There are plenty of better books to replace it with, however, which would be beneficial for young people. Like this one, for instance:
Posted on 12/07/2012 10:25:09 AM PST by grundle
American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014.
A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace.
Books such as JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced by "informational texts" approved by the Common Core State Standards.
Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California's Invasive Plant Council.
The new educational standards have the backing of the influential National Governors' Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and are being part-funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Related Articles
Letters reveal the secret side of JD Salinger 27 Jan 2011
Why Harper Lee has remained silent 01 May 2011
JD Salinger 28 Jan 2010
Jamie Highfill, a teacher at Woodland Junior High School in Arkansas, told the Times that the directive was bad for a well-rounded education.
"I'm afraid we are taking out all imaginative reading and creativity in our English classes.
"In the end, education has to be about more than simply ensuring that kids can get a job. Isn't it supposed to be about making well-rounded citizens?"
Supporters of the directive argue that it will help pupils to develop the ability to write concisely and factually, which will be more useful in the workplace than a knowledge of Shakespeare.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
If you still have it, you should post it here!
Now THAT would be good news.
Personally, I’d assign “The Red Air Fighter” - the autobiography of Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen or something similar... AND entertaining.
In eleventh grade Catholic school we read “Of Human Bondage”, “The Power and The Glory”, “1984”, “Brave New World”, and “Morte D’Arthur”.
Hmmm...three of those selections were cautionary tales of the individual caught in the midst of totalitarian dictatorship.
Not the same message in the schools of today.
I don’t know about “Rye” as a search for God. Wasn’t Salinger a Buddhist, if anything? That has very little connection to the search for God, or one that a Catholic would find enlightening, except that it is “spiritual.” I don’t find it nihilistic like some.
Salinger’s favorite tactic, or among them, is to suggest a truth beyond expression, and to present silence as the greatest expression of wisdom, or something like that. Which makes for bad literature in my opinion. It is trying desperately hard to be more profound than you’re actually capabilities. Which is a problem of symbolism, and why I choke on it. Because not always but often they want it to do the work for them.
“Gatsby” and “Lord of the Flies,” for instance, are much better. There the symbolism is simple and incorporated into the story itself, instead of a decoder ring that gives you extra special knowledge a cursory reading can’t. Which doesn’t mean a book should only mean what you can catch the first go around. But it should be in there, somewhere. Not like “Catcher,” which must be saved from banality by knowledge which passeth show.
Personally, I think most “symbolism” in literature is made-up garbage to torture students and make a book seem deeper than it really is. For instance, a lot of people try to find “symbolism” in Dickens and miss the fact that he was getting paid by the word...
I am just glad I missed Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick, and Gatsby. Give me Heinlein, PC Wren, and John Buchan, any day.
People, this article is tongue-in-cheek. Can’t you see that?
An excellent reading list - you were well-served by that school.
Sorry. Too many moves and too much stuff accumulated and thrown away since then.
I’m not attempting to be smarter than you, or convert you to my way of thinking, but what you say is what was said by most high school students to me over the years. Fair enough, I say, let’s look at the symbols and see if they make sense. Each reader must decide. You explore the writer’s autobiography for clues, his upbringing, his outlook, his influences, the times he lived in, his other writings, his thesis, his reason for writing the book. If the symbols begin to show a pattern in light of much of the foregoing, a case can be made. I don’t expect to have students accept something because I say so; I try to convince them in terms of logic. But more importantly, I try to get them to be careful readers, to open doors to possibilities. Great literature is a storehouse of treasures, and I want to make them aware that perhaps many nuggets of great wealth lie hidden, and it takes time and critical thinking to uncover them. And the discovery must be their own.
Thanks. I did not read it until I was in my thirties, and
have reread it 5 or 6 times. I love Holden for figuring
out phoniness in society and becoming enraged when he sees the f-word scrawled where his kid sister could see it.
And every now and then, I’ll call someone a crumb-bum.
Well, I have to admit it isn’t hard to be smarter than me...
Readers should not need to know the author’s biography - was this available to readers when he wrote the novel? It is valid to consider the context of the period and culture in which the author lived, but if you have to know the author’s biography just to understand his writing, then the novel is drivel. The novel should be complete by itself.
Likewise, readers shouldn’t get to decide about the symbols - either the symbols mean something - or they don’t. Symbols are simply a method of compacting additional meaning in fewer words (a literary equivalent to an acronym?); if the symbols are ambiguous and can mean different things to different readers, then they have NO meaning (if they mean multiple things, then the author is being too darn clever for his own good...). Ambiguity means the writer is not telling the story effectively and his writing is just so much egotism “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
St. John’s College High School, Washington, D.C.
Class of 1966
AKA America’s Funniest Home Videos.
You are half-right, I think, in that they don’t completely make it up. It’s just that books which are fruitful of symbols—like Moby Dick—or books which are incomprehensible to casual readers—like Ulysses—tend to get assigned more often. Less manipulatable books are forgotten.
Many good posts on this thread so far. I ‘m posting to you because of your well-written second and third paragraphs in this post.
I read Catcher before it was a very big-deal but preferred Salinger’s other stories (F&Z, RHTRC&SAI). Many a college thesis was written about some aspect of Salinger’s books in the ‘60s, for sure. Never wanted to track him down and have a conversation with him, as a girlfriend tried to do.
Fifteen years later, I began to realize how profoundly my thinking and reasoning had been negatively altered by his efforts. Salinger’s works may have been worth studying, but not from a liberal college professor’s POV.
Lord knows how I ever came to think as a conservative again.
What did you hate about it? Much of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ was written during World War II when Salinger was in the service. So when reading that novel keep in mind that the person was writing it while preparing for or recovering from D-Day (in which Salinger participated).
That thing about Dickens being ‘paid by the word’ is a canard and not true. He was paid by the installment.
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