The Elephant in the Classroom: Sanitizing Literature for Classroom Instruction Doesn't Help Students Learn the Lessons about Life and Themselves That the Texts Expose Them To
2012; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 93; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoFor high school teachers, these are enigmatic times. We want to prepare students for life in the real world, and yet we balk at teaching them the truth of that world. The recent publication of a corrected Huckleberry Finn has touched a nerve. We no longer tolerate nigger as part of our lexicon, and so the corrected version replaces that racist word with the somehow more acceptable term slave. Are we protecting our kids or ourselves? Is this due diligence applied to safeguard the innocent or to make us feel good about being responsible teachers, parents, and regulators? We can airbrush the penis from Michelangelo's David or the nipple from Blanchard's Vestal Virgin; but our kids have all seen Lady Gaga's backside through her meat dress, and there's not much we can do about that. It's out there. Pop culture runs freely among our kids, exposing them to the erotic and the bizarre, the brutal and the profane, sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll with no holds barred and no punches pulled. But, in the classroom, we presume to enable innocence and reinforce a notion that this is not, after all, a fallen world. I recently asked a senior English class what they thought about being protected from books that serve up life as it is. Their responses have helped shape my own thinking. The dangerous is the very thought of the corruption of the society and human nature. It is the thought that indeed, the utopian society does not exist ... we should speak more openly about topics such as sexuality and psychological disorders because it is dangerous not to! (Athena) Carl Jung theorized that every individual has a shadow self, a dark side that is suppressed and not acknowledged. That dark side is always a fear, he maintained, an embedded and ignored fear of something we choose not to face. It accounts for our out-of-character behavior when we sense what our hidden fear is: Our hot button is pushed, and we overreact. If we apply Jung's theory to our own situation as educators, can we ask if we are trying to hide from our students our history of racism, oppression, and sexual license? When authors or songwriters publish books and lyrics that offend, do they not push our hot buttons and remind us of our collective past, our shadow self, and thus trigger the urge to censor? Maybe we want no reminders that man's inhumanity to man is part of our being, our lexicon, and our history. Perhaps we don't want writers to remind us that we aren't out of the woods (and may never be), and certainly not with the children around. Literature must expose injustices, witness the corruption of human nature, and shatter all assumptions of sanctity within our society. (Athena) Instead, we rush to close the stable door long after our pop culture has grabbed the horses and ridden them off in every direction. We put up the umbrella of political correctness in a pop cultural monsoon. We tag movies as appropriate or not for a tender age that's already overexposed to sex, violence, gender labeling, racial and religious bigotry and stereotyping, through everything from advertising to computer games to TV shows and Internet sites. We say we want to protect them from crossing a line when they're already on the other side of it. And so they stand there in the chaotic maelstrom of their own experience and look back at us, at teachers and parents guarding the now vacant zone of innocence and rewriting the classics because they use words that offend. We substitute vacuumed books, simplistic slogans, wellness literature, mind-numbing life lessons, and a pair of blinkers--and we wonder why they're confused and sometimes angered by our naivete. People should have experiences that go beyond the constraints of their comfort. Having these experiences is the only way for a person to move on in life and allow change to become a good thing. …
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