Literature, a Window on our Nation's Past

My discussion here is of three novels that are today no longer part of the high school curriculum (if you know otherwise please let me know). High school students are often not asked to reflect on our rich national and regional heritage when it involves harsh realities and difficult topics and concerns.

An October 2 posting to this blog referenced Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn as an example of literature not welcomed in many literature classes in our public schools. I know this particular book requires treatment of sensitive issues of our national origin in slavery and discrimination. Teaching this particular book in a rascist community is a daunting challenge. Some censors fear this particular selection because it dwells on 19th Century stereotypes and attitudes. The fact Mark Twain was satirizing the stereotypes and attitudes is not in purview of these censors. Twain's methods make this novel a senior high selection in which discussion of his methods and the effectiveness of those methods are the work of the English teacher to clarify and to gauge.

I know some think we live in post-rascist America, but that is only by degrees true. If we can not tell the truth to our children about our nation's progress up from our baser conduct they will have no view of the work in front of them to do.

I remember as a young teacher being told that John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath could not be used for American Literature (this supposedly because of a parental complaint about its vulgar, profane dialogue). My students benefitted from the book in terms of understanding dislocation of farm families and rural poverty but also that all people are to be respected and legitimized in their quest for life and prosperity. It was still apropos in 1980s North Dakota which shared in the out-migration of farm families that was the 20th Century history of the Great Plains.

The curriculum which includes the Grapes of Wrath should include O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth which chronicled the 1870s in Dakota Territory and the lives of pioneers in the harshness of their new land (specifically the tragedy of husband and wife, Per and Beret Hansa) . This work in translation did not have the idiom of American English as spoken by pioneers but it was also like Steinbeck's novel brutally honest.

One topic of Rolvaag's novel, rural farm wife isolation, was such an important topic in the life of the communities I first taught school in, but the community attitude was not to talk about suicides and mental ailments, and only in an off hand way talk about isolation. Education has to be about opening even the taboo topics in a timely fashion with our children. Today's parents and educators have to deal with taboo topics, such as homosexuality. Our schools have to be safe places for all children.

I encourage all parents who would be educators and supporters of education to open the mind of their child and especially their teenager to the past as a window on our future (or perhaps a future to be avoided). Teaching American Literature in conjunction with U.S. History is and should be considered true underpinning to civics especially when so many of the citizens of tomorrow are the children of immigrant families who learn English and democracy as our common language and idiom.