High School English

I have been pondering high school English recently.

We live in one of the best school systems in the state.  We consistently rank in the top high schools in the nation.  And yet....

I was looking at my daughter's high school English books that she has read over the course of the past 4 years.  This year, she is a Senior, and she is taking her English classes at the Community College, so I'm not counting this year's English classes.  They are college level classes, and the reading she is doing is not a part of the high school curriculum.

These are the books she has read over the first three years of high school:

1984, by George Orwell.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by
The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard
Glass Houses, by Jeanette Walls
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell

3 years of High School English.  And this is her reading list. 

I am a proud product of the Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools.  4 years of English instruction at the hands of the most intense English program ever.  At that time, we didn't have GT classes.  No Honors classes.  We had one AP English class, and you had to test into it.  There were 24 open spots in that class, with one massive English test standing in between you and the AP class.  I did not qualify for one of those spots.  (Yes, I am still bitter about that.)

We had one level of English classes.  Remember, no Honors, no GT, no Basic level or Academic classes.  Everyone was expected to read the same books over the course of their four years of high school.  I had my doubts that we all read the same books until I went off to college, and met people from tiny little towns in the Southern Corner of Virginia who had read the same books we had, and some of them had better insights into those books than we'd had.

What books did we read?

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby by William Faulkner
The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

The Odyssey by Homer
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriett Beecher Stowe
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevski
The Raven, The Tell Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Autobiography of Malcom X by Malcom X
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes

There were more.  I remember reading, analyzing, and writing over and over again.  We saw several of the plays performed on stage.  We'd compare authors, time periods, and genres. I remember searching for foreshadowing, imagery, by heavens I remember analyzing the heck out of every single thing we read.  I don't know it we can say that I ever successfully learned to how to read and write, but I can turn out something that needs to be written in a very timely manner. 

I remember cursing my 11th grade English teacher at the time because  of the quantity of essays we had to write for that man.   I can't tell you how often I have thanked him for that since then.  At the time, I hated every minute of it.  Now, I am eternally grateful for the skills that he gave me that have served me throughout my life.

Take another look at that list of books that my child has read in the course of her high school career. 
Seven books.  SEVEN!!!  And how many of those would count as classic literature?

Take a look at my list.  Keep in mind, that's just what I recall off the top of my head.  There was more.  So much more.  When the reading lists came out at the end of the school year, we all got as much of a jump as we possibly could on the readings before school started.

I'm concerned.  I am beginning to think that we, as a society are beginning to lose some common ground and devaluing our education that has been the pride of our nation since it's founding.  A free education, guaranteed, that provides a common set of values and knowledge that will give us all a commonality with which to communicate with each other.  The ability to read a written work, analyze what is written, and search for deeper meaning.  Hmm... I think I've used those skills over and over again since high school.  Are our children being taught to analyze, to think critically about what they read, and to relate what they are reading to our current society and relate how this is relevant to us now, and what these insights say about us, as a society?  Have they been taught to think about how our world has changed, for better or worse since then, and what they can do to bring about change?

(An aside here... at the Community College this fall, she has already read 5 novels since September.  There are 2 more on the list that they are expected to read before the end of the semester, plus a free choice book for the final analysis essay.  Sad thing is, that's college level work now.  Back in our day, that was expected of high school students.)

There's a problem here... a symbol of deeper problem that is disturbing me on a very basic level.  I wish I knew what to do about this.