BF2S Forums Why we're working our young people too hard

Macbeth wrote:

What made them classics was the fact that they are not offensive or controversial and the local board of education thought they were the safest choice. They also tend to be really easy or have a lot already written about them so there isn't any worries about kids just not getting it and failing out. Add to the fact the older teacher are comfortable teaching what they have been teaching for 20 years.

My senior year English teacher explained this us when we complained about how boring Beowulf was. It turns into one giant positive feed back loop. Books become classics because of how much they get pushed and they get pushed because they are classics.

Jay wrote:

In some cases it's because it's a foundational book for all of western literature a la Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. In other cases it's simply because it's a book that the teacher learned about in the past, or it is a book that was able to pass through the school board curriculum committee, or it's the 'well, they're doing it, so it must be good, let's copy'. Personally, I hated most of the classics I was forced to read. Jane Austen? omgkillmenow Same for Dickens, and Hardy or any 18th century American writer. Basically the entire era where authors were paid by the word should be flushed from history imo.

What it comes down to is literature being subjective, teachers being inherently lazy, and there being a plethora of commentary on the books taught in schools. Want to know where your english teachers opinion on certain passages of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" came from? The fucking teachers edition of Norton's Anthology

Spark wrote:

Haha not my last English teacher. Wonderful bloke, free-spirited doesn't cut it.

Pity the subject (I mean the syllabus) was dross.

Ty wrote:

I like this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

The full lecture is worth a watch too but this is the gist of it.

Uzique wrote:

classics and the canon is a complex subject. the fact your definition of classic means 'taught in school' makes me facepalm a bit. d h Lawrence will never be taught in schools, and he sure was offensive enough to be banned in the states for decades. but undeniably a classic writer. often it's about challenging prevailing cultural norms and ideas. a classic is often very subversive before it becomes accepted...

Uzique wrote:

jane austen is a classic writer because she epitomises both an artistic (that is, the realist novel in its early fruition as a new genre) and historical period in her writings. she is significant in that a) she is a female writer and b) she is an early example of the emerging bourgeoisie middle-class structure. what seems trite today in the long loveplots was actually quite striking then, as the private love-lives and emotions of women wasn't much talked about. again, as i said, a lot of classic literature is subversive in many ways before it becomes entrenched and ossified. austen is also interesting today (though not for me) from an academic point of view because much of the 20th/21st century's main theoretical and academic disciplines are in her work - the three big fields of contemporary study are all there: marxism, feminism, postcolonialism. thus a lot of secondary discourse and criticism is still being done with her work, keeping it ever interesting (though again not for me). i don't really know why it would be taught in american high-schools, other than the fact that it represents the kinda archetypal example of a straight, standard novel. austen's work formally is just about as standard as the novel can ever get; in that sense its a good model, but for a seasoned/adventurous reader, it's boring as shit. but then again, sometimes you just want a novel to read. and then dickens, hardy, austen, eliot et al are all there, rich and detailed. you can't always be reading barth or gaddis.

faggot wrote:

they dont teach dh lawrence in schools

me wrote:

yes they do