Education in Literature: can we really teach how to read?

A historically common notion is that a cult person is “well-read”. Someone being considered so holds such a strong cultural significant that even in the One Thousand and One Nights Scheherazade is described as “well read and well bred” in exactly that order in an era where descendance would be expected to be more important than women’s literature. Someone being considered well-read matters so much that we seem to center our entire educational system around achieving a student that complies with such qualities. And my theory is that we fail at doing so.

I have always loved reading. One of the few things that I always carry with myself, no matter where I am, are the copies of The Little Prince and the Silmarillion my mom had because the former was the first book I ever read and the latter was the first book that gave me goosebumps: in other words, I always carry them with myself because one introduced me to the beauty of life and the other made me truly experience it. For me, the pleasure I find in reading cannot be really described through any of the catch phrases on the walls of school libraries and book shops because reading is not a single dimensional experience.

Sometimes, I read to escape reality: yet, I also do so to submerge myself into it. Sometimes, I read because I want to write something good: yet, I have found myself more than once doing so because I did not want to write anything at all. Sometimes, I read because I am: but I also do it because I do not want to be. My main agreement with History classes is the placement of the beginning of History right at the moment when some ill-occupied guy in Mesopotamia decided to start writing solely because I cannot see myself as part of a non-reading humanity.

And, even though this Manifesto(ish) might sound as proper of that one guy in English class that has read every book in the curriculum five years before taking the class, that cannot be further away from reality. My experiences with Literature classes all throughout my education involve a lot of despair, frustration and uncomfortable meetings as much as it does count a lot of different teaching methods that range from the well-planned International Baccalaureate curriculum to whatever my seventh grade teacher in Venezuela had going on. Or, better put, whatever she hadn’t.

The main concern this has always created in my mind, besides the grades end aspect of not getting along with your teacher in the Venezuelan preference-based education system, is that I could never come up with a way of making fellow students love Literature as much as I do. As any other teenager in the digital era, I am placed at the point of the Dunning-Kruger curve where there are many problems I would be oddly confident about having a solution for: how bad does a problem need to be in order for me to be clueless about it?

Just like falling in love is a desperate situation since you don’t know how to preach the devotion you feel for your other half to the rest of the world, not having a clue on how to make people love a subject as much as you do burns you every time you hear someone say they hate reading and cuts your skin every time a SparkNotes document is able to summarize everything you need to know about a book for your class. With Literature in particular, I always found a strange overlap between books I despised and books I had to do for class: does correlation really not imply causality?

In this case, probably. The way I have been exposed to the books I love varies starkly with the standard method of discussing literature in a classroom setting, but also between themselves: if using the example of these two now crusty books I always carry with myself, I got into The Little Prince by reading it next to my mom before going to bed and I got into The Silmarillion by browsing my house’s small bookshelf during a boring summer afternoon. These two setting differences are small but significant in the way meaning for these books has built up throughout my life: could we really achieve meaningfulness for readers under a standardized classroom setting?

Many questions, not that many answers. As I once heard the philosopher David Finkelstein say, philosophy should not be a free fall: considering how commonly literature is associated with this field, I think this premise expands to it. Literature should always be about asking questions and actively seeking for answers to them: as so, while teaching it, we should keep doing so. And, in my opinion, the main reason why literature is not like any other subject to be taught is because there is truly no way of conventionally making someone be “well read”.

There can always be some common agreement on how to measure someone’s proficiency in math or chemistry: of course, an amazing topologist might be awful at number theory and an organic chemist might barely have a superficial idea of crystallography, but all of them definitely know differential calculus or Lewis structures. With Literature, two teenagers can be considered amazing at it within their contexts without having read a single work in common.

Even the definition of “classics” can be somewhat fuzzy at times: To Kill a Mockingbird is a must in all English-speaking frameworks, but I truly have no idea of the translation of that title to Spanish and most likely none of my non-Venezuelan friends knew what Doña Bárbara was before listening to any of my political rants about my country’s situation. Hence, how could we ever come to an agreement on how to teach literature?

Here comes my answer, and it is that it is impossible to come to such a compromise. There are so many books in the world that hold a similar level of essentiality that we could never expect someone to have read all of them and there are so many cultures equally reliant on Literature that it is impossible to have a true identity if opting for a certain stone-set curriculum. Yet, a full contract does not imply the lack of some sense of consensus.

In such consensus, I think we should all recognize, in and out of our classrooms, the essential idea of the freedom of the reader. I am as free to despise Doctor Zhivago as much as anyone can consider Harry Potter to be the best succession of characters ever written, and both of us will be as entitled to our opinions as anyone else is. And the freedom of the reader finds an important corollary in the fact that, since opinions exist, we cannot omit them.

Classrooms are full of diversity of views: why not take advantage of Literature classes to embrace them? If someone dislikes a book, a conversation about it with someone who loves it won’t probably change the views but open up new reflection horizons. And, if a classroom has a particular opinion matrix in book taste, why not take it into account when crafting reading lists for such class?

Here, the challenge of standardization comes into play. In a system where everything is stone-frozen like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, flexibility is basically a physical paradox: hence, it has to be accounted for in the sole design of the course. The starting point can always be the same, but I truly think that a classroom is too chaotical of a system to keep the same literary tendencies throughout the course of a year.

And, as more reflection is put in the question of learning how to make someone a well-read individual, a mathematically inductive reasoning can be useful. We all learn how to read in different settings, with different circumstances and even slightly different outcomes: yet, the point is that we all learn how to read.

Why don’t we recognize this diverse nature of the literature learning process in creating the systems that do nothing but build upon these fundamental pillars?

Education in literature can never be perfect. That’s why it’s worth the while to shoot a shot at always improving it further.