Journelism

The Novel’s Place in a Televised World, No. 6: Scaring Off the Kids

When I was in 10th grade, Mr. Jennings assigned us to read the classic Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. As much as he assured us that the novella is a classic tale of English literature dealing with the moral, social and political failings of 19th-century colonialism, I could only take his word for it, because I—like the rest of my classmates—read the first paragraph of the work three times, trying to make any sense of what the dense prose meant, before I casted the book aside and typed “Heart of Darkness summary” into the Google search engine.

A decade later, I recognize that HOD and the rest of the Western canon are very nice books. Artistic, emotive, perhaps even a sublime exploration of the human condition. But at the time all I recognized was that in the old days, people spoke like they were transcribing a legal document, they wrote as if no paragraph were allowed to be shorter than 15 sentences, and free book summaries available on the Internet are more than satisfactory when it comes to phoning in a four-page double-spaced essay.

English teachers love the classics and don’t understand why students are unresponsive to the works of literature that they worship. They continue to dump Shakespeare and Byron and all the other giant Dead White Guys that they read in high school into classrooms, and 90% of students continue to believe that all literature comprises old-fashioned boring stories of the 18th-century bourgeoisie.

I have a BA in English Literature, but I have to admit that I’m not sure what teachers hope to accomplish by facing the same blank faces year after year while performing oral comprehension quizzes on chapter seven of The Turn of the Screw. If you want students to develop the same love of reading that you do, give them a book that’s accessible to them.

Instructors complain that their students don’t have a working knowledge of literature, so they cram a lifetime of reading into four years of high school. This is totally backwards. The right way to do it is to engender an appreciation of reading in the students, which will hopefully blossom into a later exploration of the Harvard Great Books collection.

None of my classmates got anything out of Heart of Darkness when we spent three weeks of class time dissecting the metaphorical implications of Kurtz’s defection into the African jungle. And they’re not likely to ever find an appreciation of it, because they were conditioned into believing that books = Heart of Darkness = boring. If we had learned that there are interesting books, that do deal with subjects applicable to our lives, and are written in a language that’s penetrable and relaxed, we might have been poised to work our way up to the classics and develop the same levels of enjoyment of these works that our fumbling teachers try to demonstrate.