blog repost: once again I struggled with posting comments in a LJ and lost

I really need to work on this tendency of mine to write very long replies (or rather to write more than 4300 characters) in LJs, which I then cannot post.

Anyway, there was a post in Jacquez's LJ about reading teenagers should have done before finishing high school. And a list in the post, with the question what you think about the list, and what you have read from it.

Anyway, my reply was supposed to be:

I have problems with these kind of lists. I'm not against saying such and such are good books to read, or important books, but this assumption of "you have to read such and such books specifically or you are not a fully rounded, educated human being" is not something I share. And that sentiment seems to me at the core of the "By The End of High School" phrasing.

Also all through high school I have been frustrated with this kind of thinking by teachers. You could propose books that might be read in class and most students never bothered to suggest anything, but I continously lobbied for books written by women, both in English and in German class, and always got turned down because they were never quite "significant" enough to be read in class. No matter how well known, there would be always male authors that had priority based on some imaginary list of importance it seemed. I even suggested authors I had no real interest in reading (like Jane Austen), because I thought they might have made it into their elusive canon. To Jane Austen they said "too difficult", but they had no problem to read some Shakespeare in English class with us. The best I've gotten out of it was being able to do voluntary reports about books that were then counted for my grades as participation in class.

Also personally I rarely enjoy stuff written before roughly 1850, though I like some a lot, just like I prefer modern art to older, so with a few exceptions my attempts to read it are doomed.

From your list I have read only a few, though most of these indeed while being in high school:

1984, George Orwell
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Holy Bible, (the Luther version though and not all of it)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
MacBeth, William Shakespeare
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennesee Williams

So I guess I've just outed myself as not literary knowledgable. *g*

Though sometimes I've read things by authors you have on that list, just not specifically the works you mention, e.g. by Dickens, Hemingway, and Twain. Also I've read a couple of other "important" books while I was in high school, that were on the "important reading" lists here (I mean authors who were prominently featured in the required reading and/or for whom you got the impression instilled that you must have read them, or are ignorant otherwise), but who don't appear on your list. I had a thing for existentialism, so I read Jean-Paul Satre and Albert Camus beyond what was required for class, also I read a lot of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Max Frisch, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I've read some Goethe, Schiller, and Heine (those were mostly assigned reading for class, but they were okay). I liked Georg Büchner's play that was assigned reading a lot, so I read more by him (not that he has written that much, after all he died 23 years old, also fits well with the banned book theme, btw). I liked Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll (and read them beyond what was assigned). I didn't care that much for the Henrik Ibsen plays, though strangely enough we read two of them during my high school time, which was more than we read by Schiller, so either both teachers had strange preferences, or the guy is significant in some way I don't remember.

Since I'm not in favor of such lists, I wouldn't say any of the ones I mentioned were essential for an US-American teenager to know by the end of high school. However, some are rather specific to German situations so I guess writers like Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll are much less significant for American teenagers than for German ones (if they are significant at all, which I'm not sure about), also I think while Büchner was really ground-breaking for drama his stories are better appreciated if one knows German 19th century background. But I think if you want some "canonized world literature knowledge" for high school students there should be some Kafka in it, and something by Goethe, and I'm really biased towards a Satre play and maybe "La Peste" by Camus, but then somehow the last two authors appealed a lot to my personal teenage angst, so maybe that's why I think teenagers would enjoy reading them.

blog repost: more on why I have issues with book lists

I started to reply to the comment by Jacquez on my last entry, and it was getting really long, so noticed that I have issues with such reading lists, which probably don't have much to do with the actual intention of those reading lists. Anyway, since it is my blog, my issues are at least sort-of on topic, so --

I am not against reading recommendations. I know I have looked for such lists, when I moved on from books for children and young adults to "literature." But I haven't found canonized lists of "those are the essential books to understand X" (with X being a country, culture, era, whatever) to be helpful.

And more often than not those lists are not multiracial or have women in them, though the one in question had. Also a lot of what is often mentioned on such lists here (here meaning my RL surroundings), had no relevance whatsoever to me. OTOH a lot of what had great relevance never made it onto any list I've seen.

However, these lists had a great relevance in my life with their effect of being snobbish and exclusive towards other kinds of reading, a good deal of which was my reading. That might not have been the original intention of those lists, but they had that effect, and I think they actually can discourage people from reading instead of guiding them to good stuff.

I think I just have personal issues with this kind of approach that are probably not close to what your list is intended to mean.

I have no clue how the idea of what culture is and what not is "enforced" in US high schools, I actually won't even generalize that my experiences with this kind of thing are representative for how it is here.

But I think the way the German education system is organized is very much a class system that disadvantages huge numbers of people. Here children are sorted at age 10 into categories that ultimately result in either being allowed entrance to college or not, since one kind of school will lead to college the others will not (it is a bit more complicated than that, but that is the gist of it). Also, for example in my year, from the people who started with me at age 10 maybe one third dropped out before gaining the right to go to college. There are ways to change schools later, but they are hard and not actually encouraged it seems. The only thing that happens is that people get moved from "higher" to "lower" school forms if they fail.

This system does not only disadvantage poor people, and people from minorities, which are known to be judged by teachers to be able to attend schools leading to higher education less often, it also leads to worse test results for all kinds of students, including those on the supposedly "higher" school forms, when compared internationally.

But nobody wants to change this failed system because there is this persistent thought, maybe a fixation even, that you have to separate students into groups to impart a higher, valued cultural education only on some because all those pesky future menial laborers (*dripping sarcasm*) won't have use for it anyway. Which might have been a "useful" oppressive concept when the system was first conceived, despite being wrong, but in a modern society it is also economically counterproductive.

The idea that those finishing the "higher" school forms should be in possession of a certain defined canon of cultural knowledge and education is IMO still very powerful here. And it is part of the justification of those school forms in opposition to the others, at least it seems that way to me.

Whether schools achieve this or not, the idea is there. Especially for children from upper class or upper middle class families. I went to a school that had a fair number of its students from a wealthier neighborhood, however since that area also bordered at poorer areas, it was quite mixed. The really status conscious parents of friends I had in elementary school often chose a different public school, in particular traditional ones teaching Latin as first foreign language, I lost maybe a third of my friends after elementary school through that. But there were enough of those parents who were aspiring for a classical education in my school that I saw the effects first hand with a fair number of my classmates, though the most extreme examples I met outside of my school. (Obviously the effects of all this on the privileged are still far better than on those who are disadvantaged by the system, still it affects both, and both not for the better, IMO.)

This "ideal" canon includes knowledge of three foreign languages with four being better (obviously Latin is important in that view, hence the aforementioned school changes), it includes playing at least one classical instrument (which is why so many in my class learned piano, violin, cello, clarinet etc., simple guitar or recorder will be not enough), knowledge of major important stuff in the humanities (that includes those canonized reading lists, (European) history, philosophy, the usual, not so much the more recent humanities like psychology, sociology etc. or sciences and math). There is still a lot of status connected to having a classical education, but obviously even here you can't make a lot of money with that and university is specialized early on, so that emphasizes the importance of school in that regard.

This "ideal" is the source why people who go to schools founded in the 16th century will make you feel that their school was founded then, when yours only exists since 1910, of course not openly disdaining, but there is status and arrogance attached to it. Theirs is a public school just like the rest, but it's the remnant of classical education of the bourgeoisie and as that it has status. That may be less of an issue today than 50 or even 20 years ago, but it's still there, IMO. And it shows later too, or the guys I went to lunch with as undergrad wouldn't have shown off their Latin conversation skills to each other in a sort of pissing contest (mind you, they were physics students, not archaeology or something). Or brought their violin to class, to subtly show off that they are part of an orchestra with performances.

But there is a flip side to valuing that kind of culture so much, which is that many devalue the rest, because the status distinction between "high culture" and "low/pop/mass culture" is so strong. That has gotten less extreme the last decades, and my parents were sympathetic to "low culture" since they had their own comics and pulp novels burned by their parents, but I've met people who were unable to understand/read a comic page I'd drawn and shown to them. Not only were they comic-illiterate because their parents had prohibited any comics, they claimed they didn't need to understand that either. They were certain that it couldn't really be anything good, because it wasn't on such lists. And that I should rather read XY from "list of important books" than what I liked to read.

This attitude leads to teachers who chide people for reading the wrong stuff (e.g. Stephen King, not Goethe), and devalues a lot of stuff, and to people not reading anything because saying "I don't like to read" can often lead to less disparaging remarks than to admit to reading "inferior" stuff.

That's why I have issues with these lists, I got them shoved in my face constantly, for reading comics, for liking tv, etc. And yes, it's probably just an arrogant minority who sees these list in that way, otherwise American movies wouldn't be hugely popular here, but it still grates on me.

I've just seen to many times that canonization leads to blissful ignorance to things that are outside the canon, and sometimes that leads to really extreme things. I mean I had conversations with intelligent seeming and well read people, who couldn't even conceive that I might find popular culture being worth my time, who insisted that I was some deluded pawn of an American cultural, imperialistic machinery or something for liking Star Wars or Batman, but had never read any Batman comic, nor in fact seen a Star Wars movie. Granted, those types are rare, but I think those lists are what makes them feel superior instead of deluded, because even those who do like popular culture will often agree that it shouldn't be on such lists, but the canonized culture is rightly on it.

I think what bugs me is the "authority" with which these lists tend to be proclaimed in the contexts where I've most often encountered them. And that in these contexts the "authority" (whether with real influence or based on wishful thinking) claims the right of definition to say what good culture is and what is not. So that's why I have a knee-jerk reaction to these lists -- I think.