Why do some Catholic schools require students to read lousy, vulgar books?

A reader recently sent an e-mail which opened with this question: "Has St. Ignatius High School never heard of Ignatius Press?"

The institution in question is a Jesuit preparatory school in Cleveland, Ohio. I know very little about it (I'm told that tuition is around $11,000 a year), but I see that the school's website features the following quote:

"The purpose of our education is to give a young man the tools whereby he can answer the question What does God want from me?" -- Rev. Robert J. Welsh, S.J., '54

Very nice. But, having read the school's required summer reading list, I wonder, "Does God really want teenagers to be reading books filled with numerous vulgarities, sexually-explicit language and references, and perspectives that are amoral and hedonistic?"

For example, the novel, The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, which is required summer reading for "English I" and "Honors English I", contains the following passage, uttered by the book's central character, Junior, a teenage boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation (warning: sexual language):

I spend hours in the bathroom with a magazine that has one thousand pictures of naked movie stars:

Naked woman + right hand = happy happy joy joy

Yep, that’s right, I admit that I masturbate.

I’m proud of it.

I’m good at it.

I’m ambidextrous.

If there were a Professional Masturbators League, I’d get drafted number one and make millions of dollars.

And maybe you’re thinking, “Well, you really shouldn’t be talking about masturbation in public.”

Well, tough, I’m going to talk about it because EVERYBODY does it. And EVERYBODY likes it.

And if God hadn’t wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn’t have given us thumbs.

Yeah, yeah, I get it: this is real teen talk written to engage teens who live in the real world and who want tough, straight, honest fiction that takes on controversial and difficult topics. That's the usual line trotted out in defense of such overrated pieces of fiction. Junior also expresses his anger at God and Jesus (after the death of his grandmother's death) by doodling cartoons that are stupid at best and certainly offensive. There is also the dubious revelation that Indians, according to Junior, used to be supporters of gay marriage--until their open-mindedness was corrupted:

My grandmother had no use for all the bay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians.

"Jeez," she said. "Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who's going to pick up all the dirty socks?"

Of course, ever since the white showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance.

If it was just one Catholic school, I might simply say, "Unfortunately, there's usually going to be a bad apple in the barrel." But Alexie's novel (based in large part on his own life) appears on the reading lists of numerous Catholic schools across the country. See for yourself. Why? Is it because it won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People's Literature? If so, then why not have the young teens read the 2004 winner, Godless, by Pete Hautman, in which the the main character says, "Why mess around with Catholicism when you can have your own customized religion? All you need is a disciple or two...and a god.'" (To be fair, Hautman's book is not, from what I can tell, actually antagonistic to religion; it might even be quite the opposite.)

And what to make of the inclusion of The Privileges, by Jonathan Dee? I read parts of it online, along with some reviews. It appears to be both repulsive and forgettable, filled to the edges with foul language and disagreeable characters, many of them seemingly hoping to be in a Camus novel but lacking the depth or focus to make the cut. I suppose it passes for what is now considered "sophisticated", what with the "f" bombs and narcissistic chatter. Goodness.

Looking at the summer book list for St. Ignatius High School, I noticed that none of those required for English classes was written before 1970, and all but one--The Hollow Hills, by Mary Stewart (1973)--were published in the past eighteen years. Do schools even bother with the classics anymore? Or has the push for being "relevant" gotten to the point that any book written before iPhones existed is relegated to the outer darkness?

It got me thinking of the books that I had to read for English classes when I was high school (a public school) in the mid-1980s. They included several plays by Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet), For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ivanhoe, My Name Is Asher Lev (a personal favorite), 1984, A Tale of Two Cities, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I cannot recall reading a book that had been published in the just ten or twenty years before. Which is not to say that good fiction for teens isn't being written in the 21st century. Not at all. But I have serious doubts about The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. If I was a parent whose child was required to read that book, I would have some questions for the English teacher, beginning with this one: "Have you never heard of Ignatius Press?" And, as a follow-up: "Or of the Ignatius Critical Editions?

I thought reading Lord of the Flies was a bit much for 9th grade when we had to read it. There were some inappropriate stuff in it and I went to Catholic School.

I substitute taught in three different high school English classes during a unit in which Lord of the Flies was being taught. In each one, I asked the kids if their teacher had explained that the expression "lord of the flies" is a translation of Beelzebub, the Hebrew nickname for an ancient Semitic god that is also used as an alternative name for Satan. In none of the classes were the students told that.

Exposure to the “dark side" to prepare to refute it is NOT, IMHO, a bad idea.

They get plenty of that without the involvement of catholic schools, believe me.

A protestant friend of mine uses your argument all the time -- equally fallacious there. In fact, he used it to say his kids might as well go to a public school rather than a faith-oriented school. That's not a line of reasoning I'm going to engage in. Why not just go to a known Satanic school to prepare for the very worst?

You are correct. I have a friend who teaches 8th grade, and she says the only thing most of these kids can memorize are lines from Bachelor Part 2 or the latest vulgar rap song.

These kids are inundated with cultural trash on a daily basis. A shame that schools would waste a golden opportunity to expose kids to that which is true and good.

LOL

Whole Cloth arguments you have there...

Why not require the reading, to allow PRODUCTIVE discussions, and leadership from the School on the depravity-obsessed foolishness?

Oh...that's right, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.....that's the ticket (pretend it doesn't exist).

Oh...that's right, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil...

Again, the exact words of my protestant friend.

Sorry, it is not necessary to experience evil to recognize it. A woman doesn't have to get an abortion, you don't have to get a subscription to Hustler, you can skip injecting heroin that one time. We all are confronted by evil every day without going out and looking for it.

Now, if it were their intention to discuss from a critical perspective -- to point out the flaws and the immorality (at an appropriate age group -- college), that would be one thing. But this is a Jesuit school. The intention is the opposite.

My daughter attended a Jesuit highschool for a couple of years. Aside from the fact that the principal was an all but out Jesuit priest, who minced around the campus in long scarves with a puppy in tow, she was forced to read book and short story, one after the other about the black experience. In every reading the black(s) were degraded, humiliated and criminal or preyed upon.

My poor middle class black daughter was embarrassed. She could not believe the limitations of the staff who saw blacks only as victims. We pulled her out after a couple of years, we could see the limited leftist mind in action.

One wonders if Greeley took advantage of his condition and the opportunity the Almighty gave him and repented.

The classics are classics for a reason. They speak to every age of the human experience and demonstrate that there is nothing new under the sun, that men have been battling God, one another, and themselves, from the beginning of time.

We now live in a throwaway culture. Missals containing the Word of God, for example, are now tossed in the trash each season instead of being well-worn over the years and treasured. The pulp these young people are reading today will not survive the ages. They won't even survive the decade.

And to think people pay $11K per year to expose their kids to this. Expensive babysitting. But I guess it "preps" them for the apostasy of college.

This is my daughter’s 10th Grade summer reading list. There are a bunch of depressing ones.

Unearthly by Cynthia Hand
The Warrior Heir by Cinda Chima
Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card
The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
The Maze Runner by James Dasher
Uglies by Scott Westerfield

I think the Sarah Byrnes book is about a pregnant teen.

Have you read any of these? How bad are they?

Anything’s possible on the deathbed but earlier I saw some quotes from past years that definitely didn’t suggest any sort of repentance.

Pathfinder is a great, challenging read. It’s quite the cerebral sci fi book. The Maze Runner and Uglies are typical teenage dystopian fiction. Lots of issues of the abuse of governmental power. The Good Earth is, obviously, a classic. The others I’m not sure about.

Sorry, it is not necessary to experience evil to recognize it.

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One does not “experience” evil in the reading of a book.

One experiences evil in the company of humans.

JMO.

yes. My reading list in high school was similar. Our teachers were lousy and that made it worse.

But the bad news is it made me hate classical books...

so it wasn’t until I retired that I got a chance to listen to decent teachers (some from free university podcasts, a few from the teaching company from the local library)for me to enjoy Home and Virgil...one of these days, I might actually try to get through Moby Dick...

Although Moby Dick is a difficult book, I enjoyed it. My father, who grew up reading sea stories, was a big fan of the book, and I had seen the 1956 movie version in the theater..

I have a friend who teaches 8th grade, and she says the only thing most of these kids can memorize are lines from Bachelor Part 2 or the latest vulgar rap song.

If you can memorize a vulgar rap song, then you have the ability to memorize Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional" or Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias".

I live in Cleveland. Here is my post which I’ve written on the topic. It contains the email I sent to the President and Principal.

http://contrapauli.blogspot.com/2013/06/eternal-vigilance.html

I advise everyone to do what I did. I actually got a very cordial personal reply from Father Murphy, the President of Ignatius High School.

http://estquodest.com

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