Okay, switch that to “until I first listened to all of The Wall a few years later.”
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When I first read Lord of the Flies, aged 9 or 10 I didn’t get it, I was looking at it as a literal adventure story. When I re-read it at 15 a lovely teacher explained the allegory and it made far more sense, it helped that I was studying Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four in the same period.
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That does sound pretty relatable for citizens of the UK!
Joking (not joking) aside, Lord of the Flies always seemed pretty relatable to me as a member of a culture with an essentially imperialist attitude towards everything. We don’t live in Lord of the Flies but we do live in the world made by the people it is about - the children who grew up surrounded by adults scarred by the world wars.
Of course no one teaches Lord of the Flies as a “Baby Boomers are fucked and we need to politically organize so we can dilute their dominance” book in highschool.
I agree with this. Because of that, I think it’s very important to feature more works that express less-often-heard perspectives.
I don’t think the two Black kids in my highschool of over 1000 students had any trouble understanding White culture (they probably understood it better than I did). But I knew absolutely nothing about the experience of growing up Black in our culture. There was an opportunity there for me to learn about the experience of being human, in it’s great variety, that was missed by educators who only wanted to give me books written by White people. Instead of simply reinforcing whatever ideas I already had, I could have been challenged to understand that many of my ideas about what is universal are much more cultural than I imagined.
Like I said above, I wish this conversation were more focused on the books being added to the curriculum than the ones being taken away. I bet they are some really good books. Taking away Lord of the Flies because it lacks diversity sounds a lot sillier than it is. Adding a new book because the new book is a good book and retiring Lord of the Flies to make space makes perfect sense.
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