Why Teach English?

Even though I'm now getting out of the teaching profession for not-so-idealistic reasons (I hate grading papers, and I like being able to call in sick without huge repercussions), I really do believe teaching literature to high school students has value. Now, here I'm writing specifically about teaching literature. Few people doubt the need for schools to teach students how to read sentences or write grammatically. A lot of people, including many students, do wonder occasionally just what about reading literature makes you think critically.

Now, I've read a bunch of bullshit books about the reading of literature that hail the study of literature as the appreciation of greatness. Some of my former English colleagues reinforce this notion as well--that the value of literature study lies not so much in the study of the material as in the material itself. One of my department heads once rejected my request to teach Lady Chatterly's Lover not on the grounds (as I feared would be the case) that it is too sexually explicit but on the grounds that it "just isn't that great a book."

I find this line of reasoning, though prevalent, a bit disturbing. What are we teaching these students to do, after all? I didn't ever want my students to simply read, in awe, and absorb a "great work of literature." How does the mere reading of great literature cause one to think critically? And, then, if it does, about what does that reading teach you to think critically? There are several problems with this approach.

First of all, I'd like to make a distinction originally made by Sau-Ling Wong between what she calls literary interest versus what most people call literary merit. If we select books based solely on their literary merit, we encounter first the problem of what constitutes "good" literature. My department head thought D.H. Lawrence not "good enough" to teach, but Lawrence's Lady Chatterly is a classic, and many would disagree with my department head. The second problem stems from the first: why teach only "good" literature? One could make the case that it is for exposure's sake that we teach only "good" literature, to follow E.D. Hirsch's model of "cultural literacy." While this is a worthy goal, it's not a terribly lofty one. Instead of teaching students, we could simply give them a reading list: "Please familiarize yourself with all of the canonical books on this list. Familiarity with these works will help you understand references to them later in life."

I've found that teaching books that teachers and students understand must have literary merit has at least three damaging effects:

1. It does not foster in students any practical critical thinking skills, as they believe, since they study and analyze only "good" literature, that only "good" literature is worth analyzing--this is an implicit message we teachers send to students. Thus, when critical thinking is most important (when students are going about their everyday media consumption--advertisements, movies, tv shows, popular fiction, comic books, etc.), students will be less likely to think critically, to question those works that they deem to have less or no literary merit.

2. It forces teachers to exclude works from their curriculum that may have what Wong calls literary interest, works that may bring about the best dialogues, the best analysis, the best discussion, simply because those works are not "great works of literature" (whatever that phrase means).

3. What usually makes a work of literature "great," apart from simply (by circular logic) being revered for so long, is that it maintains an illusion. Literature is really magic. That's why writing fiction is a difficult art. That's why fiction-writing teachers always have to hammer into their students the mantra "show--don't tell." Telling is the most efficient way to get across information to a reader (it is what I am doing right now). Showing is the most powerful way to get across ideas to a reader--it forces the reader to experience rather than hear about an experience. "Good" literature creates an elaborate illusion, an anti-Brechtian "Method" kind of reading experience. I've found that teaching truly great literature often numbs students' thinking. They get sucked into believing that what the author has presented as truth is truth--not the author's own truth or worldview but real, universal, undeniable truth.

A truly well-equipped student of literature will be able to think critically about, analyze, and question not only William Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, David Henry Hwang, Edith Wharton, and Jane Austen, but also Agatha Christie, Helen Fielding, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, Alan Moore, and Stephen King. I'm not implying that the latter set of authors is inferior in quality to the former set. Some authors are considered more "popular" and less "literary," though, and therefore do not "merit" much scholarship. All the better for Christie, Fielding, Clancy, Steele, Moore, King, et al. They won't have to worry about anyone seeing through their illusions, questioning their assumptions, or thinking critically about the values they put forth. --A.Y. Siu