I'm not familiar with the other items, but "A Long Way Gone" is plenty sophisticated enough from a thematic point of view. Violent, gritty, complicated, it portrays an ugly piece of the world and has some serious perspective. Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.'
I think the author's main point is that if we want to accommodate a new generation of learners we need to shift the canon. It doesn't mean that great classic works don't have their place in the world, it just means they don't have the value they once did for educational purpose at the level students traditionally explored them.
Grounding this in the material world: a book really only helps teach you something if you actually read it.
So the Odyssey was suitable for 2000 years. But suddenly now, it’s a problem? We’ve had new generators of learners every generation. Yet this current generation is apparently more special than the rest.
Lazier is more like it. If someone TiKToc-ified the Odyssey, kids would be quoting it from memory.
Historically, Homer's epics and other advanced texts were taught primarily to the top 5% to 10% of teenage students, specifically those from privileged social classes, in various classical education systems.
However, it's only in the last 40 to 50 years that rigorous education has been expanded to include the remaining 90% to 95% of the teenage population through widespread public education reforms.
It's misleading to label the current generation as uniquely lazy or incompetent. Instead, they're being challenged in ways that the vast majority of teenagers for the last 2000 years simply were not.
> Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.'
No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose. And I agree with what the GP said: we need to be holding our kids to higher standards and expecting they rise to that level, not going "well that language is too hard for them so let's take it off".
> No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose.
I disagree with that take on sophistication. As a counterexample, Hemingway's work is a masterclass on sophisticated prose done with minimal language, but I wouldn't want to read Pride and Prejudice in Hemingway's style. There isn't one yardstick for "sophistication".
The Odyssey is an interesting example of this (and one the author uses). I was taught the Fagles translation. That translation is not easy to read, and in many ways its choice of language is a distraction from studying the literature. I wouldn't pick that translation for my own children, even if I feel that they should at some point study The Odyssey, which I do.
We should be treating these works as what they are: literary classics, but in a historic dialect, where part of the literary exercise is the archeological/anthropological dig through the prose. As far as I can tell, that's how the author is approaching it, and I don't think calling it out that way is lowering any bar.
To me, 'sophisticated' connotes complexity in a way that means I'd never use it to describe something extremely simple or minimal, including Hemingway's prose— even if it meets the definition of another sense of the word. I might use other adjectives to praise it, but not 'sophisticated'.
And I think any reasonable curriculum should include some 'sophisticated' texts in the narrower sense described above. I actually don't think that sophistication in the sense of worldliness is as important a thing to try to ensure in this kind of curriculum. That's more a matter of fashion or ingroup signaling than any textual feature, and you'll get it for free in any school curriculum anyway— preexisting canons will impose themselves one way or another and demonstrating fluency in the canon is the main thing that evinces sophistication (divorced from complexity) in a text (or a student, for that matter).
I agree with the rest of what you're saying, though.
What good is flowery prose or outdated, verbose subject matter like Parisian sewer systems, if it actively discourages kids from reading it? Horses to water.
There are plenty of abridged versions of Les Misérables that includes all the parts relevant to the student reader and retains the appropriate level of challenge in leveling up the student's ability to engage with higher level writing.
I think the point the author is making is why choose Les Miserables, even in an abridged format, if the kids would respond better to something more contemporary. There's no shortage of phenomenal writing from the past 50 years. So many of the books in the "canon" they teach kids are so boring that I have a hard time believing anyone isn't lying when they say they sat through something like "In Search of Lost Time".
The point of reading education isn't just to get text in front of students' eyeballs. We're trying to develop the ability to read well, to effectively comprehend any text which you might encounter. There's quite a lot of things people might like to do in their lives that involve reading overly flowery or obnoxiously verbose text.
Just yesterday I had to read a super dense and frankly poorly written document for work. If nobody had ever made me slog through something I didn't want to read in school, I suspect I would have been unable to comprehend it and might very well have not made it to the end at all.
A problem might be the (missing) gradual approach, like hitting the kids with Les Miserables without getting them hooked on reading already with easier stuff. I'm also pretty sure there's enough good material speaking a more contemporary language and addressing more contemporary issues - it's not like the literary trove of the world is made of 5 good books only (or so I hope).
The goal isn’t just to get kids to look at a book. It’s to get them to stretch themselves and get better at something that is hard. The idea that you should have the kids read what is interesting to foster a love of reading and then they will be able to grow into mature reading habits as they grow has been around for a while now. As someone with a child in the 4/5th grader range, the effects are not pretty. When I was that age, the most popular books were shorter novels like Goosebumps and Animorphs, or longer novels like Redwall and Harry Potter. At my daughter’s school book fair a few weeks ago, it is almost exclusively graphic novels, be it childish slop like Dav Pilkey puts out, or simplified graphic novel versions of books like Goosebumps. Let’s be clear, stuff like Captain Underpants existed 30 years ago, but today it’s almost exclusively that. We haven’t created a generation of children who love to read, we’ve created a generation of children who largely, by middle school, haven’t graduated past picture books.
Prescribing challenging reads is also to get kids used to the idea of doing something that might not be their choice of what they want to do, which is an important life skill to have as an adult. Education isn’t simply about learning math and phonics. It’s about learning how to be a human being who can function in society. Ask your educator friends about how the recent generation is doing, especially since the pandemic. It’s a dumpster fire, with kids never having been less equipped to do things like following instructions, interacting appropriately with classmates, or holding their focus for even small amounts of time.
Simultaneously we are seeing employers increasingly wary of Gen Z employees due to their inability to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace.
We are creating a curriculum based on the idea that kids should minimize having to do things they don’t want to do or might be difficult, and are now seeing a generation of children who are incapable of doing anything they don’t want to do or anything difficult, and it’s impacting their ability to function in society.
> Simultaneously we are seeing employers increasingly wary of Gen Z employees due to their inability to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace.
What I've seen of Gen Z suggests less an inability and more an unwillingness to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace. And good for them. The workplace remains an unquestioned reservoir of authoritarianism in our culture, and I'd love to see the young people dismantle it.
> We are creating a curriculum based on the idea that kids should minimize having to do things they don’t want to do or might be difficult, and are now seeing a generation of children who are incapable of doing anything they don’t want to do or anything difficult, and it’s impacting their ability to function in society.
This is a solid point. Mostly I don't really agree that the right arena here is the domain of the canon. Real problem here is material - more parents work more hours and bring home less than they used to, and they devote less attention to their kids' education. It's not surprising that kids would rather stare at their phone than do any meaningful learning given that trend. Adjusting the canon to be more forgiving and hopefully give kids something to grasp onto and challenge themselves with is probably a fine intermediate solution for the moment, but there's a larger problem at play.
"The canon" as most people would recite... Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, etc.... is now at least 60 years old, if not 100. It's a fuzzy thing, but it's certainly old.
Merely being old is not a problem. Great literature is perhaps not literally "timeless", but it can survive being pulled out of its original context, and to the extent that students have to engage with a foreign context, that can be part of the point.
However, that's 60-100 years of language shift since the canon was canonized, and that is a problem. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it's one that needs to be taken into account. I don't see anyone taking it into account, because if anyone questions the canon, they are obviously just a drooling arm-dragging uncultured buffoon who should be evicted from sophisticated society.
But, you know, I'm in my mid-40s, and I've seen real, bona-fide language shifts in American English. Even the English of the 1980s is getting dated. Reading back into the 1950s will result in readers encountering a number of dead words. I remember reading in that era, and every celebrity seemed to be described as "indefatigable". One can assemble from the roots a good guess about what it probably means, and in this case, such a guess is correct, but you can't actually be sure without looking it up or reading it in a lot of contexts. When's the last time you saw an actor described as "indefatigable"?
It doesn't take many of these sorts of things before you are unable to analyze, enjoy, or even necessarily comprehend the "great literature" because you're too busy just figuring what on Earth it is actually saying. It's hard to analyze subtext when you're a normal reader struggling to grasp the text.
Of course, I say this into a culture that is still holding up the original Shakespeare as the sine qua non of Literature, despite the fact it is now over a century past the point that a "normal person" ought to be expected to comprehend it on a base level. If someone wants to teach Shakespeare to a modern teenager, it ought to be done in translation at this point. That I wouldn't mind; there's still a lot of "literature" in it that could be studied through a translation. But the idea that a teenager should be expected to read
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
and get anything out of it is just insane. At least 4 lines have a major vocabulary issue, more depending on what you expect from your teen. All the rest have at least minor issues, using words that are at least unusual in modern English, and many of them with connotations that are even more unusual if not dead.
But 18th century literature is starting to read similarly to a modern teen, and 19th is a bigger stretch now than it was when I was young. It is not wrong to account for this in trying to figure out how to reach modern students, it's just realism.
Right, but nothing's new about that. I, like I assume every other American high school student of my time (high school in the 90s), read it and discussed it. We had the standard book with the text on one side and definitions and help on the other. What's so different about this generation that they can't handle that?
Part of your argument is that Shakespeare is not worth learning or being a part of "the canon", which is fine, but it being difficult is irrelevant.
re: Shakespeare, any edition of the plays that high school or undergrad students are being asked to read will have line/word glosses that address the vocabulary problem. When I read Shakespeare in high school we also read key passages aloud together in class and discussed the meaning, and in some cases were asked to memorize a passage. We covered one Shakespeare play in each of my four years of high school, and I got plenty out of it.
In other words, you read a translation but with extra steps.
We might as well cut out the extra steps.
I did say that there's plenty of literary content there, but there's no reason to jam the original in student's faces and insist "THIS! THIS IS LITERATURE! oh by the way here's the definition of every tenth word and commentary on every third phrase".
You could get the content with a pure translation. But part of Shakespeare is the cadence, and that's really hard to preserve in a translation.
You think that's not important for modern people? Hip hop would disagree with you. So would many preachers (including politicians). And showing high school students who are into hip hop "look, Shakespeare is doing the same things" is a really interesting hook for them.
When I was a teenager, about 20 years ago. I read shakespeare without any issues. Beowulf was challenging but doable with effort and didnt require outside source. What has changed so much in the last 20 years that the teenagers should need a translation?
Your homework is to go find a teenager and ask them:
What is a bodkin?
What is "contumely"?
What is "dispriz’d love"?
What does "his quietus make" mean?
Finally, you can give them the entire passage and ask, what is Hamlet actually contemplating here?
A abnormally well-read teenager stands a chance at that last one... but only a chance. An average teenager does not.
I will be blunt. I don't believe you read it "without any issues". Either you're just saying that so you don't bear the dread stigma of "couldn't read Shakespeare", you had a commentary you were reading it with, or you don't even know what you were missing. That's just a single portion of one famous passage from Hamlet. The plays are rife with these issues, it's not like those are the four missing vocabulary things that you need to know to read Shakespeare and after that it's smooth sailing. I could read 18th century stuff in school fairly comfortably and read into the 17th century, I know what's that's like, and even then Shakespeare was something I could just barely catch the main plot for. The innuendo, the subtext, the historical interrelationships, much of the actual literature of the literature, no way. The change hasn't happened in the past 20 years, it's the past 100 at least.
And people need to stop pretending otherwise. People need to stop pretending that, oh, yes, I totally caught Shakespeare's commentary on the politics of medieval Italy, quite obvious really, who could be stupid enough to miss it it's so obvious to anyone? It's not helping. It's hurting people and turning them off to literature. It needs to stop.
Did you never read Shakespeare in school? You are not asked to read the bare text, there are glosses in the margins. Go look at the Amazon preview of a Folger library Shakespeare play, e.g. [0]. You also have a teacher to provide context and guidance. You are getting worked up into a tizzy in an attack on a straw man.
I think the author's main point is that if we want to accommodate a new generation of learners we need to shift the canon. It doesn't mean that great classic works don't have their place in the world, it just means they don't have the value they once did for educational purpose at the level students traditionally explored them.
Grounding this in the material world: a book really only helps teach you something if you actually read it.