I mean, maybe they're not "universal", I imagine that Chinese people probably should read classic Chinese literature before they move on to English, just as we read Shakespeare before we read ancient Chinese texts.

The French are not as familiar with Shakespeare as they are with Molière.

A solid foundation in one's own culture is not a bad thing. The fact that Shakespeare might not be as meaningful to the people of Burma should not be relevant to whether or not it is taught in the US or England.

A solid foundation in one's own culture is not a bad thing. The fact that Shakespeare might not be as meaningful to the people of Burma should not be relevant to whether or not it is taught in the US or England.

NicoleK at February 25, 2021 11:34 PM

Schools should not be in the business of imparting relevance or meaning. Most people call this indoctrination.

They should be in the business of giving students the tools (reading competency, vocabulary, math, etc.) in order to extract their own meaning.
Many great works are great because they transcend culture, and speak to the universal human condition.

Nothing good comes from putting an author’s work above criticism or off limits because of their sex, ethnicity or right/wrong think.

I remember this idiocy really starting in the 70’s. It won’t end well.

Woke English Literature: replacing Shakespeare with Wakanda (e.g., replacing sonnets and plays about great events, people and comedy, with comics books and graphic novels).

As for Shakespeare's relevance to black people, Maya Angelou was a big fan. From age 7 to age 12, Angelou idd not speak. A neighbor would read poetry to her and encourage her to speak. Finally, she decided she would render poetry at a church meeting.

. . . at twelve-and-a-half, I had my voice back, and I decided I would render a rendition. In the CME Church in Stamps, Arkansas, I decided that I would render Portia's speech from The Merchant of Venice. That would get them. That would knock them right off their pews—I could see myself doing it: "The quality of mercy" (pause) "is not strained. It droppeth" (long pause) "As a gentle rain—" I had it choreographed; it was going to be fantastic. But then, mama asked me, "Sister, what are you planning to render?" So I told her, "A piece from Shakespeare, Mama." Mama asked, "Now sister, who is this very Shakespeare?" I had to tell her that Shakespeare was white. And Mama felt the less we said about whites, the better, and if we didn't mention them at all, maybe they'd just get up and leave. I couldn't lie to her, so I told her, "Mama, it's a piece written by William Shakespeare who is white, but he's dead. And has been dead for centuries." Now, I thought then she would forgive him that little indiosyncracy [sic]. Mama said, "Sister, you will render a piece of Mister Langston Hughes, Mister County Cullen, Mister James Weldon Johnson, or Mister Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Yes ma'am, little mistress, you will."

Well, I did. But years later, when I physically and psychologically left that country, that condition, which is Stamps, Arkansas, a condition I warrant, regrettably, that a number of people in this very room abide today, I found myself, and still find myself, whenever I like stepping back into Shakespeare. Whenever I like, I pull to me. He wrote it for me. "When in disgrace with fortune in [sic] men's eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state / and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries / and look upon myself and curse my fate / wishing me like to one more rich in hope / featured like him, like him with friends possessed / desiring this man's art and that man's scope / with what I most enjoy contented least...." Of course he wrote it for me; that is a condition of the black woman. Of course, he was a black woman. I understand that. Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman.

Maybe we'd all benefit if parents read less "The Big Umbrella" and more "Sonnet 29" to their children.

If no POC writer can rise to shakespeare's level, then we must eliminate shakespeare. I'm afraid I find Maya Angelou, to take a simple example, repetitive and whiny. Pretending it is great is condescending. Shakespeare is in fact performed all over the world. In Japan they do not think of it as "white colonial" but as great story telling. Same in India.
Is there great literature in China and India? Of course. But they aren't very accessible to us due to the cultural divide. Japanese film has made inroads in the US because some of it is great film, not because we feel sorry for the japanese. these people do not want to be challenged or to feel bad that they aren't as great as shakespeare. They want to believe that they are superior (morally if nothing else) to past artists, so let's delete them all. Just comic books, that is all we need.

"De-centering" (ugh) Shakespeare is a mistake, but a bigger mistake is the "centering" (ugh ugh ugh) of children's comic books as adult entertainment. I had the same reaction to this article as I did to serious dissection of the character of the Joker and how the actor took months to prepare.

One side is dismissing great art, the other is exalting candy for children.

I'm afraid I find Maya Angelou, to take a simple example, repetitive and whiny. Pretending it is great is condescending. ~ cc at February 26, 2021 10:09 AM

I would agree that Angelou is highly over-rated, both as a poet and an author. Her insight into Shakespeare was what I was looking at; a black woman finding community with a centuries-dead white poet and playwright.

The essence of great writing and storytelling is being relatable for readers of different cultural backgrounds, even across centuries.

Zora Neale Hurston, one of the few emerging black writers who eschewed anger and grievance, reviewed Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children in 1938, saying the characters live in a "Dismal Swamp of race hatred." She noted that "not one act of kindness and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work." Far too much widely-celebrated African-American literature is rooted in anger and grievance instead of storytelling.

I love Phenomenal Woman.

I love Phenomenal Woman. ~ NicoleK at February 26, 2021 11:36 AM

IDK Nicole. Personally, I thought i was kinda drab, as poems go. Still, everyone has his or her own tastes and preferences.

I had the good fortune of attending a speaking engagement by Maya Angelou a few decades ago and found her words to be hopeful, beautiful, and captivating.

At the completion of the event she received a standing ovation that was very much deserved based upon the quality and power of what she had to share with the audience.

Perhaps, much like Shakespeare, there is something to seeing her in person than to simply read her words off the page.

Needless to say I am glad that I chose to attend.

Exactly, Kevin. Whatever happened to the days when kids actually took PRIDE in reading books without pictures in them? Not to mention the pride their parents used to have?

(One problem, of course, is that too many PARENTS don't read for fun, even to themselves. So of course they hardly notice what their kids do or don't read.)

Btw, decades ago, when certain students used to read, for fun, only those books that didn't call for a long attention span, such as The Guinness Book of World Records, guess what teachers used to call those students, in scholastic articles?

"Lazy readers."

No doubt that term is taboo today - if only because any adult can sympathize with the temptation that fast-paced screen entertainment provides.

Incidentally, Mary Leonhardt, the 9th-grade teacher and author of Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don't, wrote that she'd met plenty of cynical teens who regarded Romeo and Juliet as nothing more than a story of two dumb kids who do all the wrong things. (Of course, she was simply making clear that one has to be prepared, as a teacher, for student perspectives that one may never have considered.)

Isab Says:

"Schools should not be in the business of imparting relevance or meaning. Most people call this indoctrination.

They should be in the business of giving students the tools (reading competency, vocabulary, math, etc.) in order to extract their own meaning."

This is a poor argument.

The very act of selecting what to teach to students by definition imparts both relevance and meaning.

Even your choices of "reading competency, vocabulary, math, etc." requires that the schools treat those particular subjects as relevant and meaningful as compared to other subjects.

That we choose to teach American history and not ancient Egyptian history in primary and secondary school imparts a sense of relevance and meaning to the students.

You can call such things "indoctrination" if you like... but the reality is that education is a deliberative act of selecting what items are relevant for the next generation to focus their attention on and what things are less meaningful for their lives.

We do not have infinite time and as a result education is something of a triage operation.

We do not choose to teach high school students how to use a slide rule any longer... instead we teach them the more relevant skill of how to use a calculator and even some rudimentary computer programming.

None of this actually constitutes "indoctrination" even if you like to use such words to describe the rational process of selecting relevant and meaningful things to teach to children.

Lenona,

In a very real sense, Shakespeare's plays were meant to be seen performed live... not read off the page.

I remember the first time I saw The Merchant of Venice performed live and vividly recall how much better it was than reading it.

It is the difference between watching a movie and reading the screen play.

Plays are meant to be seen.

"Plays are meant to be seen."

Anyone knows that, and I said as much, a while back.

But you don't blame teachers for trying to avoid playing videos as much as possible, even though videos are the cheapest and easiest way for students to see a play.

In the meantime, here's part of an award-winning 1991 essay by English professor and lefty columnist Katha Pollitt. The whole essay is very much worth reading.

"Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me..."

https://studylib.net/doc/8014140/why-we-read--canon-to-the-right-of-me

"...Well, a liberal is not a very exciting thing to be, and so we have the radicals, who attack the concepts of 'greatness', 'shared', 'culture' and 'lists'. (I'm overlooking here the ultraradicals, who attack the 'privileging' of 'texts', as they insist on calling books, and think one might as well spend one's college years deconstructing 'Leave It to Beaver'.) Who is to say, ask the radicals, what is a great book? What's so terrific about complexity, ambiguity, historical centrality and high seriousness? If The Color Purple, say, gets students thinking about their own experience, maybe they ought to read it and forget about ------, and here you can fill in the name of whatever classic work you yourself found dry and tedious and never got around to finishing. For the radicals the notion of a shared culture is a lie, because it means presenting as universally meaningful and politically neutral books that reflect the interests and experiences and values of privileged white men at the expense of those of others --women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, the working class, whomever. Why not scrap the one-list-for-everyone idea and let people connect with books that are written by people like themselves about people like themselves? It will be a more accurate reflection of a multifaceted and conflict-ridden society, and will do wonders for everyone's self-esteem, except, of course, living white men --but they have too much self-esteem already.

"Now, I have to say that I dislike the radicals' vision intensely. How foolish to argue that Chekhov has nothing to say to a black woman --or, for that matter, to me --merely because he is Russian, long dead, a man. The notion that one reads to increase one's self-esteem sounds to me like more snake oil. Literature is not an aerobics class or a session at the therapist's. But then I think of myself as a child, leafing through anthologies of poetry for the names of women. I never would have admitted that I needed a role model, even if that awful term had existed back in the prehistory of which I speak, but why was I so excited to find a female name, even when, as was often the case, it was attached to a poem of no interest to me whatsoever? Anna Laetitia Barbauld, author of 'Life! I know not what thou art / But know that thou and I must part!'; Lady Anne Lindsay, writer of plaintive ballads in incomprehensible Scots dialect, and the other minor female poets included by chivalrous Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the old Oxford Book of English Verse: I have to admit it, just by their presence in that august volume they did something for me. And although it had not much to do with reading or writing, it was an important thing they did..."

(snip)

Among the many points she makes is that it's silly to argue about what should be on a mandatory reading list when we're talking about students who never learned read for fun in the first place; such students won't remember a single book they were FORCED to read, much less gain anything from it. I.e., kids have to learn to LIKE reading long before high school, never mind college.

I forgot to say what MOST critics of Romeo and Juliet fail to mention. It's not just about the deadly idiocy of feuds, or even the temptation of forbidden love. It's also about how destructive puppy love can be, even WITHOUT the feudal element. Or how destructive it is to believe that "love at first sight" can last in any meaningful way, just because you're feeling desperate.

That is, Romeo was being deprived of sex (and sex clearly wasn't the only thing he cared about, or he'd have stopped pursuing Rosaline long ago), and Juliet was being deprived not only of spontaneous romance, but ANY control over her future. It makes their immediate marriage seem almost realistic.

(In the same vein, Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat, may only have been experiencing "love's first flash," as Lancelot said, but when he left, in all likelihood, given her age, she didn't die of mere grief, if you know what I mean. I'm guessing she starved herself.)

To be fair, the high school teachers are trying to reach their students but in doing so they are encouraging narcissism and ignorance. Everything has to be about now! Me! My world!

This is known in modern parlance as "being seen," and is a great puzzlement to those of us who enjoy reading to learn about other people and other worlds that are not of our own special, specific experience.

Lenona,

I'm simply pointing out that Shakespearean plays represent a poor example of children failing to read for leisure.

Generally they are read for purely academic purposes, which is not really leisure reading.

"Among the many points she makes is that it's silly to argue about what should be on a mandatory reading list when we're talking about students who never learned read for fun in the first place; such students won't remember a single book they were FORCED to read, much less gain anything from it. I.e., kids have to learn to LIKE reading long before high school, never mind college."

The way you do this is by permitting children to read things that are of interest to them.

The further in time we become separated from the classics the less interesting they are to modern day students.

Given a choice between A Tale of Two Cities and the The Hunger Games, children today are going to find the later much more enjoyable.

That being said, there needs to be latitude for children to select their own leisure reading if we want to consider it to actually be anything other than an academic exercise.

I guarantee children would have less interest in movies if we crammed Citizen Kane and Lawrence of Arabia down their throats in elementary school... they would justifiably be bored to tears despite both films being critically acclaimed and widely considered to be excellent examples of cinematography.

In my experience children do like to read... but they also like some control over what they are reading.

For the longest time my kids would fall asleep with books next to their pillows because they would read themselves to sleep... they absolutely adore books... at the same time, the works of Jane Austin were never really on their preferred reading list.

I'm simply pointing out that Shakespearean plays represent a poor example of children failing to read for leisure.

Generally they are read for purely academic purposes, which is not really leisure reading.
_________________________________

Well, duh, did you really think teacher Leonhardt didn't know all that? She was clearly referring to what kids are ordered to read. Besides, since when does any young person READ a play for fun, as opposed to WATCHING it for fun?

Well, duh, did you really think teacher Leonhardt didn't know all that? She was clearly referring to what kids are ordered to read. Besides, since when does any young person READ a play for fun, as opposed to WATCHING it for fun?

Lenona at February 27, 2021 5:51 AM

When that’s all you have. I would have never survived in today’s 24/7 instant entertainment. My ADD would have kept me form focusing on anything with too many choices.

But I read David Copperfield for fun, when I was 11 because we had it on out bookshelf at home. My father read Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire for the same reasons when he was a teenager.

Lenona,

So what exactly are you attempting to argue here?

On the one hand you are asserting that children no longer read for leisure (an assertion that is at best lacking in support over the course of human history as it is only a temporal blip between when we had nearly universal literacy and when the digital age began).

While on the other hand you are talking about Shakespeare.

What books aren't children reading that you believe they should be reading?

Based on your argument and previous conversations it seems to me that your criticism is that children today are not growing up as you grew up.

However that is true of every generation.

What exactly is your goal... what precisely do you want children to be doing that they aren't doing... and what should they be giving up to make time for the adjustment.

Children today have very full schedules and unlike some things, hours spent during the day really is a zero sum game.

I thought you were making some kind of specific argument here, but it seems the more we chat the more nebulous your position becomes.

Please help me to understand exactly what you want children to be doing that they aren't. "reading more" is generic when you apparently have very specific requirements for what they should be reading that you are not detailing.

Plays are meant to be seen, but in the case of Shakespeare it's useful to read them first, as the language and references are archaic and hard to understand. You miss a lot of fart and penis jokes if you haven't read the annotated version first.

But I read David Copperfield for fun, when I was 11 because we had it on out bookshelf at home. My father read Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire for the same reasons when he was a teenager. ~ Isab at February 27, 2021 6:15 AM

I agree with the earlier contention that children should be taught to read for fun. However, I also agree that classics should be taught at some point. That they're centuries old is not a reason they're not read. Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, and Poldark have shown there is an appetite for period pieces.

Reading classics gives children the tools of language. It gives them vocabulary and examples of how words can be used effectively. Moby-Dick was one of the hardest reading slogs I ever attempted, but Melville's descriptive language is some of the most complex in English literature.

I mock Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games for their simplistic plots and elementary writing, but I also celebrate them because thousands of children across the country are avidly consuming books. It's when those become the only literary reference of the adults in the room that the problems begin.

Having barely literate adults does not help. When the parents have not read Dickens or Gibbon, the children are less likely to read them. Where the adults avidly consume kid-lit and comic books -- er, graphic novels -- the children will not graduate to adult-level literature.

Kevin's comment about the dissection of the character of The Joker is spot on. We have adults spending their intellectual energy on analyzing comic book characters. And why not? It seems that comic books are the only common literature we have left. Say "Batman" and every American knows to what you're referring. Say "Ozymandias" and you'll get quizzical looks from half your audience.

Whether plays should be seen or read is beside the point. The main point of plays is dialogue. Delivery is important, but many plays are put on with sparse scene settings to give emphasis to the dialogue. Reading them gives at least a decent idea of what is being conveyed in the dialogue.

Movies began as a visual medium, not gaining a voice until 40 years after the invention of motion pictures. Reading a screenplay would not give the reader the visual element movies require.

I think the biggest problem with classical literature is how it is taught -- i.e., deconstruction. Too many teachers insist their students find meaning on every page of canonical literature, forgetting that most of it was written as popular entertainment in its day. Dickens was not writing classics with symbolic meaning on every page; he was writing popular entertainment -- serialized in magazines. Most critics felt his novels would quickly be forgotten and insisted some of his now long-forgotten contemporaries would become canonical, but he never would.

The reason canonical literature is taught, and should be, is because it speaks to the human condition, not the black condition, or the white one, but the human one.

Just let the kids read. Discuss the novel, or the story, or the poem afterward -- without the arbitrary symbolism deconstruction forces upon the students.

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." ~ from the movie, Dead Poets Society

Also, a lot of stage productions of Shakespeare take it too seriously. It's a lot of slapstick and bawdy humor. Most productions gloss that over in favor of eloquence, which is nice too, but Shakespeare can be made much more accessible.

Same with opera. Best opera I ever saw was a Barber of Seville by the Curtis Institute of Music. They really camped it up, it was hilarious and awesome. Best acted opera I've ever seen.

Some people forget comedies are supposed to be, you know, comic.

You can't compare Rowling to Dickens. Carrol/Dodgson would be a better analogy... he was also writing fantasy for a younger audience.

You miss a lot of fart and penis jokes if you haven't read the annotated version first. ~ NicoleK at February 27, 2021 7:58 AM

After all, aren't fart and penis jokes why we read Shakespeare?

😁

Isab, read that again. I said "a play." The original David Copperfield is not a play. I thought it was obvious that it can be pretty difficult, even for a high school freshman, to read ANY play, as opposed to a novel, and appreciate it half as much as a stage production of the same play.

NickoleK Says:

"Plays are meant to be seen, but in the case of Shakespeare it's useful to read them first, as the language and references are archaic and hard to understand. You miss a lot of fart and penis jokes if you haven't read the annotated version first."

It's funny, but that honestly has not been my experience.

Whenever I have seen Shakespeare performed live, the actors have always done an excellent job capturing humor that is not immediately obvious in the text alone (especially not to a child or youth). Careful inspection of the words and context does reveal these details, but in my experience a well-versed troupe really breaths life into the work.

Obviously experiences may vary depending upon the actors and directors involved.

The same goes for more modern plays. I loved many of them both on and off Broadway, but have never been inclined to read the scripts for any of them.

It is also interesting to see how they differ when performed on Broadway versus the West End.

In any event, if what we are talking about is exposing children to culture we must acknowledge that there are significant financial barriers at play... not everyone can afford to take their kids to these things, let alone travel to where they are located.

In terms of encouraging children to read, it starts with the parents reading to their children early and often.

Conan Says:

"Delivery is important, but many plays are put on with sparse scene settings to give emphasis to the dialogue. Reading them gives at least a decent idea of what is being conveyed in the dialogue."

I would argue that the performance of the actors involved is at least as important as the words themselves.

Two examples that immediately come to mind are Proof and Copenhagen, both of which have sets that are composed more or less of the stage and chairs.

The delivery was not subservient to the dialogue... they both were critically important.

Simply reading those plays in your room does a disservice to the full power of those works.

And Conan, of course at least some of the classics have to be taught at some point, by parents as well as teachers, since teachers have only so many hours. Plus, kids who are always allowed to wallow in stuff at home that's three grades below their level clearly won't do well when forced to read at their grade level at school.

The problem comes when half the students don't have parents who read to them, and so teachers have to be the ones to spend extra time convincing kids that even books with long words and very few pictures - if any - CAN be fun, if not instantly. Enter Harry Potter, since there's no shortage of middle-school kids who can barely read at all, never mind chapter books. But you can bet that plenty of teachers wish they could spend 90% of their reading classes on interpretive, not escapist, literature that has actually stood the test of time. Too much candy does not lead to a love of vegetables.

(At the very least, I think HP should only be an OPTION for book reports, not mandatory school reading, since there's a chance kids will freely choose books that are clearly better written, like the Prydain Chronicles, which have plenty of humor as well. Besides, plenty of kids dislike reading any book that's mandatory, on principle.)

Isab, read that again. I said "a play." The original David Copperfield is not a play. I thought it was obvious that it can be pretty difficult, even for a high school freshman, to read ANY play, as opposed to a novel, and appreciate it half as much as a stage production of the same play.

Lenona at February 27, 2021 8:47 AM

I think you miss my point. It really doesn’t matter what it is, when there isn’t a fluffier less filling alternative. (In this day and age, a veritable boatload of them. )

You are missing the forest for the trees.

One of the great amusements for young adults in the 19th century was reading plays as group with each person taking a part.

Would they rather be watching a play? Sure. But to most, outside of the cities, it was not even remotely available.

Sadly the vocabulary skills of even literate adults in this country have so declined, much classic literature, including plays, might as well be in a foreign language.

I read Jude the Obscure a few weeks ago for the first time. There are some universal lessons about the human condition in there. I wonder if I would have noticed them at the age of 20?

Sorry for some of my typos and muddled book titles earlier this morning. I got my first Covid vaccine yesterday, and had a rather bad night.

Showoff. Arriviste.

Some of us got our immunity in that OLD FASHIONED STYLE, uphill both ways, and we liked it that way. Antibodies are for champions!

Showoff. Arriviste.

Some of us got our immunity in that OLD FASHIONED STYLE, uphill both ways, and we liked it that way. Antibodies are for champions!

Crid at February 27, 2021 9:18 AM
Yea Crid, I had it too, and was terribly sick in early March last year. We are hoping that proof of vaccination will make it easier to get back into Japan when the time comes. No other reason really. Not worried about contracting it again.

The Moderna made me wish I had just passed, and I am not sure I am going back for the second round. Will wait and see what tomorrow brings.

Kevin said: "This is known in modern parlance as "being seen," and is a great puzzlement to those of us who enjoy reading to learn about other people and other worlds that are not of our own special, specific experience."

Well, one can't very well blame kids from PAST generations (especially working-class kids) for getting sick and tired of stories about kids in the upper classes who never had to worry about where their next meal was coming from, who seldom misbehaved, and didn't even use slang. (They often had servants, too - the mother in E. Nesbit's The Railway Children was the only breadwinner for her three children and counted pennies, but she still had a maid!)

The problem started when young readers started getting even MORE narrow-minded - and, dare we say it, selfish.

From Canadian critic/journalist Michele Landsberg's 1986 guide (pp 205-206) Reading for the Love of It: Best Books for Young Readers (she was born in 1939):

"It is revealing, I think, that both Judy Blume and S.E. Hinton , another popular American writer for young teenagers , have both explained their motivation thus in interviews: 'When I was young I could never find any books about kids like me, and that's what I wanted to read about.' Their almost identical statements lay bare an almost identical narcissism , as well as an astonishingly limited knowledge of available children ' s literature.

" 'Kids like me' Of course children want to be able to 'identify' with the characters in books, in the sense of recognizing similarities in emotional experience, if not in precise situation; the finest authors have always been able to show us the universal in the unique. Mary Norton's Arriety and Ursula LeGuin's Ged are quintessentially themselves-they are never described physically but we know them intimately, would recognize their characters at once in a crowd – and yet they share the boldness, impatience, dreams, and fears of all young people.

"Hinton and Blume cater to quite a different level of self - knowledge. Without question, puberty brings with it a consuming absorption in the self as a social and sexual being . Normally, however, this is only one aspect of the adolescent's self - awareness. The difficulty arises from the single - mindedness of Blume's focus, For her, it seems, books are only 'about kids like me' if they mirror the lives of young North Americans with a constant repetition of brand names, fashionable problems, and current 'lifestyles.' This facsimile realism, like TV soap opera, has the ultimate effect of shrinking the world to a small, square frame, leaching it of complexity and depth and draining it, finally, of all that is most elusive, pungent, and vital, It is as though we It is as though we invited youngsters into an art gallery where every frame held only a mirror.

"I don't mean to imply that youngsters should be prevented from reading these books (please see the next chapter , on bad books, for a discussion of this conundrum ). However, concerned adults have a duty to consider whether or not badly written 'problem novels' are in fact a distortion of reality and whether they may reinforce some of the more questionable values of our culture ...

(page 207) "What may indeed corrupt the children . . . is not Blume ' s (sexual) frankness, but her bland and unquestioning acceptance of majority values, of conformity, consumerism, materialism, unbounded narcissism, and flat, sloppy, ungrammatical, inexpressive speech."
__________________________________

Trouble is, she unfairly failed to mention Judy Blume's 1981 novel Tiger Eyes, which was a BIG improvement over her previous novels in multiple ways, even if the 15-year-old girl is still kind of selfish and short-sighted and refuses to admit it - at least four times. Also, Landsberg brags on page 235 about how she would have been bored to death, as a preteen, to read about sheltered little suburban Toronto girls like herself when she much preferred to read stories about boys and girls who BOTH got to go on adventures. If she ever mentioned the exhausting identity crisis that so many kids that age and older go through, and how even clunky "problem novels" can be helpful in that way, I couldn't find it. (At least such novels don't give a struggling kid the extra burden of being difficult to read.)

Bottom line, Artemis - I agree completely with Katha Pollitt's essay, but only partly with Michele Landsberg. Kids instinctively eat because they have to, and with a firm but friendly attitude, parents can teach them to eat vegetables without whining and even like them. (Ask vegetarian parents.)

But...kids DON'T get sick if they don't read for fun, so teaching them to like reading is a much more delicate, though essential, process, with all the electronic temptations at their friends' houses. This is why it's so important for parents to get more involved with leisure reading (not schoolwork!) and to learn to like reading, themselves, if they don't.

Lenona Says:

"Bottom line, Artemis - I agree completely with Katha Pollitt's essay, but only partly with Michele Landsberg. Kids instinctively eat because they have to, and with a firm but friendly attitude, parents can teach them to eat vegetables without whining and even like them. (Ask vegetarian parents.)"

I never had any trouble introducing vegetables to either of my kids... and it didn't take a "firm but friendly attitude"... we just presented them at an early age.

My kids eat beets, pickles, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, Brussels sprouts, etc...

Roasted sweet potato is a massive favorite around here.

Children who "whine" about not liking vegetables are likely also children who were fed very sweet things by their parents early on.

I think you are generalizing way too much and speaking to a stereotype as opposed to reality. Generations of children grew up eating vegetables up until the industrial era when heavily processed foods put enormous quantities of sugar into everything.

I find that you are often speaking to a very narrow part of human history as if it is indicative of long standing tradition that can or should be preserved for all time.

Your description doesn't match how things were two hundred years ago and they don't have to match anything in the future.

Children eat what they are used to eating.

My kids for example love oatmeal... because that is what we gave them to eat. They don't eat lucky charms, or frosted flakes, or any number of super sugary processed cereals.

Your stereotype for how kids are is a fiction based upon how people raised in the 40's, 50's, and 60's ended up raising their own kids.

That cohort is not in any way representative of humanity past or future.

"But...kids DON'T get sick if they don't read for fun, so teaching them to like reading is a much more delicate, though essential, process, with all the electronic temptations at their friends' houses. This is why it's so important for parents to get more involved with leisure reading (not schoolwork!) and to learn to like reading, themselves, if they don't."

That you have a personal aversion for "electronic temptations" has no baring on whether or not they are necessary for children to learn.

Computer/electronic literacy is every bit as important for children in the modern age as traditional literacy.

I've seen you complain before about children playing video games, but that was never really a fait criticism. Children can and do learn from video games as well.

The adage everything in moderation and nothing to excess plays an important role here.

I don't know what young adults you are seeing looking only at books with small words and pictures.

In any event, if we are going to trash the reading habits of 10 year old children who are drawn to Harry Potter (which incidentally is not really any different from children in generations past that felt drawn to books like A Wrinkle in Time, or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) then surely we can criticize the tendency for women born in the 40's, 50's. and 60's to rabidly consume romance novels by Danielle Steel or the more recent fervor surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey.

Adults of advanced age have been consuming literary trash for decades... needless to say the youth of today should be able to read Harry Potter, or Twilight, or The Hunger Games without having to be harshly judged by the romance novel generation.

It makes no sense to insist that today's youth consume the so-called classics as part of some nutritious educational diet as prior generations graduated from the classics directly into literary cheese cake.

Danielle Steel didn't make her fortune writing for the youth of today... she made her fortune writing for their grandparents.

I would argue that the performance of the actors involved is at least as important as the words themselves. ~ Artemis at February 27, 2021 9:00 AM

I would agree, to a certain extent. Actors can take a well-written play and make the performance their own, enhancing the audience's enjoyment.

However, a poorly-written play is a poorly-written play and no amount of good acting will save it. The "words themselves" are the more important part of what makes a good play.

==========

Sorry for some of my typos and muddled book titles earlier this morning. I got my first Covid vaccine yesterday, and had a rather bad night. ~ Isab at February 27, 2021 9:13 AM

From what I've heard, it's usually the second shot that causes the problems. So, I guess you've got that to look forward to.

I'm in Group 5, so NC won't vaccinate me until May or June.

==========

There are some universal lessons about the human condition in there. I wonder if I would have noticed them at the age of 20? ~ Isab at February 27, 2021 9:13 AM

Probably not, but had you read it at 20, you would have remembered having read it and that might have been of some value.

==========

And Conan, of course at least some of the classics have to be taught at some point, by parents as well as teachers.... ~ Lenona at February 27, 2021 9:07 AM

I would agree; very few people are likely to gravitate toward the classics if someone is not paving the way for them.

Conan Says:

"However, a poorly-written play is a poorly-written play and no amount of good acting will save it. The "words themselves" are the more important part of what makes a good play."

This is a fair point. Garbage in, garbage out so the saying goes.

I'll amend my position to be that if we presume that the play itself is a quality work that the performance of the actors can and does make an important difference.

I think I feel the same way about music. Poor quality lyrics and score are difficult/impossible for a talented musician to rehabilitate on the fly. By the same token, beautifully written music being performed by someone who lacks talent and skill isn't really entertaining either.