Literature in Education

For us in the field, the answer is just that we love it. We study it for years, then we look around for a chance to make a living off it. That's understandable, but if that's all, we're con artists, selling insubstantial dreams to the susceptible young to help maintain our own habit. I don't think this is true, though. We have important things to teach.

1. Literature offers the best way of teaching extensive reading skills. Non-literature reading programs, and especially programs for non-native speakers, focus on short passages. Big international surveys such as PISA (or tests of basic skills) are based on many readings of very short passages. Yet extensive reading is a different kettle of fish. To read something longer, you need to stay aware of macrostructures such as plot.

2. Literature offers a way of linking the emotional with the intellectual. If students are to learn reading effectively, they have to remember significant turns in plot, and this will only happen, in the first instance, if those turns have emotional impact. So it harnesses the emotional to the cognitive. When literature does what it should, though, it acts against the alienation of the emotional and the intellectual.

3. Literature teaches values with emotional force. To take an American example, To Kill a Mockingbird is at once a condemnation of America, and a celebration of an archetypal American hero: the man who stands up to defy his whole community in defence of what's right (the same character as John Proctor of The Crucible, in a way). Khaled Hosseini does something similar in A Thousand Splendid Suns when Mariam stands up to accept her death in defence of her co-wife and her co-wife's children. Students need to feel the force of these things, or values will not be strong in their lives--but they also need to be able to defend themselves. There's nothing about literature that says it always has to be moral. Many people think that the Yugoslav war comes down in part to poetry, to the sort of thing Serbian students learned in school. Karadzic is an expert on folk ballads.

4. Literature has the power to change destructive ways of thinking on many levels. In my life, poetry has been a wonderful thing. When your emotions bear down on you to see the world in a negative light, and believe that it's not you, it's just real, at a time like that, you need something as powerful as poetry. It can crystalize what you feel at that moment, or it can transform it into something better. I believe in memorizing poetry. If you memorize a poem, it will become a part of your emotional structure, and it can only do that because its structure is unyielding. It will not give, and that's why it is worth it to you. When I was in teachers' college in Montreal in 1983, I read George Gabori's wonderful book When Evils Were Most Free. He was a political prisoner in Stalinist Hungary. When he was in solitary confinement, he exercised his mind by trying to remember all the poetry he ever knew. He says by the time he got out, he could recite for eight hours at a stretch without repeating himself. That is how important literature is.

5. Literature is about reality. Some of you out there have probably read deconstructionist criticism from the eighties that goes on about literature being only about itself. What nonsense. Literature is about itself in so far as it is a self-contained system. But so is mathematics, and yet the bridges built by mathematical calculation stay up. "Poems are imaginary gardens with real frogs in them." Who said that?

I suppose I am preaching to the choir here, but I think these are good reasons, and maybe you would like to know them, too.