What is reading? A method of learning, total engagement of the mind, sitting in the corner of a couch turning pages, unaware of the clock ticking and calling the reader to other things. Seeing through another person’s eyes.
Listening to the voices of ages past, of humans from all written history. It is sharing, listening to secrets, the author knew and had to tell someone and couldn’t keep in. It is openness to whispers from across years, silent and ready. Openness to eons past, to infinite experience, seeking wisdom or fun or both.
What is writing? Leaving a trail of bread crumbs for anyone lost in the same woods as you are. Having an idea so pivotal, so important that it cannot stay inside, shadow-shrouded, that it must be shared and offered to others.
What are stories? Stories are lessons learned by others than we can learn through them. They are the lives we want to live, the lives we worry we’ll lead, cautionary and inspiring. Values lived out in choices, decisions and circumstances.
Just rambling thoughts here–I may some back and edit.
On another note, I’ve been stirred up by an assignment in my library class that asks me to come up with alternatives and supplements to modern classics. Two areas I agree with are: it’s good to consider and reconsider what we are reading. In particular, I’m no big fan of Lord of the Flies or The Great Gatsby. It’s good to audit curriculum to aim at including all students. Interestingly, I agree with all of #DisruptTexts points about literature being liberation and including works that represent student experience. ” Here is their manifesto:
- We believe that literature provides access to a diversity of experiences by providing “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” (Bishop, 1990) to develop empathy and understanding. A curriculum that does not reflect the diversity of human experience does a disservice to all students.
- We believe that no curricular or instructional decision is a neutral one. For too long, the traditional “canon” — at all grade levels — has excluded the voices and rich literary legacies of communities of color. This exclusion hurts all students, and especially students of color.
- We believe that critical analysis of all texts helps students become stronger thinkers. Each of us has studied, taught, and continue to teach from canonical texts, just as we also make intentional choices about teaching, pairing, and centering BIPOC voices.
-https://disrupttexts.org/lets-get-to-work/
I very much agree that no curricular decision is “neutral,” so I wonder what other values we are looking for in addition to diversity. Diversity is one aspect of human experience, more of a pathway really and less a destination. So what destinations are we aiming at? Truth? Goodness? What is the good life? Morality? I believe that all stories are parables, stories of values and what we value as a society and/or as storytellers. I realize these may be considered outdated notions, but I think they are true and unavoidable if we recognize that nothing is “neutral.” So while I support diversity, I ask what else are we spotlighting? What are our values? They aren’t neutral either.
I also ask this question of diversity. Diversity is usually considered as skin color, ethnic background, sex, sexuality, disability, and occasionally religion. I wonder about other types of diversity, ones that aren’t visible on the outside. What about people who are adult survivors of abuse? People who are adopted? People who deal with alcoholism in themselves or their families? People in poverty? Humans have infinite facets, infinite types of diversities. Some are more socially potent than others, but the point remains. We can aim at showing stories as both “windows” and “mirrors” to students, and I agree that we should. But I also would acknowledge that we will never reflect every type of diversity to every facet of every student. Nor will we offer all the windows. Of course, I don’t mean that we shouldn’t try. I mean only we have to set realistic expectations on what we can accomplish. For instance, a white male student may deal with horrible alcoholism in his home that is the defining struggle of his life, the thing that he aims to conceal everyday at school. He may not see himself in diverse books and how could the teacher or librarian know? While earnestly providing reflections in stories for students, I propose that we also consider values.
To that end, while holding the goal of a diversity of reflection, why not also highlight books, many of them overlap, that are generally human in character. And we ought to state that we are doing, and state what the values are, to help students see themselves even in old works, dare I say classics, in order to see some things that are true for all us humans and have been for thousands of years. We allow anthropologists and biologists to do this, but literature and philosophy are approaching banishment from doing the same.
In defense of classics, while I support shifting away from some, I would say to be sensical, that it must be values guided. Get rid of Lord of the Flies, but not just because it’s old, but because it’s brutal and maybe off the mark of human nature.
At the same time, I would hope that we allow for continuity of the “canon” of high school literature, for instance. It gives people something in common across countries, states and generations to have read “Hamlet,” for instance. As a society, a shared literature means shared values. It represents something we can all have access to and have in common. If we fracture and disrupt and replace everything, that is a statement about our society. In fact, I would say it is true that we are becoming (or perhaps already are) a fractured society with trouble agreeing on shared values, then the thinking about literature matters all the more. If we can find a way to share literature, then maybe we can agree about more than we think. For instance, if we can find new ways to read Shakespeare–what a tool that would be! I think of The Merchant of Venice, which can be read as anti-Semitic. Yet it can also be read as sympathetic to Shylock, who suffers unjust discrimination. “Has not a Jew hands? Eyes? Dimensions?”
So, if nothing is neutral, let’s agree that disruption for disruption’s sake isn’t of much value. So for what values are we going to disrupt?
I do think many people who advocate for disruption may actually agree that it’s a question of values. However, that is rarely stated. The main statement is diversity for diversity’s sake. Instead, I want diversity for value’s sake. For affirming the humanity, the not-aloneness, of all our students. And I want the humanity of all humans–of those who have gone before. Of those who saw limitedly, as we inevitably do. And reconsidering, not discarding, and perhaps even affirming in literature, a humanness that we all have in common across nations and times.
[If you are actually reading this. Many thoughts spilled out without any revision–just a mind dump really. Please do consider commenting with something productive.]
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