4 ms·

Students hated 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Their teachers tried to dump it

haspoken 3y ago
https://archive.ph/nCEPl https://archive.ph/nCEPl
sneed_chucker 3y ago
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.
- ksaj 3y ago
  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.
- hindsightbias 3y ago
  Romeo & Juliet is unfilmable in context today. Little did The Moral Majority know that it would take liberal progressives to implement their agenda.
- prepend 3y ago
  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.
wrp 3y ago
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.
- Cpoll 3y ago
  > Steinbeck 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.
- almatabata 3y ago
  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: * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
  - cafard 3y ago
    It is part of the definition of any novel that it is fiction. LoF's understanding of anthropology has been shown up as flawed, that is quite true.
  - WilNeuton 3y ago
    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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

https://archive.ph/nCEPl https://archive.ph/nCEPl

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.

ksaj 3y ago
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.
hindsightbias 3y ago
Romeo & Juliet is unfilmable in context today. Little did The Moral Majority know that it would take liberal progressives to implement their agenda.
prepend 3y ago
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.

wrp 3y ago

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.

Cpoll 3y ago
> Steinbeck 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.
almatabata 3y ago
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: * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
- cafard 3y ago
  It is part of the definition of any novel that it is fiction. LoF's understanding of anthropology has been shown up as flawed, that is quite true.
- WilNeuton 3y ago
  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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]