From the article: It was also a matter of method. Education scholars often narrate the development of high-school-English pedagogy as a clash between two competing schools of thought. On one side is the “student-centered” approach typified by the education professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her 1938 book, “Literature as Exploration,” which emphasized the resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience."
I sure hope this is dead and buried. I couldn't imagine anything more dire than literature being reduced to a mirror reflecting back the (presumably young and intellectually deprived) readers sad little life back at them.
I was privileged enough to grow up in what I'll call the LeVar Burton school of literary interpretation: books are a window into a world entirely unlike your own where you can be Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly. What’s more interesting: every book being about being a dull little high schooler, or any book being about anything: Farm animals reproducing the Russian revolution, European nobles murdering each other over random points of honor, being totally psyched for war and finding out you’re a giant pussy, navigating the world of being a mentally unstable prep school girl in the 1960s... entire universes of totally inaccessible experiences made possible through the magic of the novel.
You’ve misunderstood the pedagogy of Rosenblatt. It is essentially what you describe.
Resonate does not mean mirror, it’s more like sympathy from a personal connection.
You need “resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience” in order to place yourself in the world of “Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly.”
The opposing school of pedagogy would ignore the personal connection and have you focus on style, structure, metaphor. etc.
On one hand I agree with you. But upon reading a bit about "Literature as Exploration" you mentioned, I can't help but agree with her point also.
Its cool to expose kids to new and interesting world views that they might not come across. But we really really need to validate whether making a kid read books like Moby Dick is worth it? Do kids really need to read intense books or just have fun? What good is introducing a book that is not relatable in the slightest?
It's like hearing NPR on the radio because your parents turned it on when you're 6... You just don't care.
The vast majority of the content is just utterly unrelatable. It could be great content. But it doesn't matter, you won't suddenly start caring about GDP or employment metrics or politics. Those things are TOO far outside the window of relatability for that age.
Gatsby is the same exact problem - it's busy talking about middle-age malaise, which tend to resonate with teachers, but is just entirely unrelatable to a bunch of kids in their teens.
Those kids are busy day dreaming about the future - they don't have the kind of experiences that let the book resonate yet, and they likely won't for another 20 years at least.
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You can't expand someone's mind if you don't have anything relevant to present. You just bounce off.
You expand it by having at least SOME content the reader can understand and relate to, anchoring them there, and then shoving the boundary around it wider.
I think maybe it isn’t all or nothing here. Reading about something outside of one’s familiarity can really expand what is relatable to a student, with the help of an instructor to fill in context and use things to which the student can relate to help them grasp the ideas in the text.
I sure hope this is dead and buried. I couldn't imagine anything more dire than literature being reduced to a mirror reflecting back the (presumably young and intellectually deprived) readers sad little life back at them.
I was privileged enough to grow up in what I'll call the LeVar Burton school of literary interpretation: books are a window into a world entirely unlike your own where you can be Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly. What’s more interesting: every book being about being a dull little high schooler, or any book being about anything: Farm animals reproducing the Russian revolution, European nobles murdering each other over random points of honor, being totally psyched for war and finding out you’re a giant pussy, navigating the world of being a mentally unstable prep school girl in the 1960s... entire universes of totally inaccessible experiences made possible through the magic of the novel.