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August 19, 2000
To Whom It May Concern:
The English Department
of Masconomet has attempted to add some contemporary works into the collection
of books and novels required or suggested for students. Because some of
the literature contains mature language and topics not usually associated
with the classroom, there have been some understandable objections and/or questions about the choices. We in the department have added these works
for a variety of reasons. For one, students have long been implicitly given
the idea that the only good literature is old literature. Works often thought of
as modern really are not. Catcher in
the Rye is no longer contemporary fiction. Much classroom time is spent
explaining 1950s slang to puzzled students. We also must explain how Holden
expects to spend a long weekend in New York City on a couple of hundred
dollars.
Catcher is actually used in the classroom as a springboard for discussion
on the history of language.
Another reason to update the reading
list is to guide the students into the discovery that there are more present day
authors
worthy of time and pleasure than Stephen King and Danielle Steele. It is
good for the students to know that the best seller lists rate popularity
and not quality. Further, it is good for students to read about contemporary
issues and themes, to listen to a vital voice of an author who sees the
same world the students do, to explore characters who are set in environments
existing in the present day. All of this helps round out the students reading
experience when their list of literature also includes an extensive list
of works from the other periods of history.
Bringing the Masconomet
reading list into the last third of the twentieth century brings the good
and the bad of the changing styles. What is presented in the media
is not what may have been acceptable when we were young. Television today
is vastly different than it was in the sixties or even the seventies. The
language and themes covered even in family entertainment require a greater
knowledge of the world today than the programs of only a couple of decades
ago. Movies are not the same, nor is theater or music. Literature, which
has always been at the vanguard of society's change, must, if it is to
have a viable effect and purpose, reflect the world in which we live and
comment upon that world. If literature is going to reflect the world, it
will reflect an image of the best and the worst that society has to offer,
the ignominy and the nobility, the vulgar and the eloquent, the sordid
and the sublime. The purpose of the arts is to reveal the truth and, while
truth is beauty, it is not always pretty.
The question
then becomes, At what age do we expose our children to the truth? Perspective
helps in this case. Looking back on their lives we see our high school
students at play in the back yard, innocent, only months or a few years
away from trick or treating, faery tales, cartoons. Look carefully at their
present and we realize that there are difficult decisions they must weigh that
have hard consequences. Moral decisions will arise that they must face
and they may be facing them alone. Is it not better that they first face
these challenges in their imagination through literature rather than in
real life? Further, look carefully into the student's near future. How
far away are any of these people from being independent? From being away
from home? From being Marines if they should so choose? While from the first perspective we can
see how our students sometimes appear immature to us; from the last perspective
it is easier to understand how mature our students are. It is better to
prepare them for their future.
Bad language,
sexual immorality, violence, drugs are not topics we want to expose
to our children, but they are topics our children know about. How we present
the topics is the matter at hand. These topics also are not new to literature.
Anyone familiar to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales knows that
literature has covered bad language, sexual immorality, and violence for centuries. Presenting these topics in a contemporary fashion does cause
concerns because they become immediate, near and close to home, therefore,
they seem more dangerous. Bringing up difficult topics can produce
anxiety.
We need to read the books our children read,
see the movies they see, watch the television they watch, listen to the
music they hear. We need to discuss the themes to which they are exposed. Sometimes
when talking with young people we will find it is not the language, sex, violence,
or drugs, but the ambivalence over ethical decisions and morality that is disturbing.
It is not keeping the topics away from our children that will protect them,
but using the arts to broach the topics. Discussing the human frailties
of fictional characters is easier and more objective than investigating
our children's, or our own.
Best regards,
Thomas Trevenen
English Department
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