Why literature classes are a joke!

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 I also wouldn’t hesitate to call some old classic out-of-date at best or just word mashes at worst.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. 

Are schools really anti-boys?

 To be honest I hate being the one who cried 'sexism', but this really got to me. Today, I found this video on the Internet.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFpYj0E-yb4#t=308

My opinion of course won’t hold as much critical value compared to professors and researchers, but I noticed some key factors that disturbed me and made me believe this shouldn’t be taken as seriously as it wants to be.

 1. The whole research is based on stereotypes, right down to the pictures and coloring scheme. It’s all about ‘boys act this way, girls act that way’. They don’t directly say it, but it has an undertone of ALL the boys are disorganized, love sports, don’t like poetry… All of the stereotypical traits we were fighting so hard to combat all these years. The thing is, this is not biological or something that you’re born with. You are raised to be this way, either directly by your parents pushing you into sports or arts, or passively over social norms that are in their nature arbitrary.

2.   It mixes issues.

The extreme cases listed, like the example with the pirate drawing or the cookie gun, are not schools being against boys. It’s an issue with violence, or more clearly, gun control. America, as far as I know from the media, is extremely reluctant to enforce even the slightest bit of gun control. That’s why terrified schools, wanting to avoid mass shootings, enforce the ‘zero tolerance’ policies. The theory is that if they punish kids for bringing up gun-related images, they won’t develop the desire to do so. This theory has more holes than Swiss cheese, but that’s a topic for a whole other discussion. The point is that this then affects the boys more than it does the girls because guns were seen as traditionally boy toys, so it naturally there will be more incidences with boys than with girls. You’d get the exact same result if schools decided to ban extra skinny dolls from school in fear of spreading negative self-image. You’d expect more girls to be affected by this than boys.

3.  It never addresses what actually happens after they graduate.

Maybe this is a bit unfair as it is not directly relevant to the topic, but I really think it should be covered. They say that boys do much worse in school than girls, but it never says that regardless of that, they will still get higher pay and higher-ranking jobs as women. It never mentions that most departments are run by men.

4. General flaws masked as specifically male-targeting

What this video does raise are some good critics on the overall education system. Children are not given enough free time, enough moving space, there isn’t enough diversity or choice within the system, etc. however, they present them as specifically anti-male, even though they have largely remained unchanged for centuries. Teaching and focusing on fictional literature and poetry is not a new thing. People studied it for centuries and there was just no one to call it out on it. There was no one in the 19^th century going: “I don’t think poetry is suitable for men and thus we should write about swordfights!” I’m not saying we shouldn’t include more action-oriented literature in our school program, but it’s not a recent thing designed to make life harder for boys.

 

Lastly, I would like to offer my modest, unprofessional opinion on why the current school system is becoming ‘anti-boys’. You see, the motto of the school system is for the most part ‘obey’.  Even after all the reforms, it’s still designed for younger, less educated individuals to obey the authority-figure of the teacher. This is basically the environment for the old female archetype- obey the author of your husband, parents, social construct… While it was typical for men to be thought to BE the authority. Meaning there is a natural clash. In the past, the upbringing and education system was stricter, able to break the authoritarian needs. Now, the screws are loosened for the sake of a friendlier environment, but this allowing the children to also misbehave. What would also be an interesting study is to survey if children misbehave more if taught by a male or a female teacher, or if gender matters at all.

This, as I said, is completely a wild guess and probably just as based on old stereotypes as the before mentioned video, but it hopefully gives some food for thoughts and maybe opens a discussion.