Top Ten Reasons Why Students Need More Literature (Not Less)

In uniquely powerful ways, literary study prepares students for richly rewarding and meaningful lives. No other reading experience or learning
activity duplicates this preparation.
1. Imagination: Reading literature cultivates the imagination. That’s one reason why tyrants and dictators hate literature, banning or strictly
controlling it. From the ancient Greeks to the present day, cultures steeped in literary study have thrived on creativity and innovation.
2. Communication: Writing and talking about literature helps prepare students to write and talk about anything. Not only are they working with
words, with carefully considered language, but they are also considering how different kinds of people think and react to and understand
words.
3. Analysis: Literary works—whether fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction—challenge readers to make connections, to weigh evidence, to
question, to notice details, to make sense out of a rich experience. These analytical abilities are fundamental life skills.
4. Empathy: Because literature allows us to inhabit different perspectives (What’s it like to be a teenage girl, a Jew, in Nazi Germany? How
would you feel if you thought your father had been murdered but no one else believed that?), in different times and places, we learn to think
about how other people see the world. We can understand and persuade and accept and help these others more effectively and fully.
5. Understanding: We think in terms of stories: this happens, and then that happens, and what’s the connection between these events, and
what is going to happen next? People who’ve experienced more stories are better able to think about actions and consequences. Experience
is the best teacher; literature is the best vehicle for vastly enlarging our possible experiences.
6. Agility: Literary works often ask us to think in complex ways, to hold sometimes contradictory, or apparently conflicting ideas in our minds.
As brain imaging has shown, this kind of processing helps us to be more mentally flexible and agile—open to new ideas.
7. Meaningfulness: Literary works often challenge us to think about our place in the world, about the significance of what we are trying to do.
Literary study encourages an “examined” life—a richer life. It provides us with an almost unlimited number of test cases, allowing us to think
about the motivations and values of various characters and their interactions.
8. Travel: Literature allows us to visit places and times and encounter cultures that we would otherwise never experience. Such literary travel
can be profoundly life-enhancing.
9. Inspiration: Writers use words in ways that move us. Readers throughout the ages have found reasons to live, and ways to live, in literature.
10. Fun: When students read literature that is appropriate for them, it’s intensely fun. Movies are enjoyable, but oftentimes the written version,
readers will say, is more powerful and engrossing. Students who don’t find literature to be a whole lot of fun are almost certainly reading the
wrong things (too difficult, too removed from their interests), and not reading enough (perhaps they are slogging line by line, week by week,
through a text beyond their growing capabilities). When students do discover the fun of literature, they will read more and more, vaulting
forward in verbal skills and reasoning abilities, and becoming better readers and writers of other kinds of texts (letters, memos, legal briefs,
political speeches, etc.).
May 2004
by Terrence Moore
We have said before that the purpose of high school is to confront students with difficult problems and to teach them to respond with
true and beautiful solutions. Generally speaking, the most difficult and engaging problem for young people, as for humankind as a
whole, was put forth more than two millennia ago by the Greek command: know thyself. Teenagers love to talk about themselves, as a
casual walk down the halls of any school will reveal. They express their likes and dislikes; they express their moods; they talk about
who is taking whom to Prom. Yet to what extent do they really understand themselves and their place in the world? The great task of
teaching young people to know themselves has always been the province of the humanities, principally history, literature, and
philosophy. The most domestic of the humanities, the study largely devoted to the intrigues of private life, has long been literature.
Unfortunately, the humane study of literature today has been all but ruined by the methods of a great many school curricula, modern
textbooks, and even literature teachers themselves. The greatest sin of school curricula is not to allow young students to read serious
literature before high school. Some of the great authors in the English language, such as Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson,
and Mark Twain, wrote books for children, but often these authors are not encountered in elementary and middle schools. Literature
textbooks are guilty of several faults. Most of them are anthologies that do not feature whole works of fiction. Thus students cannot
see the themes and characters of the stories all the way through. Furthermore, the selections end with the most rudimentary and
ridiculous of questions designed to do little more than see if the students actually read the story. Some of the newer textbooks have so
many colors, useless prompts and anecdotes, and pure trivia physically surrounding the text that readers are distracted away from the
author’s words. Publishing companies have taken marketing lessons from MTV. Worst of all, these publishing companies also provide
teachers with elaborate “teacher’s editions” that offer in the margins the “answers” to those ridiculous and rudimentary questions.
Drawing upon the paraphernalia of these textbooks and the teaching methods learned in education schools, literature teachers often
reduce the interesting and complex representations of the human condition found in literature into simplified plot structures. You
remember the drill: rising action, climax, falling action (denouement), here a metaphor, there a foreshadowing. Great works of fiction
are thereby reduced to mere technique. I well remember reading The Scarlet Letter in high school and, under the guidance of my
teacher, thinking that it was a novel about colors competing against each other, namely, red vs. black. There was a larger theme, of
course; we always had three to choose from: man vs. man, man vs. society, man vs. nature. On the test we all put down that the
character Hester Prynne demonstrated the theme of man vs. society. That was it. After this mechanical treatment of the text the
brightest among us did not realize that here was a story about a woman who had somehow lost one husband, had an affair with the
town minister resulting in an illegitimate child, and was vilified by everyone in the town. Are these not events that warrant some
discussion of faithfulness, chastity, hypocrisy, sin, guilt, love, lust, truth, and lies? Or did Hawthorne write his intensely moving story
so that high school students could forever cram his novel into the same plot structure allegedly used by every other novelist?
The classical way of studying literature is much harder but ultimately more rewarding and certainly closer to what the author had in
mind. A knowledgeable teacher who has keen insight into both the written word and the human condition must ask students exacting
questions that emerge from a close reading of the text. These questions concern the motivations of the characters—their passions,
struggles, meanness, idiosyncrasies, and, at times, greatness—and the larger implications of these motivations for human nature. At
first, students will want to say whatever pops into their heads, often some claptrap they have picked up from popular culture. By
means of the Socratic method the teacher will ensure that they use only the text to support their answers. Once students begin to
know literature, they will begin to know themselves. If nothing else, this knowledge will enable them to appreciate and be amused by
the pride and prejudice that accompany any Prom.
Great Literature Enables Students to Understand Themselves and Others