Friday, May 25, 2012

Someone Else's Blog

Cultural Literacy Rant over at Excavating the Relic.

I thought she made some very interesting points.  I've always thought that there's a powerful history component to high school English, but it's definitely focused  passing The Canon on to the next generation.  You get critical tools along the way, but it really leads you to believe that those tools are only for use on The Canon.  It wasn't till college that I really learned a lot about how to approach any kind of art/performance/media with an eye toward how it's constructed, and I still wish I was better at it.

1 comment:

Brenda Pike said...

I think the reason middle schools and high schools read such *old* books isn't because they think nothing else is worthwhile, but because parents get in a tizzy whenever more modern books are introduced into a curriculum. If you assigned more modern books that are more relatable to kids, there would be more language, relationships, politics, or culture in it that at least one parent is going to complain to the school board over. That's why the reading list becomes so much broader in college—there are fewer parents who are going to complain that you're ruining the innocence of their poor child.

Same thing happens in history class. For all my high school curriculum had to say about it, the Vietnam War didn't even happen.