I consider
myself a person who does admire and appreciate literature. I enjoy intriguing
characters, grappling storylines and immersive writing. If the previous has
been supplied, I can even appreciate a particular writing style or stylistic choice
so long as it doesn’t make the piece incredibly hard to read. *cough* Ulixes by
Joyce *cough* However, I am also a very fickly reader and won’t hesitate to put
a book down if I’m not drawn in by it in the first few chapters. I also wouldn’t
hesitate to call some old classic out-of-date at best or just word mashes at
worst.
Not that my
opinion has more grounding than any other, but, going through elementary and
high school, I got a feeling the academia flat out fears the fact that I might
not perceive any of the ‘classics’ as anything other than God-given gems. They
really seemed to do their darnest to make me fall down on my knees and praise
some book they declared good. They fragment the text, trying to make us appreciate
every little word the author might as well had used on a whim. They focus on
the author and all the wonderful things he had done or the perils and hardship
he endured as if the book was literally written in his blood. They want us to
make personality charts for every single character, regardless of how
unimportant they may be. Worst of all, they make us look for profundity that
might not even be there.
My point
is, we hardly ever discussed these books just as books. We were always spoon-fed
our opinion to us, saying these books are great because the academia says they
are. We were not allowed to say that we think the convoluted writing alienates
the reader, the characters are incredibly passive and uninteresting or the
story non-existent. Heaven forbid that you imply that a book from today’s
popular culture might do something better! “No!” they would yell, “those books
are LEISURE literature! A REAL book must have at least a hundred parallels to an
old thing you have never heard of or put style in front of story!”
People who
diss these books are seen as uncultured, stupid or too lazy to read something
other than basic sentences. Therefore their opinion doesn’t matter and can
simply be dismissed. They are never asked why they would prefer the new Harry
Potter over Madam Bovary or the new Twilight over Kafka’s Metamorphoses. So
there are never new, more daring ideas or concepts brought into the discussion,
making the “intellectual” circle polluted with inbreed ideas that had no
critics for at least 50 years.
This later
carries over into the classroom. Students get bored by having to know every
single detail about the author’s life or the book’s release. We don’t share our actual opinions on the
characters or the story, or maybe what we think is good and what’s bad.
The problem
is, the academia doesn’t realize this might actually HELP people to appreciate the
work, because they would feel their opinion is appreciated as well. For
example, for the longest time I considered William Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet a terrible love story. They see each other, “fall in love”, get married,
die… that’s what the book sounded like to me, a horrible misrepresentation of
what true love is like. However, Is tumbled on a video online, also talking
about whether or not Romeo and Juliet is bad. And guess what happened; they showed me a side
of the story that I didn’t think about. That maybe it’s not the story of ‘true love’,
but young love. About the time when you actually feel like this love is
eternal, without real rational reason. I found that now, I could relate to the
story. But in order to get to this point, that someone must have first said
that Romeo and Juliet sucks as a ‘true’ love story.
By not discussing
literature, but teaching it, we rob the children of a valuable opportunity. If you
talk about something where opinions can’t be anything other than subjective,
the children would learn how to form their own opinion, present it, respect the
opinion of others and learn how to admit they might have been wrong or right on
something. It’s an important lesson in tolerance, one that can be done without
making them make posters about how bullying is bad or how important acceptance is.
Have trust in them, they can work that out on their own if given an opportunity.
The thing
is, by the time the kids reach high school, it’ll probably be too late to
start. They will be so used to being told what to think that making a
discussion group will just confuse them. They will get bored, uninterested. In
general, they will have a feeling like what they say doesn’t matter anyway and
just carry out the exercise half-heartedly to appease the teacher and not get
in trouble.
That is why
I believe that the way we teach literature should undergo some fundamental changes,
possibly along with the whole educational system.
