In the 2008 comedy Smart People, Dennis Quaid plays Lawrence Wetherhold, a down-on-his-luck English professor struggling to find an academic publisher for his latest academic monograph. After Lawrence's precocious daughter sardonically suggests a new title for the work of literary criticism--You Can't Read!--it draws interest from the nonacademic branch of Penguin Group, is reworked by the editors, and becomes poised for commercial success (to Lawrence's dismay).
We have in this scenario a brilliant take on what the public thinks of and wants from an English professor. In his worst moments, Lawrence is uninterested in his students, and looks down upon them. He feels a deep and withering sense of frustration over how his students perform and where their interests seem to lie. He is awkward and tweedy and aloof. His Stanford-bound daughter's suggestion that he call the new monograph You Can't Read! is a perfect jab delivered by an intelligent and successful young student, as it reflects at once the widely held belief that English professors are snobs who lay unconvincing claim to a mystical power to "read," or to magically unlock all the "hidden meanings" and "symbolism" within the text, and the mockery with which this apparent superpower is generally acknowledged. Millions of children who grew up struggling to understand why their English teacher's favored interpretation of Animal Farm was more legitimate than their own have grown into adults who, having been able to graduate from college and hold down a job and figure out a mortgage, remain unconvinced that their high school English essays were or even could be assessed based on much more than whim or subjective, personal preference. Thus, when Quaid, seasoned player of academic characters, portrays Lawrence as a professor whose contempt for his unlettered students is pithily expressed by the barb "You Can't Read," the comedy works because we love watching the elitist English professor get taken down a peg, his hermeneutic powers exposed for what they are: not a sound academic treatise, but a popular book that belongs on the shelf next to Bill O'Reilly and Anne Coulter titles, inflammatory and empty.
The reality, however, is that analytical reading is a skill like any other, requiring, like the mastery of other skills, significant time, effort, practice, and, indeed, talent (I put "analytical" before it because here I'm not talking about merely the ability to understand, for example, that the letters c-a-t form a word that represents a four-legged carnivorous mammal that goes "meow"). And though analytical reading is to an extent a transferable skill, it's no more a feat of wizardry that your English professor is probably better than you at reading literature analytically than it is an act of Zeus that your doctor knows more than you about anatomy. People who teach literature will or at least should have spent years learning it, along with its influences, surrounding social and economic history, language history, literary and narrative theory, and so on, just as your doctor will or at least should have spent years learning biology and chemistry, anatomy, epidemiology, and so on.
Understandably, reading is something we tend to take for granted. You Can't Read! also works wonderfully as a joke title for an English professor's book because of the sheer audacity it would take to sell the public a book called You Can't Read!. Because reading is something most of us begin learning as toddlers, we endow it with a kind of false simplicity, as though the ability to read the back of your cereal box is a sound prerequisite for a literature class. Pragmatically, we figure that so long as we possess the linguistic building blocks, we should introduce children and young adults to literature in academic settings as soon as possible. After all, for reasons few people will bother to articulate, much less articulate convincingly, literature is important, right? Could you imagine what the concerned parents of America would say if we told them little Mikayla or little Trenton wouldn't have the option of taking a literature course this spring at the Cromwell Academy or Lake Oswego High? The same parents who wouldn't dare allow their Mikayla or Trenton to major in English in college, for fear of dismal job prospects, would march straight down the superintendent's throat if we put the kabbash on middle and high school English.
Nevertheless, we should ask the legitimate question sooner than later: should we be teaching literature as early on as we do?
The rest of this essay argues that not only should we seriously consider putting off the teaching of literature in schools before college, but that the teaching of literature prematurely often amounts to a kind of cruelty. That's right. Teaching literature prematurely can be an act of cruelty.
Before you think me hyperbolic, take a few minutes of your day to talk to someone you know about their experience learning literature in school. Asking people about how they learned literature is something of a hobby of mine. For some people, who usually tend to be verbally and rhetorically gifted, or particularly inclined by nature or by socialization toward the literary, English class was a refuge from an otherwise dry and mechanical middle or high school curriculum. For others, their English teacher happened to be that one special, gifted teacher who captivated students and changed their lives for the better. For most, however, the experience of English class falls somewhere on the spectrum of neutral ("I didn't really learn anything") to terrible ("The better the bullshit, the better the grade"). Ask someone what they actually learned in English class, and you won't hear much of substance. Either "English" was construed as English language, and they spent all day diagramming sentences (less likely among younger students, I find), or they learned how to write a five-paragraph essay with a thesis, three "supporting points," and a conclusion about a work of fiction. From this experience students come away with an insufficient and sometimes outright debilitating writing technique, and a frustrating sense of bewilderment about how one perspective on a given piece of literature is any more or less compelling than another. Because the five-paragraph essay emphasizes taking an argumentative stand, then "supporting" one's argument with "evidence," taking "evidence" as loosely as possible to mean any fragment of shit the student can dig up in support of his or her opinion, students rarely learn to read carefully, to identify basic narrative cues, to investigate what other critics have already said about a piece of literature, and why, and to broaden their knowledge of the wider context of the literature they're writing about. In other words, students are given literature and made to critically engage with it, but without any of the basic tools that virtually all literary scholars agree are necessary and fundamental to the practice of engaging critically with a literary text. In fact, students are expressly encouraged to use analytical "methods" that are directly at odds with those of basic, introductory-level literary criticism: rather than making arguments that come from evidence, students are taught to find evidence for their "arguments," "argument" being in this case a more serious-sounding word for "opinion." Rather than investigating the world beyond the piece of literature they're tasked to write about, students are forced to rely on their own largely uninformed and undeveloped sense of literary analysis, usually discouraged from seeking out guidance from the ideas of more experienced and accomplished others. Originality of thought and ideas is considered paramount; in context, a ridiculous notion considering the fact that when we look back on our high-school English essays we discover that, unsurprisingly, we weren't quite as "original" as we thought we were when we were teenagers. Originality in ignorance is hardly something to cultivate or aspire to.
Yes, this method of teaching literature to school-age children guarantees that at best they will come away from middle or high school English class having learned next to nothing about literature or literary criticism, along with a few bad reading, writing, and analytical habits that will cripple their ability to do even basic literary criticism at the college level, where more bad teaching awaits them anyway. But, as I said, this method of teaching literature also has the capacity to inflict real and serious cruelty upon young people. By depriving students of the basic tools and methods that legitimize literary criticism, and help to differentiate an innovative and plausible reading from a bullshit reading; and by emphasizing the value of their opinions couched as "arguments" and "supported" with cherry-picked quotes and the implication of "symbolism," we set students up for a hard fall. Because at the end of the day, we also assess their essays and in-class comments, either with the same kind of arbitrary, bullshit criteria by which we teach them to build and assess their own readings of literary texts, or by pulling the rug straight out from under them, applying as teachers a more sophisticated but undisclosed and unexplained means of determining whose readings of the text are good and whose are bad. Here is where the cruelty comes in: we build the children up by teaching them the false validity of their own opinions or "original arguments," then we tear them down with an evaluative process that is opaque by definition, too sophisticated to explain to young students who haven't been provided with the tools to understand it. What's worse, the more astute students will indeed see that the Emperor has no clothes. Those students will then have to reckon with painful questions like, knowing that they are being arbitrarily and at times hypocritically evaluated, does the teacher like the students with better grades more than me? Has the teacher taught me a lie? Does the teacher, and some of the other members of my class, have a special, mystical talent for understanding literature that I do not possess? And so on...
From talking to many and reflecting on my own experiences learning literature in school, this type of confusion and, for some of us, sense of betrayal, seems widely experienced. As much is confirmed by the fact that the wider, even educated public, even in adulthood, understands very little about the process of literary criticism, or the value of what skilled, practiced literature teachers and professors actually do. The mismatch between what the practice of literary criticism is and what it is popularly perceived to be can only come, as such information mismatches generally do, from under- or mis-education. We mis-educate every generation of children to believe first that reading is as simple as c-a-t, then that analyzing literature is little more than creatively bolstering your personal opinion, then that the value difference between one "opinion" on literature versus another is nothing more than a function of arbitrary power, the authority to grade it so, whether by an English teacher or professor like Lawrence Wetherhold, or a stuffy New Yorker fiction editor. We take something as powerful as literature, which, for reasons heretofore barely articulated or acknowledged, we all seem to agree is oh so culturally important, and we gut it of its cultural significance by assuring that virtually everyone's experience with it in the classroom is unpleasant and misleading. We confine literature to the realms of personal pleasure or personal distraction, as if its sole value lies in its ability to make us feel good, or to help pass the time of a subway work commute.
For these reasons I would argue that we underestimate the value of both literature and literary criticism. In the process, we sabotage the literary education of our children, sometimes doing them significant intellectual and emotional harm; and we (humanities educators) harm ourselves and our broader cultural relevance. I recommend, therefore, that we consider putting off the formal teaching of literature until post-secondary (college) education, reserving middle and high school English classes for the exclusive teaching of English grammar and writing, sticking with mechanics and using literary texts, along with nonfiction texts from history, science, etc. only as examples. Essays in these classes should be focused not on analysis, but on basic summarization, something that sounds dry and basic, though again even some college students are finding it difficult. Should students develop an interest in studying English in-depth and moving into literary criticism, or the analysis of literature, this is something they will be better prepared to undertake as part of a higher (college) education, where professors will also be better equipped to teach them literary criticism and research methods.
An important caveat before closing: despite that I would eliminate for the most part the teaching of literature from middle and high school curricula (saving perhaps advanced placement literature options), I am in no way suggesting that literature should not be part of the lives of children and young people. On the contrary, children should be encouraged by both parents and teachers to read, and read avidly. There is an important difference between introducing literature to children for the sake of reading it, enjoying it, and learning from it, and introducing literature in the classroom as an object of analysis. While I do believe the latter would be premature for students in middle and high school, the former--enjoyment and engagement with literature--should be as widespread a practice as possible. And I am willing to wager my own career that if children are able to enjoy literature outside of the classroom between learning to read and enrolling in college, plenty will be interested in the English major.
