I wonder how "Native Son" or "Invisible Man" would have been handled by the same cohort. Frankly, the "Acceptable" way to talk about race nowadays is already so far removed from what it was even in 2003, that it's easy to see why today's high schooler would be uncomfortable with literature from the 1960s.
And we live in a day and age where being uncomfortable is tantamount to personal violence in the eyes of many.
It really feels like the average person just isn't capable of processing works of art or literature with the historic context in mind. So as cultural norms continue to shift, I wonder where this leaves many works of literature which we've long considered "classics" or at the very least, important.
That culture shift has been rapid, and very broad, too.
In my final year of English class, in the 90's, I studied a play. I forget the title now, but a line in the play that also formed the title of my essay about it, would not be allowed in a school setting at all today.
Basically a young white boy is talking to their family slave and says he wants to build a kite. The slave says he would show him how, and the boy naively was shocked and said, "What does a n**r know about flying a kite?"
I was one of two white people in the class. Times were such, that short a time ago, that the class loved my essay, which was about how slavery was so normalized at the time of the play, that this child couldn't even imagine life any other way. He learned, through building and playing with this kite with the slave that Black people were actual people, deserving of the same respect his (white) family received, and that his off-hand remarks, which everyone took for granted, were really awful.
Today I would be cancelled for even writing the word, let alone reading it out loud in front of a classroom! Call it "naming and shaming," perhaps, because replacing it with any other word would have killed any power that play had about the topic of racism.
I think the world is separating into the “idiot” works that thinks To Kill a mockingbird shouldn’t be studied, the normies that don’t care, and people who want to strive for greatness and study great things.
There’s lots of people who this this is a stupid idea and the people proposing are stupid. It’s hard to tell if you can organize to districts that stay mildly sane.
What is more of an issue here, the possibly representative reactions of a few students and teachers, or the whole process by which school readings are chosen? As a high school student, I really hated A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies. I wondered, with all the great literature written just in the past century, why were we forced to read such downers? Why couldn't they choose novels that made more students enjoy reading? If you would ask me what I'd recommend instead, off the top of my head, I'd suggest anything by John Steinbeck, for example.
This might be a case where AI in teaching and easy availability of electronic texts might actually help the humanities.
Grade the reading level of 1000s of texts, allow students to choose from among any of those thousands of texts that are age and grade-appropriate, and have AI develop custom course materials for that book and support the teacher’s grading process. No teacher, or even school system, has the resources to develop materials for every possible good book, nor necessarily to be able to grade the relevant homework (at least at HS level). AI could.
The teacher role would include review and adjustment of a student’s chosen syllabus for breadth and depth. (“Not everything has to be written by Brontë, Amy.”) Students might carry that positive experience of reading what they choose into adulthood and actually read for pleasure as an adult. (Isn’t that the desired outcome?)
If given the choice in school, I would have skipped novels altogether (except SF and fantasy) and read poetry anthologies and non-fiction (travel literature, religious literature, collections of popular essays, histories, Great Books, etc.) instead. The reading assignments of “sophisticated” (i.e. depressing, neurotic, middlebrow, often NYC-centric) modern novels led to me skipping the whole novel genre for leisure reading ever since, i.e. for 50+ years. Did I miss much?
Side note: I was assigned dozens of essays to write in K-12, and never once was assigned an actual essay to read. Students were assigned classic essays to read in 19th and early 20th Century schools, but not in my mid 20th Century public schools.
> ...never once was assigned an actual essay to read.
I recognize this as a huge problem in education and sometimes bore my colleagues with rants about it. In my field of work, we expect grad students to write a thesis/dissertation without ever having studied good examples of such.
I once asked a famous textbook author for examples of well-written dissertations in his field, so I could have students study them as models. After thinking on it, he said he couldn't come up with any, observing that students are generally poor writers. Well, I think we educators have to take some of the blame for that.
The problem with lord of the flies is that it is fiction and does not necessarily represent the way people will actually behave in that situation. We have the example of an actual shipwrecked boys and it did not turn out like the book at all:
Two significant differences make that real life story totally different from Lord of the Flies.
(1) In that story the boys are friends who ran away from boarding school and stole a boat with the intention of catching fish and sailing to someplace that would be more fun than boarding school. IOW all of them were probably of fairly similar ages, disposition, and character type. And they they were the kind of kids who would think doing that was a good idea.
(2) In Lord of the Flies, the boys are a typical mixed bag of British boarding school boys including young ones, big ones, jocks, wimps, nerds....
Middle School anywhere is often a civilized version of Lord of the Flies, and any grade in a 1940s British boarding school was worse, as attested to by CS Lewis. So the outcome in each of those stories is totally consistent with reality.
I was a student at a fairly lenient military boarding school in 8th and 9th grade, and my experiences there confirm the veracity of how the Lord of the Flies ends.
Like East of Eden with its uplifting themes like abusive childhoods, survivor guilt leading to suicide and abusive narcissism?
But I jest, there are uplifting moments and themes of redemption and the good in humanity. I'm inclined to agree that it'd be a much better choice than Lord of the Flies.
And we live in a day and age where being uncomfortable is tantamount to personal violence in the eyes of many.
It really feels like the average person just isn't capable of processing works of art or literature with the historic context in mind. So as cultural norms continue to shift, I wonder where this leaves many works of literature which we've long considered "classics" or at the very least, important.