How the Schools Shortchange Boys - In the newly feminized classroom, boys tune out.

City Journal ^ | Summer 2006 | Gerry Garibaldi

[CGTRWK]

Sometimes you don't know what you like. I think it is important to teach the classics.

Reading is a recreational pastime you're trying to impart on a new audience. You don't make excuses about them not knowing what they like yet, you make it fun for them or they won't do it again without coercion, period.

Would you take someone who had never had foreign cuisine before and start them at a Japanese restaurant with raw octopus?

Or take someone who had never been camping before out in February to shiver in freezing rain eating cold canned beans for a week?

How about take a novice shooter out and start them out with a .458 elephant gun and no ear plugs?

Start a non drinker friend off with straight scotch whiskey?

So why would you ever start a novice reader off with boring classic books? It may be important to read them at some point in life, but youth is not that point.

[AnAmericanMother]

In my opinion, if literature is worthy of being described as "classic," it will attract uncoerced readers in every generation.

Depends if you're talking about the folks in the stalls, or the "groundlings". The groundlings came for the low entertainment, Bottom, Quince, and the other "players" doing their bawdy slapstick while Lysander and Hermia, Oberon and Titania kept the educated entertained.

You would NOT approve of the way gentlemen's sons and daughters were taught in those days. Rote learning, and failure to recite letter perfect was punished most severely . . even Roger Ascham, who was considered a most humane and enlightened teacher, advocated frequent use of beating with a stick to encourage learning. Queen (then Princess) Elizabeth herself was beaten for mistakes in her Latin. Now that's "forcing". The Elizabethans recognized that kids often are too young to recognize what is good for them. They were more serious about it than anybody today -- we are contaminated by the awful Dr. Spock and "self led learning". I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that the English prose of the late 16th and early 17th century is the best that has ever been written. Your average 17th century gentleman or lady had a command of the language that isn't even aspired to in these latter and degenerate days.

The groundlings, on the other hand, were sent out to 'prentice and received no education at all, other than what they might pick up along the way themselves, if motivated.

[AnAmericanMother]

You seem to have a visceral dislike of the classics. Must have had a REALLY bad experience.

I could not disagree with you more, however. Teenagers as a group sink to the lowest common denominator. They have to be pushed a bit, or all they'll read is trash if they read at all. In my day it was the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, now it's the Goosebumps (although that's really preteen) and those awful Gossip Girl books.

Once you get them into the good stuff, they seem to like it. Mark Twain is (I think) the best American writer, and he's perfectly accessible to kids even younger than high school age. Much will go over their heads, but much is retained and they can come back to re-read Huck Finn when they understand the gravity of that, "Well, then, I'll go to Hell!"

BTW, I was in the best prep school in Atlanta 30 years ago, and Moby Dick was NOT taught. It isn't taught in that school today (my daughter just graduated there.) I took an entire course on Melville in college, and that's about the first time anybody can begin to appreciate him . . . of course you can't appreciate The Whale fully until you're well into middle age.

[AnAmericanMother]

You're just assuming that "classics" is some sort of fungible category. Some classics are appropriate for the younger grades, some for high school seniors. A clever teacher will assign appropriate classics for the class at hand.

And reading is not merely a 'recreational pastime'. It's necessary for the old-fashioned "liberal education" - that is, what makes a gentleman.

[LexBaird]

I think it's very likely that Shakespeare is too deep to be absorbed properly during many of the years in which it is taught.

There is a broad range of Shakespeare, from simple slapstick to deep psychodrama. The usual HS plays are Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. JC makes much more sense if you know the historical Roman period, which (of course) isn't much taught anymore now that Latin isn't. R&J is pretty simple. The musical West Side Story is a modern retelling.

I don't remember feeling that I was reading something wonderful, just something difficult to understand from my perspective. When you start reading something and the first sentence has half a dozen footnotes to words you won't understand, it tends to make appreciating greatness impossible.

Xenalyte, I will sya that you are probably right and that reading it out loud would have been more effective. But then I would have had no way to comprehend the strange vocabulary at all!

It sounds like you got stuck with a teacher who didn't know what she was reading, either. Seriously, now that you are an adult, pick up a play and read it. Try A Comedy of Errors. It's a simple slapstick about two pairs of identical twins, something that anybody can identify with. Ignore the line breaks and read the sentences straight. Most of the unfamiliar words, you can get by context. Just enjoy the story, worry about nuances later.

About as gloomy as a Shakespearian tragedy.

Vicious, bloody, a sense of inevitable disaster everyone can see coming but no one can stop, yes. But Shakespeare is rarely gloomy. The action is too fast for that; it's more like a train wreck.

[AnalogReigns]

“ ‘Why do we have to do this crap anyway?’ Right?”

Any kid, high school age or not, female or male, who would say this to an adult teacher needs serious lessons in respect--and deserves suspension, period. That this parent didn't punish the kid as well for sassing his teacher speaks volumes.

Too many parents fear their kids and never teach them the discipline of respect for adults. Our schools are full of brats, and yes, a male brat is harder to deal with than a outwardly compliant female brat.

[LexBaird]

I don't know for sure if schools make money on special ed.

I can tell you as a parent of a child with a real special need (lots of brain damage as evidenced in an MRI) that my daughter and many others like her are shortchanged

You are both correct. The schools make the money on the "special ed" kids who really aren't special need. A child with brain damage has real, costly needs. An unruly boy doesn't. Schools want few of the former and lots of the latter in the special ed programs.

[LexBaird]

It's not a book about whales; it's a book about what obsession can do to you.

Yet, years later, I still know how to flense a whale.

[George W. Bush]

The schools make the money on the "special ed" kids who really aren't special need. A child with brain damage has real, costly needs. An unruly boy doesn't. Schools want few of the former and lots of the latter in the special ed programs.

Exactly. Ever notice how they always manage to fill every funded special ed slot, no matter what? Just like when some states like Cali funded bilingual at a higher rate than regular students. They were forcing some Asian kids into Hispanic bilingual classes just to get the extra money. Imagine being an Asian kindergartner trying to learn English language skills in Spanish.

[LexBaird]

Your average 17th century gentleman or lady had a command of the language that isn't even aspired to in these latter and degenerate days.

Just look at the average example of Civil War correspondence from common soldiers of the 1860's, or the newspapers they read.

[George W. Bush]

You would NOT approve of the way gentlemen's sons and daughters were taught in those days. Rote learning, and failure to recite letter perfect was punished most severely . . even Roger Ascham, who was considered a most humane and enlightened teacher, advocated frequent use of beating with a stick to encourage learning. Queen (then Princess) Elizabeth herself was beaten for mistakes in her Latin. Now that's "forcing".

Oh, man, the good ol' days!

[linda_22003]

I did have Jules Verne in school, and a romp through most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, in 7th grade English. Am I alone in this?

[linda_22003]

Comes in handy during barbecue season. ;-D

[Little Ray]

So did I, but I checked them out of the Library. They weren't in textbooks.

[LexBaird]

Just like when some states like Cali funded bilingual at a higher rate than regular students.

I knew a guy with a Latino last name, who was at least third generation American. No Spanish was spoken in his home, yet the LAUSD wanted to place all his kids in ESL programs. Bilingual teachers earn more. Bigger demand, more money, therefore ramrodded by the Union. That's why there was that ridiculous move a few years ago to get "Ebonics" classed as another language, up in Oakland.

[linda_22003]

Or consider M.R. James, remembering a tough master's dressing-down to a student in Ancient Greek class, in 1875:

"A boy who construes 'de' *and* instead of 'de' *but* at sixteen years of age, is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial ingratitude which I tremble to contemplate!"

You can picture the whack of the stick on the desk during that tirade. James notes laconically (in his memoirs, "Eton and King's") "It was bad policy, for it unnerved one for further efforts."

[linda_22003]

We had the books, not textbooks. There are many editions of Sherlock Holmes available cheaply. Everything you read at that age was in a textbook? How odd. Or maybe it was my district that was odd.

[ziggy_dlo]

ping

[LexBaird]

Am I alone in this?

Starting around 7th grade level onward, the "classic" authors I can recall from public school:

Mark Twain
Shakespeare
Melville
Dumas
Dickens
Hardy
Hawthorne
Moliere
Conan Doyle
Thurber
Hemingway
Camus
Kafka
Sinclair
Orwell
Steinbeck
Coleridge
Poe
London
Cooper
Machiavelli

Chaucer

"Bullfinches Mythology"
Mallory
Wilde
Verne
Stevenson
Kipling
Crane
Harte
Hugo

I am sure there were others that slip my mind, plus a host of "not quite classical" that I read for school and for pleasure.

[LexBaird]

Comes in handy during barbecue season. ;-D

1) Take one medium size whale 2) Preheat your rendering cauldren to 350 degrees....