Growing up, I always tried to read the classics like Little Women by Louisa May Alcott or Rough Riders by Teddy Roosevelt. I didn’t understand half of what I was reading, but it didn’t matter. I felt like I was in a time past, that the simpler lives of the people involved was better somehow. And I became hooked–I couldn’t wait to get to high school and read them, being able to actually understand them. However, when I got to high school, I found, to my dismay, that we were either only reading segments of classics, or not reading them at all.
Sophomore year, I was placed in an advanced English class. I thought we would be reading things such as Beowulf or The Old Man and the Sea. We read J.R.R. Tolkien that year, and, while a great author, he wasn’t what I considered to be a classic. All throughout high school, we never touched any classic novels, unless to was to pull a quote out of context and throw it in a paper.
There are life lessons to be learned from all sorts of literature, undoubtedly, but what comes then, to the student who enters college without knowing that Shakespeare has hundreds of conspiracies flying about concerning him? Or doesn’t even know what The Old Man and the Sea is? People say that these types of literature are getting phased out because they aren’t relevant to today’s culture. To them I ask simply: What makes a girl’s struggle to stay alive and come of age while hiding who she is, who her family is any different from the girl who’s sitting in the bathroom, struggling with her inner demons and hiding who she really is for fear of persecution? Anne Frank and the people I see in high school, and the people I went to high school with are not as different as people may think. Give classic literature another chance: you may be surprised at what you can learn about yourself.