In Defense of Ibsen
On the list of education problems facing the country, whether or not high school English curricula at tony private schools are adequately fine-tuned to interest teens in reading literary classics is pretty far down the list. Still, I suppose it’s a subject that may well be of interest to Washington Post readers many of whom perhaps send their children to fancy private schools. But while it’s fine for publications with upscale audiences to cover issues of concern to those audiences, it’s a bit problematic for them to conflate those issues with questions of broader national concern. Thus, Nancy Schnog probably shouldn’t have started out with this factoid:
It’s the time of year when I’m reminded of my twisted fate as a high-school English teacher. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, more teens and young adults are dropping literary reading than any other age group in America. “The percentage of 17-year olds,” it reports, “who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled” in the past 20 years. I teach juniors and seniors — yes, 17-year-olds.
Realistically, if you want to look at aggregate statistics, Schnog’s students at the McLean School in Potomac, MD have very little to do with this issue. Rather, we need to worry about the large number of students, primarily from low-income families, who are dropping out of high school or graduating without acquiring basic literacy skills.
With those provisos, though, the suggestion that teachers should think a bit harder about exactly which books are likely to be interesting to teenagers makes sense to me. But of course tastes differ. She seems to suggest at one point that Henrik Ibsen’s plays are the sort of thing that shouldn’t be on the curriculum. And yet I definitely remember Ibsen — specifically The Doll House and The Master Builder — as some of my very favorite things I read in high school.
64 Responses to “In Defense of Ibsen”
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August 24th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
It seems to me that you’ve missed the central issue here, that being the fact that apparently there’s a person out there called Nancy Schnog.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I never quite know what to do with “nobody reads anymore” stories like this (which come out at least once a year). To me reading literature for pleasure has always been an eccentric thing, and doing so has always put me into a niche. It depresses me that more people don’t read and I genuinely believe that theres many people out there who would have their lives enriched by reading if they’d just put a little work in. But you can’t force these things, and you shouldn’t try to, and ultimately reading literature is always going to be a minority discipline.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
It seems to me that you’ve missed the central issue here, that being the fact that apparently there’s a person out there called Nancy Schnog.
On reading the post, my immediate impulse (and I daresay I speak for many other readers) was to post a comment similar to the one above.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Why so much focus on literature? I took AP classes through High School and my experience was that I used more useful reading and writing experience in history classes than in English classes. This is because English classes made us read stuff like The Scarlet Letter while history classes assigned us research papers on Alexander The Great, or Nathan Bedford Forest, or maces. Some people will enjoy literature and others won’t, but for most people basic research skills are necessary.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
How about the fact that we’ve got millions of kids who grow up with no computer skills or internet access?
Totally agree, Matt. Let’s worry about the high brow issues after we have the basics hammered down.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
The way literature was taught when I was in school — and I’m willing to bet it has not improved — was not likely to foster a mindset that equated “reading” with “pleasure.” It was more like aversion therapy. How much would you enjoy any art form if you had to write an essay on it afterwards, or go rooting around for symbolism that may or may not have been in the mind of the creator? (”Who can tell me what the bat in ‘Tropic Thunder’ represents? Anyone?”) It’s amazing how enjoyable Shakespeare is if you can just, y’know, watch it — which is pretty much what he intended to begin with. Hell, you don’t even miss the footnotes.
And don’t get me started on Thomas Wolfe…
Most of our “classics” began life as popular entertainment. That suggests that first and foremost they should entertain. Plug ‘em into a curriculum, and you instantly suck that vitality out of them. (No surprise — the same thing happens with history. It really is an achievement to make the American Revolution as dull as it is in the textbooks.)
Obviously, that does not address the issue of teaching literature. But if you’re going to bemoan the decline of reading for pleasure, don’t do it in the context of the thing that removes the pleasure from reading. Maybe there’s a larger issue here — that our kids are not taught to evaluate or process information in any meaningful way. I’d go so far as to say our schools are no longer about teaching at all. Thanks to the committees and the pressure groups, they’re about either indoctrination, or simply not offending too many people. Neither of those goals is consistent with the exercising of critical faculties.
For what it’s worth, in my twenties I revisited some of the required reading from high school English: Homer, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy — even Dickens. I enjoy the first three. Dickens still bores me. And as God is my witness, I will never read Thomas Wolfe again.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Freddie is right I like literature a good deal more than the average fellow, but it definitely wasn’t a taste I picked up in a classroom.
I think most people who came of age in a public school forget how terrible they are, even in an affluent suburban area like where mine was (Bowling For Columbine, as a rare exception, touched on this). Most people chalk up the awfulness to their own age and what they were going through at the time, which is surely a large part of it. But the soul-killing, quasi-industrial environment is a big part of it, too. Secondary schools exist mainly to warehouse and indoctrinate adolescents, and from that perspective it’s pretty insane to hope that they will fertilize those young minds with a love of truth and beauty.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
The educational establishment in urban centers are way ahead of you, Matt. If you teach in a big city, all the talk is about literacy and numeracy and graduation rates. There is almost no consideration given to kids who might actually walk through the doors with established skills and/or interests. Every resource and initiative is dedicated to pulling people up to incredibly low standards that are lowered and manipulated to suit bottom-line people who need to talk about increasing graduation rate, and the number of kids who can read and compute at grade level. The idea that someone might pull up from this effort and wonder what’s happening to everyone else is refreshing. If someone doesn’t do that, you will see a massive withdrawal from the public schools–even worse than what has already happened. This will not be good for the country.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
While Schnog spends time wondering how we can find more books that “appeal to teenagers,” one of the good things about high school literature classes was that they taught us to think like adults.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Roddy,
Your post hit home. I was forced to read Hardy’s Return of the Native in HS, and it almost turned me off reading forever. Are you telling me that this book might be good as an adult? I can’t fathom it.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I second the defence of Ibsen. The Doll’s House was one of the most memorable plays of my high school studies, and the contrived
alternate ending is a history lesson in itself.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
The problem here is that interesting books have sex in them. The fact that in high school we read great authors, and always read their most boring books, is not an accident. A Tale of Two Cities is boring as hell for high school students, but it meets the PG criteria teachers feel comfortable with.
I’m not saying they should hand out Nora Roberts to high school freshman, but a lot of great literature has sex in it (part of what makes it great) and highschool students are better prepared than just about anyone to appreciate that. Why hide it?
I say, intersperse modern classics with classic classics. ‘White Noise’ would be a great book to teach in high school, and absolutely not just for high-performing students. It’s engaging, clever, doesn’t shy away from real life issues (sex included) and classroom discussions practically write themselves.
August 24th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Ibsen can look pretty dry at the outset, but he was burrowing into many fascinating social issues. I admit he’d be tough to teach. A problem is teachers who don’t have passion for their material, but that’s a general thing.
August 24th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
taskerbliss, there is definitely a chance you might find Hardy more readable now.
In my English class it was The Mayor of Casterbridge that we had to read. Something about it survived the process of being taught so that I was motivated to reread it later. And after I did, I picked up the other Hardy books that were readily available. The only one I didn’t care for was Jude the Obscure.
When friends would ask why I was reading Thomas Hardy, I would tell them, “Because in his books people are miserable for 400 pages, then they die. That’s entertainment!”
So my suggestion would be, take Mayor of Casterbridge out of the library. And if you’re not engrossed fifty pages or so in, move on. But then I’d suggest the same thing if we were talking about John Le Carre or Robert B. Parker. Life is too short to read a book you don’t enjoy.
August 24th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Roddy: I’ll give it a shot just for the sake of forensic analysis, but that book really made me gag in HS. I do like Hardy’s poetry, though.
By the way, I always liked Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler more than The Doll House. Call me crazy.
August 24th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
This is a tough one. Literature classes can be great or terrible. Do people really need a classic education in literature? What’s the inherent value? Hard to decide.
I’m trying to get to the core. The purpose of literature, of art in general, is to communicate with great minds, to see the world from a different angle, through extraordinarily perceptive eyes. You deepen yourself through the aha! experience of seeing something new and wonderful.
Literature is great for this, but you can’t force it. My great experiences were scattered and hard to predict. The standout was Moby Dick in college.
I suppose there is also benefit to developing shared culture. Having all suffered through high school, we can chat about semi-familiar authors and compare impressions. There’s also the snootiness factor. Reading great, perceptive writers from an era is probably a better way to experience different times and places than reading history.
August 24th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
cube–
“Reading great, perceptive writers from an era is probably a better way to experience different times and places than reading history”
That type of reading is part of studying history, not a separate discipline. Also, you are spot on in noting that reading is a way to perceive the world through different angles. Apart from the personal fulfillment it provides, reading is a window into the lives of different people and places. Well said.
August 24th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Taskerbliss,
“A Tale of Two Cities” is largely about a man’s romantic jealousy/envy and how it gets sublimated into self-sacrifice. It also has a rape scene that is pretty critical to the plot, if I recall correctly. It’s hardly a sexless book.
I didn’t read it till college (for fun) and it was one of my all-time favorites. What a sad degradation of human nature it is when people think that a book has to have enough T&A before it is worth reading. I suppose you’d prefer to throw out Dante’s Purgatorio and replace it with trash like ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’, ‘Lolita’, and ‘The Story of O’. Build your sexual dystopia without me, please.
August 24th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
FYI: Since “Goth” had yet to be invented, Thomas Hardy was the ideal tremendously engaging to my angst-throttled 17-year-old self. I Cliffs Notes-ed my way through the discussion of every single book assigned in AP 11 English, except for The Mayor of Casterbridge– which I found so compelling that I read it in a single sitting.
(I hope the teacher, Mrs. Blunt, does not read this blog. Water under the bridge, baby.)
August 24th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I’m firmly of the opinion that we need federal legislation to remove Wuthering Heights from high school reading lists.
August 24th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
When I was in high school a teacher of mine was shocked to the point of disbelief when I said I didn’t read so much. She was sure, based upon my knowledge and ability that I did read. The point is, you can learn a lot of things without reading literature. Not that one should not read literature, just that it is not a necessary thing to survive. One can learn these things other ways but ‘learned’ people don’t believe it.
August 24th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Ibsen (if I remember the literary anecdote correctly) was obsessed by his homeliness. People would see him sit in the park motionless and head down for long stretches of time and think he was deeply involved in literary concerns. Instead, he was looking at his face in a mirror he propped on his lap. Kids today, obsessed about their own appearance, are just cutting out the middleman.
August 24th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
“A Tale of Two Cities is boring as hell for high school students, but it meets the PG criteria teachers feel comfortable with.”
A Tale of Two Cities is a thrilling novel, very relevant to our time. I read it with my teenage son, who was mesmerized by it. It has a great deal to teach us, for example, about the effects of torture and imprisonment on innocent men accused of treason; about political hysteria aroused by false rumors; about what happens when an extremist political ideology, unmoored from reality, takes the reins of power.
And the central motivating factor in Sidney Carton’s story is that he has syphilis, incurable and invariably fatal, caught from frequenting prostitutes. This is why he cannot propose to Lucy, and why he is willing to die in place of Charles Darnay so that Darnay can marry Lucy and make her happy.
Your English teacher didn’t understand this and so she didn’t teach it to you.
Dickens wrote constantly about sex and its consequences, particularly on how the double standard imperiled the lives of poor women – in Oliver Twist, for example, Nancy the prostitute is murdered by her sometime boyfriend, Bill Sykes, and in David Copperfield the adventurer Steerforth seduces and ruins ‘Little Em’ly’ – he just wrote about it obliquely, so that if you don’t know it’s there, you miss it.
August 24th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Bloix,
Sydney Carton had syphilis?? I didn’t ever pick up on that. I thought he didn’t propose to Lucy because he was an alcoholic and didn’t want to embroil her in his addiction.
Interesting….I certainly agree with you that ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ is a fascinating book.
August 24th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
With people like Roddy, who needs the standards movement to ruin public education? On the one hand, he’s bothered that students might have to put their thoughts on paper and assess the ideas in a work of literature because thinking and writing about symbolism and such destroys the pleasureable aspect of reading. He then reaches the conclusion two paragraphs later that today’s schools are all about indoctrination and political correctness, attitudes which are inconsistent with the use of critical faculties – as if there is some magical education program out there that doesn’t possess a political bias. But then perhaps he missed the multiculturalist and expanding the literary canon debates that have been going on for the past thirty years. It’s nice to know he occasionally revisits great works of art and understands what Shakespeare intended. I assign The Moviegoer and Persuasion over the summer for my Senior Honors students, though it would be hard to evaluate whether they’ve fully understood the relationship of tradition and authority in the growth of personal identity unless they put it all on paper. But then assigning such work always diminishes the pleasure of reading. And if you can read Bleak House and still think Dickens is a bore, you are the bore.
August 24th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Bloix:
That’s a really good comment. I’m not sure why you’re disagreeing with me. I know that Dickens wrote about sex (though not the syphillis thing, that’s pretty interesting) but my point that the novels selected (and as you point out, even the way they are taught) are designed to minimize it over and above other considerations like… which ones are actually more enjoyable. Not that you can’t have good literature without sex/love/romance, nor that all good literature should have it, but by intentionally minimizing it, they can lose a lot.
My English teacher sophomore year of highschool was, indeed, an idiot, which likely contributed to my disliking the book at the time. But I don’t really think this point applies only to Dickens. It’s sort of like Huckleberry Finn being replaced with Tom Sawyer because it’s less “controversial”. It is less controversial. It’s just also more boring.
Hector: Yikes. I’ll be sure to keep you off my “Sexual Dystopia: Grand Opening” invitation.
August 24th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Some of the first literature that really excited me in high school were plays, and some of the first plays were in fact Ibsen’s. One reason is that plays are shorter reads than novels, so I’d get the experience and the point faster, move onto another play by the same author, and call the obsession or expertise or passing fancy mine. Another is that Ibsen’s poles of realism (with feminist overtones) and lyricism or experiment resonated easily with me and what I understood as a student, whereas a 19th c. novel’s conception of realism might or might not have felt stodgy or dense, and a formalist’s idea of experiment a little hard. Another is that I could imagine a performance aspect, with me reading as thus a voice. From there I could get up an interest in seeing performances. I bet these appeals could be used in teaching others now and then.
August 24th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Matthew, I’m shocked that no one has brought this to your attention previously, but your educational career (Dalton School, Harvard College) is pretty far removed from the median high school experience in this country. So, what you liked, is extraordinarily irrelevant as a measure of what typical high school students might like.
August 24th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Jeer9,
Wow! You sure pegged me!
Are you watching my house???
August 24th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Steve L hit it pretty well. As with so many issues in education, this one has an obvious solution that is probably the only way to fix things, but also seems completely unfeasable politically/culturally.
The obvious solution in this case is to firmly establish an association between reading fiction and pleasure before you worry about “great books”–and then not to make the transition from pleasure reading to “serious” reading too abrupt or painful.
This could easily done by starting with a selection of contemporary literature that happens to have a decent plot–think almost anything by Paul Auster–and/or to be really funny–say, White Teeth. The trouble is that people are too ready to fight about what qualifies as “literature,” not to mention about what qualifies as “appropriate” (almost all of the relevant books are rather direct about sex, for example).
Meanwhile, class discussion should really focus on developing the necessary tools to get stories, on a big-picture level. They should absolutely stay away from anything resembling a University-style lit class–that stuff, if you think it has any value (I don’t), can be taught after students learn how to find visceral, entertaining drama in literature, which is really the main thing writers go for in the first place.
August 24th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Hmm…we read a lot of books in high school that had sex pretty up front in them – Madame Bovary, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Death in Venice, and As I Lay Dying seem particularly notable in that respect. I’m not sure how commonly any of those are read in high school, though. Hardy has a fair bit of sex, too, doesn’t he?
A Tale of Two Cities certainly has less sex going on than David Copperfield or Bleak House, but Bleak House, at least, is too long for high school reading. I’ve not read Great Expectations.
I think a big problem with high school English curricula is not so much the reading lists, which are usually decent enough, but the way the books are studied. I have always loved literature, and I greatly enjoyed most of the English classes I took in college (I was an English major), but high school English was always fairly hit and miss with me. I think part of the problem is the “having class every day, reading the book gradually over the course of a month or so” structure of high school. In college, you read a large portion of the book before each class, so you have a fair amount of new stuff to talk about each time. You also tend to have teachers who are smarter, which always helps.
Our high school English was actually pretty good – we did a lot of close textual analysis, which was very useful for the future – but the pace is just so slow that you’re sure to be sick to death of whatever you’re reading by the time you’re done with it. That’s the real problem, and it’s hard to devise an answer.
August 24th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Good point. In my prep school, we could read things that were rather frank about sex in English and Spanish class, while at the local high school the curriculum was much more constrained (and this is in liberal Massachusetts). We could also read Camille Paglia. This is largely because we didn’t have a conservative PTA demanding that everything we read be “appropriate.” At the same time local public high schools were firing teachers for smoking pot, I was taking a class with one of the most popular and effective teachers at school who years earlier had been caught smoking pot by students.
It probably also doesn’t help that so much of the literature taught in schools, especially public schools, is Victorian literature. If there is a single era in Western literature that is even more mind-numbing, I haven’t encountered it. How much do we really need to know about class Victorian England anyway? It’s not the be-all and end-all of human existence.
August 24th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
I had an English teacher in high school who implemented and taught a class where all the student had to do was read pretty much any adult-oriented book of fiction for the class period. She gathered together a small library of random paperbacks in her classroom, from which the students could choose; or the students could bring something to class and she’d usually approve it. The grading was based upon how many class periods were missed and nothing else. No other work was required.
People like me shouldn’t have been allowed to take the class, but there was no way to stop us. I stopped paying attention to any of my classes by fifth grade and read adult paperbacks, instead. So it was an “A” for doing what I did, anyway. (Okay, I lied. I didn’t get an “A” because I was skipping school a lot that year.)
On the other hand, my best friend took the class with me and prior to it he had read perhaps four real books in his entire life up to that point. During the class he read about six or eight.
The teacher’s rationale, obviously, was just to get kids to read. Most of the students who were like my friend, including him, found they really enjoyed the books they read. I don’t know if the reading stuck—I’m not sure it did with my friend. But I’m sure it did with some that otherwise wouldn’t have read another book in their lives.
She didn’t worry much about the content of the books she’d included in her little library. You have to understand, this was Eastern New Mexico, which is basically Texas and is very much the Bible Belt. Prom was controversial every year because of the dancing, for example. But she had some books with some pretty questionable content, like The Exorcist, for example. I asked her one afternoon if she thought many of the parents would approve of some of the books she was letting their kids read. She replied, “Let’s not let them know about them, what do you say?”
Reading Matt’s post, I thought it was odd how he focused on reading classics when the statistic was about any pleasure reading whatsoever. It seems to me that frequent reading of any sort of (non-picture) book, fiction or non-fiction, is essential to achieving a high state of literacy and usage of written language.
Personally, I think that fiction is considerably more important than non-fiction, an assertion I expect to be strongly denied by the crowd here. Partly it’s because fiction all about adopting subjective points of view that aren’t native to oneself. That is a tremendously useful exercise for developing a depth of comprehension of the human experience, as well as learning to synthesize disparate concepts and points-of-view.
Most readers who strongly prefer non-fiction to fiction are biased to the point of bigotry on the matter. The argument invariably is one of utility. It appeals to those who have a limited comprehension of intellectual utility and therefore the straightforward practical nature of non-fiction seems to them to be superior. However, I am continually astonished at how low the competency is of non-fiction readers on subjects about which they’ve supposedly read. I’ve come to realize that I have extraordinary retention. But that doesn’t quite satisfy me. I quite strongly suspect that most readers of non-fiction actually recall very few of the facts they’ve read. Not a moderate minority, but something close to none.
What I think is happening is that they are enjoying the experience of seeming to be learning something. Like watching a nature channel. A month later, most people will say only that they watched an interesting show on dolphins but not be able to relate more than one or two, if any, information contained in the program. Same with all these non-fiction books. It’s information as a form of entertainment, not education. And if it’s about entertainment, the problem is that if people aren’t actually retaining anything, then it’s entertainment with less utility than entertainment that is actually art, even bad art. Worse, it deludes people into believing that they know things about the world that they don’t and that they are more intellectually competent than they are.
Finally, as someone educated in the so-called “Great Books”, including works of mathematics, natural science, philosophy, theology, and literature; I’m of the strong opinion that, as intellectual activity of the first order, literature is the equal of the others. I have a very hard time getting my head around the claim that, say, Goedel’s On Formally Undecidable Propositions is an important and useful intellectual work while Tolstoy’s War and Peace is “just” art with little serious intellectual utility. That’s appalling parochialism.
August 24th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Highschool english is the worst academic subject ever devised. It offers so little and takes so much.
August 24th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
When I was in high school, I was bored stiff by Shakespeare and poetry. One of my English teachers actually noticed I was psychotic and suggested that I read the Gothic poems and perhaps Ezra Pound. I got into “Manfred”, but Pound was useless.
Basically, “literacy” in terms of having read “the classics” is a complete waste of time. However, my parents did buy a library of classic books, such as Sherlock Holmes, Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, Last of the Mohicans, etc. – all of which I read at an early age – because they were adventures – not dramatic adult bullshit like Shakespeare. And I followed that up with comic books and sci-fi for years.
I’ve never bothered to read any of the “great authors” because I recognized that they did nothing but cover the same topics as every other author – they just did it in tendentious terms. They were “the Establishment” – and I learned early on that the Establishment was bullshit. You can get just as much education in human nature by reading sci-fi as you can by reading Shakespeare. Novels are novels. Having to waste time interpreting an ancient version of English is nothing to the purpose.
August 24th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
When I saw the article in the Post, I said Ha ha! They screwed up! It’s not the McLean School in Potomac, it’s the Potomac School in McLean! but evidently both entities exist.
Victorian novels are awesome, by the way.
August 24th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
On a nonliterary note, did Ibsen have the most awesome mutton chops of all time or what?
August 24th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
If that play about Nora and Torvald was one of your favorites, you should remember that it was A Doll’s House. The house where Nora lived like a doll with Torvald.
From the snippets about high-school English that I’ve picked up since my own high-school days, I gather that the reading list has improved, but that the assigned books are wasted on most pre-college readers, who are not ready for them yet. Or else the pleasure is killed by their being required. When we teenagers in the early 60’s read The Catcher in the Rye on our own, that was our book; when I learned from a man ten years younger than me that his HS teacher had made him read it, I was glad that HS English had broken out of the Silas Marner mold but I felt sorry for him.
When I was in high school, most of our required reading in English fell into two categories: Shakespeare, and literature chosen for its supposed safeness. A Tale of Two Cities made the list also because of its tie-in with our history studies. Now Dickens and George Eliot wrote for a mainstream Victorian audience, so anything they wrote about sex or illicit drugs they wrote between the lines so the less worldly would not catch wise.
But yes, there was something about those plays. The task of plowing through a novel, against a deadline, could be so frightening that my mind shut down, but oh, Julius Caesar. Romeo and Juliet. R.U.R. by Karel Capek. The second was expurgated, and the third had a passage from the Bible removed, but there was so much drama left for us to savor.
But Matt, why do you think that classic literature is taught only at tony private schools? Has secondary education fallen so far? Really?
August 25th, 2008 at 2:12 am
Mim, I was just about to nitpick that same point about A Doll’s House… Agree with the earlier poster who said that they found plays much more accessible since in theory you can read almost all of them in 2 hours. Rockaby or Play take like 15 minutes! I think they should be teaching Heiner Mueller in high school, then you could watch The Lives of Others after or something. Also, speaking of syphilis, Ibsen’s Ghosts uses it as a similarly veiled but crucial plot point. I guess for all its modernity the 19th century couldn’t handle explicit references to VD. Not like that episode of Friends where Joey is on the PSA billboard and all the girls he approaches think he’s diseased.
August 25th, 2008 at 4:43 am
“An Enemy of the People” should be required reading for any blogger who wants to comment on public policy.
Literature is important, so lets teach it once the schools and students get math, history, basic literacy, and science right. And even then, I’m not sure if most of the “great books” shouldn’t wait until some time past puberty, when students will appreciate them better. I remember that I got the most out of my fiction reading in my late teens and my twenties, and I know others have had the same experience, so there seems to be a specific age where its best to introduce this stuff.
Also, if we can get the basics right, there are some subjects not on the high school curriculum that should be, since they come in useful in making decisions in adult life. These include statistics, logic or even an introduction to philosophy, also how local government works. There is alot in the current curricula I’d sacrifice to introduce those topics. But to get back to Ibsen and and “Enemy of the People”, a good deal of literature can be integrated into courses on other subjects.
August 25th, 2008 at 5:21 am
I guess I don’t have too many complaints about what I had to read in high school. Some of it I liked and possibly wouldn’t have encountered if I hadn’t been assigned to read it (”A Death in the Family”, “Cyrano de Bergerac”), some of it I didn’t particularly like but was glad I read (”Hamlet”, “The Odyssey”), and some of it I just didn’t care for and still don’t.
I do think Victorian literature is overrepresented, and I have no idea why it is. I suppose it irks me because I don’t care for Jane Austen or George Eliot much, but my person feelings aside, nothing about the novels (the historical periods, the way they advanced literary conventions, their influence or relevance today) seemed to justify their prominent place in the curriculum.
I suppose Shakespeare might have been overrepresented, too (3 plays in 4 years, and I think 3 of the only 4 plays we read), but hey, it IS Shakespeare. (I definitely could have done without Merchant of Venice, and would have rather read Romeo & Juliet. Or Richard III. Or Henry IVs or V.)
August 25th, 2008 at 9:28 am
The play that Ibsen wrote as Et dukkehjem has been published as both A Doll’s House and A Doll House in English. Either is an acceptable translation.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:38 am
I remember the pleasant coincidence of being assigned “Native Son” for both my 11th grade English and American History classes. It was also a very good book. I think the history class had almost as much required reading of novels as my English class, and they connected more too – Huck Finn, All the King’s Men, Native Son, The Jungle, Freedom Road, Grapes of Wrath, Night.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:58 am
“Reading Is Fundamental”, Jack Tripper, the 80’s.
February 12th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
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