I’d also recommed his book ‘The Coyote Kings and the Space Age Bachelor Pad’ because it is so much fun to read. Also it takes place in Edmonton and isn’t a bleak Canadian fiction/GG bait about a dysfunctional poor family on the prairies/in the Maritimes/In Montreal.
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Lord of the Flies was required reading in my high school English class. At age fifteen I found it creepy, oppressive, disturbing & yet dull. Being forced to read it felt like torture. If you want another violent book written about children, but not for children, try A High Wind In Jamaica, in which children kidnapped by pirates go feral & join the pirates. I might have enjoyed that one much more, as the kids kill lots of grown-ups.
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Over the course of my school career I think I had to read Lord of the Flies about 3 times. Given how thoroughly the first teacher drilled us with every single metaphor, symbol and point of the book I was able to coast through the other two retreads.
Ditto Romeo and Juliet (again, apparently ok for teens because it involves teens??), To Kill a Mockingbird and a couple of others. The English teachers in Alberta were not pushing any literary boundaries, perhaps because it was the 80s and we were in the midst of yet another social conservative satanic panic, so teachers who pushed the boundaries were pushed out of the profession.*
*My school’s sports teams were named the ‘Red Devils’ until about 1984, at which point the local Christians had a satanic panic and it was changed to something else. My submission of ‘Inquisitors’ was not accepted as an alternative.
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But then you got to read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hoo boy, fun!
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Presumably the stories of the first people to inhabit any given part of the globe would fit that criteria. But of course that wouldn’t include any stories about white people in the Americas.
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If I could speak with this youngling, I would point out that because of racism and gatekeeping in publishing, the choice of written works that match her modern experience will be limited. Pushing back against that is an important goal to pursue, but doesn’t address the issue in the short term. Still, there are always oral alternatives and more technical solutions available to fill that particular gap beyond what can be learned from the experiences of family, Aunties, Uncles, griots, and other Keepers of the culture.
I’d also advise to be more inclusive and less exclusive when it comes to cultural narratives. Literature is full of allusions, and languages include metaphors that could be completely missed or misunderstood without some of the classics that are being challenged. I can imagine a world 20 years from now when I could write, “These guys are going full Lord of the Flies…” in cursive, sure in the knowledge that only people my age and older will be able to understand it. Is that really the world we want? 
Part of what has helped the Black community survive is a deep knowledge of majority culture, during eras when those oppressing us were uninterested in learning much about us that didn’t fit their preconceived ideas. Keep in mind what Sun Tzu wrote about an enemy. We are a minority among minority groups in many countries, so learning more about other non-dominant cultures is important, too. I was raised by Christians, but educated in a town with strong Jewish, Hispanic, Asian and African American groups which had input into our school curriculum and public library. That made a huge difference in providing diverse offerings for students in an area with a population that (according to the Census) was 80% White.
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I read something saying that Australians are simultaneously resentful of authority and deferential to authority because of Australia’s colonial history, The rugged individualist who doesn’t want the government telling him what to do on his land knows, deep down, that his land is his only because of the power of government.
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Yeah. And there’s that one story arc in…maybe “Little House in the Big Woods,” where I swear Pa went off on a bender but the story is that he got stuck in the snow and had to eat most of the Christmas treats he’d gone to buy them 3 days earlier…
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If I could speak with this youngling. . . .I’d also advise to be more inclusive and less exclusive when it comes to cultural narratives. Literature is full of allusions, and languages include metaphors that could be completely missed or misunderstood without some of the classics that are being challenged. I can imagine a world 20 years from now when I could write, “These guys are going full Lord of the Flies …” in cursive, sure in the knowledge that only people my age and older will be able to understand it. Is that really the world we want?
Sure, but to be fair to her, I think she’d likely agree with you:
The OCDSB needs to seriously update the English curriculum. I, as a 17-year-old Black, Jewish, feminist, and social justice activist do not need to learn about how men in the 16th century fought over poor young women, who would eventually sacrifice themselves for their husbands… who had three other underaged wives. Although I agree that students need to learn about important poets and authors such as Shakespeare, this does not mean that the entire English curriculum should be focused on such outdated and irrelevant material in this day and age. Students need to understand how to pull information from Shakespeare, Orwell, Dahl, Golding, and other authors; however, we shouldn’t be memorizing passages of information that we truly can not relate to our modern-day lives. Additionally, without being able to make real-life comparisons, this information does not stick with us… so are we really learning anything? OCDSB should make each English course focus on authors, playwrights and poets of marginalized groups, in addition to the classics. Not only will it allow for the English program to be more inclusive, but it will also allow Black, Asian, Middle Eastern and Indigenous students to feel represented.
She too understands that knowing some of the classics is important. She’s not arguing that they never be taught, just that some of them make way for books that represent and illustrate other traditions.
As for the value of cultural capital that consists of understanding an allusion to TLOTF, meh. It’s not THAT significant a text as a representative of the hegemonic western tradition, let alone all that good a one.
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True, but it’s not non-existent, of course.
That’s another issue - the primacy of the printed book as the primary form of literature taught. Given that much of human history human knowledge was handed down via family and community networks via oral transmission, there is no reason not to include elements of that in a literature class.
Agreed. But I’m not sure that people want to completely get rid of the old canon, merely supplement it with a new set of works.
To be fair, this happens all the time, though, as society changes around us. I do think that tends to be a byproduct of capitalism to some degree, but not entirely.
Right. But there was little option to not learn about the majority culture, too. Gets us into the whole double consciousness that DuBois explicated.
That should be in the service of cross-cultural solidarity, of course.
Seems reasonable to me. And this is true of other European traditions as well. The canon tends to be very focused on ancient Greek, English, and German classics. In addition to being more inclusive of the diversity in the US, you can also bring in European works that aren’t part of the canon already (from the margins of Europe (Irish, Slavic, etc).
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I’m about as lefty as it gets, but I think chasing things like this while the right increasingly slides into fascism is a fool’s errand. While we are trying to come up with the most “perfect” reading lists for literature (and often completely overlooking things like critical thinking) the right is speaking in eliminationist rhetoric and many of them very much mean it. Almost none of this navel-gazing and hair-splitting over what books hurt which groups’ feelings the least will matter if that side seizes power.
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I’m sorry, but how do you think we got here in the first place? By consistently denying that a valid perspective exists outside that of white men.
We don’t fix this until we widen our perspectives and create a more inclusive culture that acknowledges that people other than white men exist and have something to say to us. The more we lean into continuing to center white men, the more white supremacy will continue to be centered in our culture.
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I would certainly agree that expanding viewpoints is valid; but a lot of this rather overwrought handwringing strikes me as fiddling while Rome burns. This sort of thing almost comes off like a caricature of leftist goals, IMHO.
I’m actually very concerned that as various factions of the left nitpick over such things while the right steals all the actual power - none of this will matter in the least. They’ll go back to white supremacist Christian madrassas if they get the power they seek. I think some of this stuff will actually push many in the center away from the left and into the arms of these people, especially as issues of class tend to get overlooked in favor of gender/racial things, and these people see the left doing nothing to improve their lot.
When it comes to lit…as a young white male, I had to read the Great Gatsby. This required a perspective shift that was very great, because even though white males just so happened to be involved, that did not mean I could identify with them. They were older than me as a young teen, they were much higher in the class structure than I, and from another era. Does anyone really imagine that mere race/sex is all that is required to identify with aspects of literature? I sure hope not. Same goes for a lot of “classical” lit - Greeks were not always considered “white” (but now are, due to some weird fluidity of the definition of “whiteness” over time), am I automatically supposed to be able to identify with the problems of classical Greeks because I, and they, are “white”?
All that being said, it seems to me that expanding the “acceptable” canon seems a better goal overall, rather than trying to discard any of the current canon. That actually seems to be what is happening here, upon closer reading. Unfortunately, I think there are some that would rather ditch all the classical lit because “white male bad” thinking seems to overtake their critical thinking processes, and that is just as blinkered as the other side, IMHO.
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It sounds like you’re either saying it’s not worthwhile to work for comprehensive, inclusive, representative literature as part of learning, or that we as a society can only focus on one thing at a time and spending time on anything other than the most critical item is essentially navel gazing…I disagree with both of those opinions.
ETA: I see while I was typing this you realized what you were reacting to was not what the actual linked article was about. So probably a moot point.
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Oh no! Giving a shit about education!!! What a bunch of idiots!!! Education never did nothing for nobody!!! /s
If you had read the original post, or a single comment here, you might have learned that no one fucking said that… But instead, you did not. You made an assumption that was easily disproved.
Once again, the heart of the problem is the continued centering of white male perspectives in our public life. Until that changes, we’re going to keep doing the same shit over and over again. Dismissing this as not important misses the larger structures that are keeping white supremacy in place and is contributing the problem of ascendant fascism on the right. You can’t continue to center certain perspectives over others (to the EXCLUSION of others) and expect progressive change.
None of whom are actually in positions to shape policy. The vast majority of liberals and people on the left want greater inclusivity, not exclusion of the “classics” taught in literature classes. This is like saying that the Black supremacists are the core of the Black Freedom movement. It’s fearmongering bullshit meant to spin up white fears of retaliation.
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I am not saying it’s not worthwhile, but it is all a matter of degree, isn’t it? I think good literature is about human experiences. Trying to put every piece of literature on the scale of where it lies on the gender/racial spectrum seems like a very strange accounting system to me. I’m all for adding to the canon, especially if it is actually good (and I’d like to see science fiction not ignored while they are doing that), regardless of what the author/protagonists’ gender/race happens to be.
Meanwhile, we see how the reactionaries are behaving, and we don’t have to guess what they will do if they seize power. You think they are going to care about how “woke” their students or their curriculum will be? Texas’ list of proposed books to ban tells us a lot.
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Do you really think people who care about things like this are ignoring the rise of fascism? Because my experience is they are more likely to stand up against it and for things like human rights, not less.
Meanwhile I notice there are a lot of people who say they are concerned about fascists, but who then spend all their time chastising their ostensibly fellow leftists for not doing things exactly their way. Just a thought, but if you actually care about it, maybe you’d have better luck going after the fascists instead?
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So why are books written by white men still considered classics that we all need to read? Do you really believe that the building up of the literary canon in the west was NOT driven by white supremacy? The entire system of education was not value neutral - it was very much built to maintain white supremacy and positioned itself as “neutral” when it very much was not.
Entirely subjective.
Maybe if they had gotten a decent education that was not focused on the white experience…
Yeah… kind of the point. No one is saying to not include some of the traditional canon… that’s right wing fearmongering.
Or that the type of literature taught in school is disconnected from that?
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That’s a key thing. I felt that there was a hilarious over- emphasis on Depression-era stories set in either the Prairies or Maritimes, which was difficult to relate to in late 20th Century Vancouver. It was as if the teachers decided that what they were forced to read when they were students was the best possible list.
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I would say they are quite fringe, but they do exist. And yes (thankfully) they don’t have any power. Because that kind of thing would likely give the right wing a great deal more power and animus.
And please don’t read anything I say as not caring about education. I care very much. I would love for all student to exit schools with a firm grasp on critical thinking, and being able to empathize with others. Stretching your brain by reading about people and situations you are not familiar with is a great way to learn that empathy - again, regardless of color/gender. You come to realize that there really are some universals, even as protagonists’ color/gender changes - and many other factors that often play a much larger role - such as class, time period, location, the context of the literature, etc. In fact, all of the literature I was made to read as a kid in school (and much stuff I read on my own) required that I get in the headspace of someone very, very much unlike me, even if some of the characters just so happened to be also white and male. Old Man and the Sea. Great Gatsby. Scarlet Letter. The Lottery. The Odyssey. Moby Dick. To Build a Fire. Romeo and Juliet.
Lastly, surely you can see how such things can be easily caricatured and used to recruit for white supremacists and fascists? Because I can assure you that it is going on. I’m not really sure how we work on keeping them out of power while also expanding the canon, but I can assure you I am going to give “keeping them out of power” precedence when it comes to having to prioritize things. Because not everything can be priority #1, otherwise, nothing is.
