graduate programs, and that we just didn't get it. My first encounter with Post Colony Theory. Eventually, she had the gumption to be proud of me for wanting to get an English major. "Philosophy" "Yeah, same difference." I also had a philosophy & a Greek lit indie study with a history teacher. That was much more enlightening.

Anyway, there's plenty of good reasons to stop assigning Victorian literature, most of them having to do with the overwrought way in which Victorian writers torture and humiliate their prose. The Bronte sisters were the 19th century equivalent of our Nora Roberts, and Dickens was a propogandist. No wonder it's impossible to get bright high school kids to like to read.

Not like dumbing things down or changing the cirriculumn to postmodern multicultural fiction. But that leaves lots of good books to assign. There's Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, and a lot of others worth reading.

Always enjoy reading your blog. Thanks!