Via Fear and Loathing in Georgetown, I was amused by this post in which Miss Self-Important takes a hatchet to a WaPo lament penned yesterday by a high school English teacher in which she, the HSET, laments the attitude of her students toward the Great Books:

Ah, high school English teachers, perennial targets of Miss Self-Important’s ire. The newest installment of English Teacher Angst comes from the Washington Post, in which Angsty English Teacher laments that her students just aren’t having as much fun with Charles Dickens as they used to. When did high school students love Charles Dickens and fall all over themselves to write essays about him? Unclear. But moving on.

The problem seems to be that teenagers don’t get excited by “great books” in English classes, and as a result, become illiterate. Well, except that some of these books turn out to be of questionable greatness–”How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” for example–and that the kids are actually reading a lot of non-assigned sci-fi in their free time, and so presumably are not illiterate. Nonetheless! This is a major problem for Angsty English Teacher, because her students (who are also brilliant creative writers in the making, it should be noted) sleep through her course and sometimes long for their next period gym class. I haven’t heard of many brilliant writers who don’t read or any pedagogy based on fun (except, in fact, gym class, which was the least fun experience of my life), but maybe this mysterious new species of “digital native” will overturn my anachronistic assumptions.

The HSET’s lament, if you read the original article, seems to be:

1) That her students don’t find Dickens, Shakespeare and those other boring, dead dudes, like….relevant to their lives;

2) Being made to, like, study formal literary structure and detail and, like, write essays about it  is so……non-creative; and

3) Forcing her students to, like, read books they’re not into is making her all, like, unpopular, n’ stuff!

The HSET’s solution to these problems of connectivity with her class? Abject surrender, apparently.

Personally, before surrendering I would recommend that HSET dig out her old copy of The Berenstain Bears: Draw It! In that particular story, a new art teacher comes to the Bear Country School.  On his first day there, he sets up a seemingly meaningless copying assignment for the class.  Sister Bear says something like, “But, how are we going to express ourselves?”  To which the art teacher responds, “You’re not. I am going to express myself by teaching you how to draw!”  And damme if over the course of the story, Sister, Brother and Cousin Freddie don’t begin to understand the point of all those exercises in form and composition!  As much as I generally loathe the denizens of Bear Country, I’ve always thought that their creators got it just about right with this book.

The purpose of high school English is to teach kids to read and write, to recognize literary structures and to be able to compose essays demonstrating that recognition.  We employ the Great Books in these exercises not because we expect most of the kids to fall in love with Faulkner or Hardy or Hawthorne or Homer, but because the skills of these authors have withstood the test of time and deserve to be studied.   As for appreciation of the art for its own sake? Remember, they’re just snot-nosed, know-nothing kids.  Mere exposure is good enough at that age.  (Heck, I was a goddam college English major and I didn’t develop any real taste for novels until a good fifteen years afterwards.  And I still only enjoy poetry in very small doses.)

As for HSET’s popularity with her kiddies? Well, all I can do is go by own own dim recollection: The teachers who made the most lasting impression on me and whose efforts I ultimately came to appreciate the most were the ones who actually made me work, not the ones who wanted to be my pal.