Classic literature is something of a hot topic issue for High School literature teachers. Many of our students start from a point of aggressive disinterest when confronted with something described as a classic and most of the parents labor under the assumption that the only valid thing for a literature teacher to attempt is these weighty and storied tomes. Most of my fellow teachers fall in one of two camps. One camp thinks that we should be pushing the classics as a way of grounding our students in the larger scope of literature and learning. The other camp tends to believe that a focus on the classics undermines our primary purpose to encourage life long reading habits by making students slog though difficult language from an antiquated and bizarre culture.
Frankly, I exist between the two camps and see the merits of both. I love many of the classics, but some of them are just literary flies stuck in the amber of an outdated canon. I don't venerate a book just because someone called it a classic and I have a hard time justifying to the students that they should as a group love these books inherently. I guess it comes down what an English teacher thinks their primarily responsibility to the students is. Personally, I tend to fall on the side of believing my biggest responsibly is in fostering a love of reading in my students regardless of what they read. Many teachers, and many parents too, seem to think our most important roll is in curating cultural history through literature and conveying that majesty to the students. There is definitely a place for that, and I certainly teach my share of classic literature, but when every text is a struggle either through language or culture, I find that students just stop wanting to read. I feel that there has to be a balance. There will always be more time for a student to pick up a classic some day, but often the reading habits for the rest of their lives are set in high school. I'd rather make readers than worry about classics.
The reason I'm thinking about this particularly is because I just completed a reread of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with my father. He'd never read it before and the last time I read had been in my 20's. The first time I read Jane Eyre was some time in middle school. I'm not sure why I took it into my head to read the thing, but I remember reading the whole thing and even enjoying parts of it - most notably the first bit of it where Jane is a child. I think the rest of it fairly flew over my head as dealing with relationships that I wasn't quite up to grasping at the time, and I finished it as an exercise of endurance and pride. (I was a stubborn little thing.)
I next read it in High School because it was part of the honors curriculum in my Brit Lit class. I don't really remember much of that reread, honestly. I think that's when the whole Rochester plot line registered with me and even if I couldn't really relate to Janes decision at the end of the book, it struck me as nice and stuck with me. I know I read it again sometime in my early 20's as part of the great 'classics' project I was engaged in at the time.
This last reread though, a lot of what makes Jane Eyre great really clicked. Jane is a highly relatable character. She's not this prim and perfect ideal of the era. She's brash, irritable, and fully intelligent. She is also kind, loyal, and possessed of sense of duty that is as admirable as it is frustrating at times. Jane's reactions to difficulty feel familiar, like something anyone would do or think in the same situation which is conveyed through a close first person point of view. As a matter of trivia,
Jane Eyre was the first novel published in England with a first person female point of view. Many scholars thing that this accounted for some of its success at the time. Regardless, in this reread Jane's character suddenly popped for me. I liked
Jane Eyre before, now I would be willing to say I loved it.
So what changed? Age. Experience. Life. I don't think I was really in a place to really understand all of what Jane Eyre is until about now. Part of that is simply having a greater understanding of various topics like religion, British history and culture of the age, but a big part of that is just a greater understanding of life and people. I couldn't relate enough because I just wasn't old enough. Maturity plays a big role in relating with adult characters. For all that Jane is only supposed to be 19, she is as a character more mature than that and deals with things for the most part like a more experienced adult.
This is something that we educators lose sight of. We might love a work of literature and think the themes transcend the differing cultures, but we are older, with more experience under our belts, and an eye that sees farther along the trajectory of life. We can use that to help our students bridge some gaps, but at the end of the day, sometimes, they are too young to really feel it with their hearts. They need something we can't just teach into them. They need time.
So yes, in the end, I think exposure to the classics is a valuable thing in education. However, I don't think it should be the cornerstone of what we do. I think we should mold students whose minds are hungry for more knowledge and more experiences. If we do that, I believe they will continue to explore the classics on their own, in their own time, when they are ready for them.
