Jacqueline Wilson says rewriting children’s books can be justified ( www.theguardian.com )

conciselyverbose , 10 months ago

So I think there are ways that you can do it to kill the flavor of books, but the core premise that some of those books are no longer appropriate for children as written is absolutely real. They're not capable of reading critically and recognizing that some of the characterizations aren't appropriate. They just absorb. And if you did want them to engage with "this isn't right", you need to be more direct with it and deliberately make it part of the story.

Adult books IDK. I'm not really a big classics reader generally, because while historical relevance is important, I just don't think a lot of the themes translate to modern culture. I'm kind of torn on reading them in literature class for the same reasons. They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn't really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don't really apply today also don't get through anyways. If you read more modern stuff you might actually engage people with reading, but updating curriculums is a slog and a half.

wjrii , 10 months ago

They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn't really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don't really apply today also don't get through anyways.

As an old English major, I agree that the "canon" is probably larger than it needs to be, and educators generally do a piss poor job of accepting that excellent works of literature continue to be written while the length of a school year does not change. I'll stick up for a heavy dose of the classics though. Even more than the techniques, which absolutely are present in modern literature, Shakespeare and Dickens and Melville provide a shared set of norms and expectations and feed into references and provide a vocabulary for conversation and even subconscious engagement with newer works of lit and drama.

In a lot of ways they ARE the historical context of English literature, and to that extent, yes, you should cram some of them into the brains of teenagers. Not so many as we do now, and the point is well taken that newer works can engage more readily, but school is the right time to have people read these works and to discuss why some parts are relevant, and to take a moment to explain why other parts were relevant. I'd love to see a curriculum that includes some "family tree" type stuff for themes and techniques and shows how writers have more- or less-consciously adapted and built on the DNA of previous works. Kind of a "Huck Finn begets Holden Caulfield begets Harry Potter" kind of thing. Nothing could be worse for engagement than a pure chronological lesson plan for the year.