Catering to the Teenage Reader

Editor's note: Starting today, Class Struggle will appear Fridays on washingtonpost.com. In addition, Jay Mathews writes a separate column on education for the newspaper's Metro section that is published Mondays on the Schools & Learning page.

As a child, I always enjoyed reading. But when high school teachers began to demand that I analyze what I read, I resisted. Was it really necessary to drag symbolic modes out of the lively dialogue of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," or painstakingly dissect all the relationships in "The Great Gatsby"?

In the Outlook section of the Aug. 24 Post, Nancy Schnog, an English teacher at the private McLean School in Potomac, rushes to the defense of reading-for-fun adolescents like me. She suggests the traditional way of teaching her subject should be discarded -- a notion that occurs to her after she sees stacks of works by Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston on a bookstore table labeled "summer reading." She also questions her own decision to ask her students to read British Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge for two weeks after a month's study of American transcendentalists.

"Far too often," she writes, "teachers' canonical choices split from teenagers' tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels."

But that same edition of The Post also had an inadvertent challenge to her argument, in a long, vivid piece by my colleague David Maraniss about the upbringings of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Maraniss interviewed men and women who had been Dunham's friends when they attended Mercer Island High School, near Seattle, in the late 1950s. Dunham was part of a clique of self-conscious teen intellects who were chosen for an advanced humanities courses, taught by men whose names they still remembered: Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert. What did they recall best from that reading list? Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Hegel, Mill, Marx and other complex works just as daunting to high school students 50 years ago as they are today.

Obama's future mom loved those writers and passed on that well-nurtured taste for intellectual discourse and literary complexity to her son and daughter. Her success in that course gave her the confidence to embrace a life of the mind. She became a well-regarded anthropologist. Developing intellectual muscle became important to her children, as it had been to her. She prepared them to appreciate such teaching themselves, excel at demanding colleges and embrace careers -- law for Obama, history teaching for his sister -- that depended on aggressive thinking, the epitome of what a good president or a good educator does. A feature story on John McCain by my colleague Michael Leahy in the Aug. 31 Post revealed that some of his teachers and his father got to him, too, leading him to wade into academic waters as deep as Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

So what are we to make of this? Schnog wasn't given enough space to say much about a cure for our classics-ridden English lessons. But she does call for "adding works of science fiction or popular nonfiction to the reading list." Should we abandon the most strenuous parts of the literary and philosophical canon in order to get more students engaged in their studies, or will that doom the next generation to a watered-down version of reality and make future writers, teachers, researchers and politicians the poorer for it?

I know many fine high school English teachers. I sought their advice. They seemed to feel it was, in many respects, a false choice. A good teacher introduces students to both the classics and more modern works, paying attention to what works best with which students.

Frazier O'Leary, who teaches Advanced Placement English at Cardozo High School in the District, said: "As someone who teaches Beowulf and Chaucer along with [Flannery] O'Connor, [Sandra] Cisneros and Edward P. Jones, I feel that good writing never dies. My students are always interested in how writers like Shakespeare and Morrison are masters and mistresses of their own genres and how their artistry is what makes their works timeless. I don't think it is necessary to slim down or modernize the canon. I do think it is important for 21st-century students to be able to believe that they could one day be a part of a canon which includes people who look like them. We are talking about the ability to read and comprehend works written generally in English, not works written by English people necessarily."

Mary Ellen Webb, who teaches 12th-grade English and journalism at Westfield High School in Fairfax County, agreed. "There are plenty of opportunities for students to read Shakespeare as well as, say, Gary Paulsen or Ann Brashares," she said. "My classes read some classics but also have a couple of free-choice reads. I also think it's useful to show students how they can make modern-life connections with some of the 'greater' literature: What teen can't relate to the love triangles and unrequited love in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'? I don't teach 'The Great Gatsby,' but I've pointed out to students how easy it would be to imagine Paris Hilton or any of the Osbourne family showing up at the wild party scene toward the beginning of the book."

Dan Verner is a veteran English teacher in Northern Virginia who has since retirement been enjoying the fruits of other teachers' labors by reading and scoring SAT essays. He said he is comfortable sitting "firmly astride the fence on this issue." He said: "On one hand, the students will find ways not to read books they don't want to, and so we need to try to appeal to their tastes and interests. On the other hand, the 'classics' are rich and rewarding for those students able and willing to take them on. I suppose it depends on the student. Some devour Shakespeare; others have to be pulled kicking and screaming through any book. English majors tend to live in their own little world and think everyone, no matter their age or interest, should share their taste in reading. But I think as teachers we need to engage our students in reading, writing, speaking and thinking, and if that means we use something other than the classics to do that, so be it."

On the day I graduated from college I married a classmate who had, at least for a while, majored in history and literature. I asked her this week how she felt about being required to analyze the classics in high school. She said she loved it. "It was like solving puzzles, same as in math class," she said.

I confess that on those few occasions in my teen years when I managed to discern what the Great Writer was up to, I felt good. I hardly ever read serious literary fiction anymore. My bed stand is full of science fiction and popular history. I can say with great confidence that I will never be president. But it did me no long-standing harm to sit and think for a few minutes about the author's intent. As surly as American teenagers can be, I wouldn't abandon the effort to connect them to several hundred years of culture, in Europe and other places. Even if they complain to each other about these assignments, that kvetching is, in essence, a conversation about great literature, and worth the trouble.