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For all the English geeks out there, I read this a couple of days ago and have been thinking about it ever since:
Pop Goes The Bard: The Age looks at classic vs. contemporary content in English Lit courses
For those of you who can't be fucked, it's a piece about the shift away from classics in VCE/HSC and Uni English literature towards studying Buffy and Pulp Fiction. While it makes some valid, if wibbly, points about a change in teaching structures, a lack of commercial demand for literature graduates (thus the need to make the area more appealing to students) and what we as a society consider to be 'valid' and 'relevant' literature, it makes a couple of glaring omissions.
Firstly, contemporary literature is a lot more egalitarian than the literature of even a hundred odd years ago. Women writers were rare, lower class authors of any gender unheard of. Children's literature and teen fiction didn't exist because children and teenagers were just viewed as 'little adults' for a long time; the very idea of 'childhood' is a recent addition to Western culture. If you taught a classics-heavy literature curriculum at any level these days, you'd be teaching people to look at the big questions in life, yes - but you'd be teaching them to do so from the perspective of a bunch of rich old men. Not that those rich old men didn't have varied and intelligent things to say, it's just that they could only ever say things that resonated with their experiences and no-one else's.
Secondly, people seem to be willing to criticise the way the classics (and English Lit generally) are taught these days, and the pressure society places on students of this era to have 'career oriented' degrees. All valid. But what about the possibility that society has created students who are unsuited to learning this stuff? Modern society tells us that instant gratification is a Good Thing - no need to spend ages learning archaic permutations of English in order to understand Chaucer or even Donne; we'll just create a nifty Cliff Notes version for you. No need to look deeper than a sound bite or further than a catch phrase.
In essence, we've encouraged young adults - the people who are usually off questing for the meaning of life through the classics of literature, art and philosophy - to remain adolescents for as long as they can. We decided it was good for this generation to spend the majority of their youth attempting to act and to consume as children and teenagers do, rather than teaching them to observe and edify like intelligent adults. We gave them text messaging, for Christ's sake. What did we think would happen to their love of poetry and prose?
(Someone will have noticed by now that I'm only twenty five myself, and yet I'm referring to young people as though I don't belong to that age group. This would be because in every respect besides my physical age, I don't, in fact, belong to that age group. Sometimes I feel fifty years old, sometimes I feel like I'm five. But it's rare that I feel like I am my own age.)
What's my personal take? Students should be exposed to both classics and modern literature at any level of secondary or tertiary education. Frankly, I don't think any author or any kind of literature has the monopoly on elegance or emotion or intellectual stimulation. Knowing about contemporary issues and literary styles is good because it teaches us about ourselves and the world we reside in. The classics give us some perspective on the journey humanity has taken to get there. They give us the clearest sense of what it is to image someone alien to us and yet part of us.
The balance of one to the other is something educators can only decide based on their students ambitions and backgrounds, and they should be given the trust and freedom to do that. In the end, what matters is not the amount of literature you take in but the lessons you learn from it. That requires more than reading in itself, or reading a certain kind of literature - it requires someone to inspire you and guide you.
Pop Goes The Bard: The Age looks at classic vs. contemporary content in English Lit courses
For those of you who can't be fucked, it's a piece about the shift away from classics in VCE/HSC and Uni English literature towards studying Buffy and Pulp Fiction. While it makes some valid, if wibbly, points about a change in teaching structures, a lack of commercial demand for literature graduates (thus the need to make the area more appealing to students) and what we as a society consider to be 'valid' and 'relevant' literature, it makes a couple of glaring omissions.
Firstly, contemporary literature is a lot more egalitarian than the literature of even a hundred odd years ago. Women writers were rare, lower class authors of any gender unheard of. Children's literature and teen fiction didn't exist because children and teenagers were just viewed as 'little adults' for a long time; the very idea of 'childhood' is a recent addition to Western culture. If you taught a classics-heavy literature curriculum at any level these days, you'd be teaching people to look at the big questions in life, yes - but you'd be teaching them to do so from the perspective of a bunch of rich old men. Not that those rich old men didn't have varied and intelligent things to say, it's just that they could only ever say things that resonated with their experiences and no-one else's.
Secondly, people seem to be willing to criticise the way the classics (and English Lit generally) are taught these days, and the pressure society places on students of this era to have 'career oriented' degrees. All valid. But what about the possibility that society has created students who are unsuited to learning this stuff? Modern society tells us that instant gratification is a Good Thing - no need to spend ages learning archaic permutations of English in order to understand Chaucer or even Donne; we'll just create a nifty Cliff Notes version for you. No need to look deeper than a sound bite or further than a catch phrase.
In essence, we've encouraged young adults - the people who are usually off questing for the meaning of life through the classics of literature, art and philosophy - to remain adolescents for as long as they can. We decided it was good for this generation to spend the majority of their youth attempting to act and to consume as children and teenagers do, rather than teaching them to observe and edify like intelligent adults. We gave them text messaging, for Christ's sake. What did we think would happen to their love of poetry and prose?
(Someone will have noticed by now that I'm only twenty five myself, and yet I'm referring to young people as though I don't belong to that age group. This would be because in every respect besides my physical age, I don't, in fact, belong to that age group. Sometimes I feel fifty years old, sometimes I feel like I'm five. But it's rare that I feel like I am my own age.)
What's my personal take? Students should be exposed to both classics and modern literature at any level of secondary or tertiary education. Frankly, I don't think any author or any kind of literature has the monopoly on elegance or emotion or intellectual stimulation. Knowing about contemporary issues and literary styles is good because it teaches us about ourselves and the world we reside in. The classics give us some perspective on the journey humanity has taken to get there. They give us the clearest sense of what it is to image someone alien to us and yet part of us.
The balance of one to the other is something educators can only decide based on their students ambitions and backgrounds, and they should be given the trust and freedom to do that. In the end, what matters is not the amount of literature you take in but the lessons you learn from it. That requires more than reading in itself, or reading a certain kind of literature - it requires someone to inspire you and guide you.
