I never thought I'd be one to sing the praises of Young Goodman Brown, The Canterbury Tales, Billy Budd, or
any of the classics forced upon me as a freshman in high school. (In my
defense, I was 14, and if you asked me then who I considered to be a
literary genius, my answer would have been Neil Peart.) With age comes
appreciation, and while my tastes still gravitate towards writers who
didn't wear powdered wigs or who worked by the light of an oil lamp,
I'd argue that the classics still help us to understand the world
today. But is classic literature being phased out of the classroom?
Janine Wood thinks so. In this article, she details her challenges in finding a copy of Great Expectations for
her 12-year-old son, a quest that turns interesting as she finds that
very people she encounters have read the book, and even fewer are
remotely interested in it. (Before you ask - no, I haven't either. I
was going to, right after finishing the Tom Clancy book I'm working
on.)
One father she talks to asserts that "teachers don't read Dickens, so they don't assign him." Indeed, her son's assigned reading list is missing a number of writers that should be standard issue - no Mark Twain? Really? Undaunted, Wood offers up tips on getting your kids to read great literature; she suggests reading the works along with your kid, and forming book groups to help them navigate their way through all the "prithee"s and "anon"s.
Like I said, when I was a kid, the classics weren't my bag. But there were a few I liked - I might have been the only 8th grader who read Moby Dick by choice, even if it was after I heard that Melville provided inspiration for The Wrath of Khan. The piece got me thinking that I need to put some Golden Oldies into the rotation (I do feel obliged to clarify something - the Tom Clancy line? Sarcasm. With a capital "arcasm".); I've been reading a ton of nonfiction lately, mostly about the Middle East. Maybe I'll revisit Shakespeare; after all, his Henry IV had some pretty interesting advice about a ruler's need to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels."
