There was just an article in Slate about how A Separate Peace is going out of style and nobody reads it anymore. It surprised me, because everybody I know had to read it. I was assigned every one of those books in the list above in middle or high school.
You do realize that the point to teaching with books like Moby-Dick is not to help children start a career in whaling, but to learn how to appreciate literature, right?
How, exactly, should a school system be asked to predict exactly what career you’ll end up in or whether you’ll be smart enough to put your understanding of history to personal or professional use?
Rick, when a book is only used by teachers and never in any other setting, that would be the useless literature. Moby Dick sure fits that. The school officials would only have to determine that the literature is used in a non-education career setting, and put more emphasis on things like biographies, which I don’t remember even reading any at all!
I am sure large companies could point to literature on their founders and their visions, and they were not stupid visions of a nut (yep, Moby Dick again) but instead visions that came true and made money and jobs for us, just what we ought to be trying to teach, not how to be a nut with a stupid vision, see now? Some major authors were just drunks that killed themselves, why glorify that? Tell them about real people who made millions with new ideas instead, what is the down side of that?
Kids love video games, who thought of that? Who made the LCD screens they use? Teach them something useful and that they might want to work in later. There would always be electives in their choice of books if they want to read a few totally nonsense books, let those be the electives then.
I think that there are more contemporary books assigned than what the list suggests–it’s just that teachers are assigning different contemporary novels, so no one or two or three dominates the list.
This is a PDF copy of last year’s AP English Lit test. On the 4th page is a list of suggested works of “Literary merit”–it’s as close of a consensus as to what you should/can/is being taught in High School as you are likely to get. There you will see things like The Kite Runner, Equus, Things Fall Apart, Beloved, A Prayer for Owen Meaney–and many other contemporary works.
There are institutional pressures that encourage teachers to stick to the same classic novels, but the cannon does evolve–and it’s not such a bad thing that it evolves slowly.
I think it’d be (relatively) easy to figure out what the most common high school books are. The national textbook market is dominated by what California and Texas state school boards choose to adopt, so the rest of the field tends to follow suit. There’s a very eye-opening book on the textbook industry called The Language Police, which my junior US History teacher recommended as a companion to the entire Orwell catalog, which he had assigned.
The point of teaching literature is not to teach how to make money. The point is to teach what good writing is.
And yet they still teach Moby Dick. 
Jimmy Stewart wrote a Calculus book that, I would guess, a majority of colleges use. He has so much fucking money from this.
st. augustine’s confessions probably makes the rounds in religion classes, though nobody would read wealth of nations for econ. math/science textbooks range by edition, much less author though i’ve seen james stewart on many a texbook whenever i road tripped to other colleges.
Machiavelli’s The Prince was required reading for some politics majors i knew - in different classes no less.
and as for physics, personally, i’ve known a lot of guys who learned quantum through Feynman’s lectures. however the % of physics majors vs history/lit majors is almost negligible.
NON academic reading, i would suppose it’d be either Atlas Shrugged, any Kafka title, or god forbid - a Malcolm Gladwell Book. Those three pretty much encompass all levels of poserdom that half-educated college kids want to pretend to embody. Libertarian/Neocon, Bohemian Ultralib, or pseudointellectual.
Edit: Gravity’s Rainbow??
College is tough to analyze, because a lot of schools will only require English 101 from a non-English major, and will mainly use a compilation of selections (like The Blair Reader) rather than individual books.
For my English 101 class, we only used one book, Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
It’s pretty common in History (Western Civ) courses, too.
Why would literature have to meet any condition of being used in a “career setting”? There are lots of subjects that schools should and do teach with an emphasis on practical and career applications, but I don’t see why literature should be one of them. AFAICT, literature is most often encountered in the real world in one’s leisure time, not in any sort of job or career environment.
That is, in post-school real life, people read literature because it makes them think, it amuses them, it showcases writing as an art form, it lets them escape into a different world temporarily, and so on and so forth. Why shouldn’t this be considered an important part of real life, and a valuable component in the education of schoolchildren, even though it’s not directly connected to the immediate tasks of earning one’s living?
I think it would take a really militant-philistine radical materialist anti-arts school board to stipulate that a literary work has to be “used in a non-education career setting” in order to be appropriate for a school curriculum.
Um, you are aware that the commercial industry on which the whole plot of Moby Dick is based—namely, the whaling industry—made a hell of a lot of “money and jobs for us” in its day, aren’t you? Melville himself points this out, in passages that contain just as much pro-commerce jingoism as you could ask for in your corporate hagiographies of modern entrepreneurs:
So if what you primarily want in a school textbook is capitalist boosterism, I’d think Moby Dick would be quite suitable for your purposes.
Because most people are smart enough to tell the difference between admiring a literary work of art and “glorifying” the personal lifestyle of its author. If you demand that schools teach only works by authors who led exemplary personal lives, you won’t have many literary greats left in the curriculum.
(By the way, I was never assigned Moby Dick as a textbook in school or college, but I’ve voluntarily read it on my own—several times, actually. Just because you personally don’t happen to like or understand a particular literary work doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily stupid or that other people can’t get something useful out of it.)
Surely critical thinking and the ability to formulate and then communicate ideas in a written form come into play here, right? Maybe recognizing good writing is part of the package but I don’t think it’s the primary purpose of teaching literature in high schools or colleges (Literature majors excepted of course).
I read only three on that list: Gatsby, Julius Caesar, and Huck Finn.
Though my schools English curriculum didn’t entirely focus on classic literature, that was mainly freshman and junior years, My freshman year I recall Much Ado About Nothing (often swapped with Midsummer), Caesar, Dante’s Inferno, and the Odyssey (they alternate years doing Iliad and Odyssey for the frosh), and selections from Canterbury. Sophomore is Multicultural and Minority Literature, where we read such well loved classics as Yellow Raft on Blue Water, Bless You, Ultima, Woman Warrior, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Junior is generally American lit (AP English Literature class), Gatsby, Huck, Catch-22, and Grapes of Wrath, a pretty typical selection I’d say. I hear One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest usually pops up too. Senior year (AP English Lang for all students) is the year that starts normal and then drifts to wtf territory, We started with King Lear, then went to Candide, Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko), Pride and Prejudice a couple plays by Ibsen (one of them is usually A Doll’s House), and start drifting into existentialist territory. That’s when the weird stuff hits, we start getting Camus, Sartre, often we analyze the movie 8 1/2 by Fellini, something by James Joyce (usually Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man), and usually finish up with something fun like Rozencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead, The Bald Soprano or similar.
I’m guessing a lot of these (especially Sophomore/Senior) are rather atypical since I can’t find many people who graduated other high schools that have even heard of a lot of those.
Actually, he made a good point. Among my favorites are history of science and business books. Many have compelling stories. In a nation that asks its youth to be ever innovative in the work force as a national competitive advantage, I do think it wise to teach about the beginnings of various industries. Mauve, which described the beginning of the dye and organic chemistry industry, Plastics, about, well, you know, and others were ones I have enjoyed over the years. Could be a great class project to construct a blog paralleling the story the way we used to make timelines.
There are a lot of kids that never really learn to read, or to enjoy it. I think presenting material that is inspiring and more closely related to something they might be interested in is a way to overcome that.
Of course, but that doesn’t mean that we have to devote entire English courses to them. We assign reading material to students in almost all courses, not just English.
We certainly can (and ideally should) assign interesting works on industrial and technological history as part of the school curriculum, but there’s no reason to throw out Melville and Shakespeare to make room for them. Especially not when there are a lot of kids that can get something out of reading Melville and Shakespeare.
But the really good ones are just as valuable and interesting today as they were fifty years ago! My students loved To Kill a Mockingbird when we read it thirty years ago – even if one of my students did write that it won the “Pullet Surprise.” That’s why teachers so often choose from these “classics.” They have proven their durability.
If I were teaching now, I would be sure to put A Prayer for Owen Meaney on the list. Or maybe I would get permission to teach it in class. My granddaughter’s class read it and she begged me to read it. My husband read it aloud to me and both of us were just overwhelmed with it! Thanks for the reminder, Manda JO.
Silverstreak Wonder, the books of literature that you are assigned in high school and college aren’t intended to be “how to” books that will serve your immediate purposes over the next five to ten years. They should be something that you can draw on over a lifetime of experiences which will challenge what you are made of. They are for the battlefield, the death of your best friend, the question of your own integrity, your ability to endure pain, dealing with obsession, and facing your own death. You have not lived long enough to know their full value yet. And you probably haven’t read enough of the good ones.
Like you, I love biographies and I learn a lot of practical and inspirational truth from them. But nothing stays with me like a well told story. Oh, what I could tell you about Conor Larkin…
I’d balance it differently than it is now. I don’t recall reading any of the types of books I mentioned, even in passing, in high school, and I went to one of the top academic high schools in the country.
I have lived long enough, and I have read the good ones and continue to. I have “Grapes of Wrath” on my desk right now.
I venture that if I ask random people around town to assess the value of th books they read in high school to them, and then asked if they were helpful in “facing their own death” or “integrity”, they would simply stare at me. If I asked them if school had spent more time preparing them to understand the economics of a rapidly changing world via reading instead of some of what they read, they would leap at it.
What makes you so sure a non-fiction book can’t tell a compelling story? Or that “facing death and integrity” are not themes found in books about the birth of industries or other innovative activities?
This was a different Jim Stewart, a concert violinist in his 60s, not the It’s a Wonderful Life actor.