The problem is not with the classics themselves but with the people who teach them. I mean no disrespect to K-12 teachers, whom I admire a great deal. But I think some give up too easily on this point. Moby Dick is a tough sell for anyone, and personally, I wouldn't start there or - possibly - even go there at all. But there are lots of classics that can be made accessible if you approach teaching them with confidence and enthusiasm. I have to do this in my college classrooms all the time.

Assuming the students can read at grade level (not always the case, I know), I think it's an insult to many middle schoolers to deny them exposure to some of the great works. And such policies say more about what is convenient for instructors than what is best for students. I think it's fine to mix in popular works, even "trash" if you wish - I read trade paperbacks all the time and enjoy them. But if some books are "hard" is that a sufficient reason to give up on them? I don't buy it.

Ravitch chose Moby-Dick to make a point, and that point wasn't to insist that all middle school children read it. Perhaps she should have chosen a classic title that middle school children are more likely to understand like, just for instance, The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Ravitch is understandably alarmed by, or at least highly skeptical of, any reading program that allows students to read books that are popular but also vapid like (fill in the blank) rather than classic texts, and "rather than" are keywords here. I'm in her camp: the popular and vapid should be reserved for their free time. (And there are ways to reward the reading students are doing in their free because it should be encouraged.)

As for the difficulty of teaching such books, that all depends on the teacher and always will. I would probably have a hard time getting middle school children to warm to Moby-Dick, but there are plenty of other classic texts that could be used in its place.

Laurie, thank you for your thoughtful discussion of all this. You are correct about that pendulum, and the NYT article exemplifies it. Student reading choice has a healthy tradition going back at least into the 1930's. There's even sone research!

I'm grateful my kid is reading anything. People can complain about J. K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer et al. all they want, but their books are competently written and decently edited, and a kid who is turning those pages voluntarily is learning something. I could have fallen over when I found my daughter had gone from one of the Meyer books to a somewhat more serious work: Operation Valkyrie.

What drives me nuts is the condemnation of such books by people who can't keep lay/lie straight and who think gonna/dunno/wanna and could of/would of/should of belong in the English language because they don't realize that fonetik spelling iz uh will uh thuh wisp.

Redweather, thanks for the hyphen in Moby-Dick.

"I think it's an insult to many middle schoolers to deny them exposure to some of the great works."

Since when is giving middle-schoolers a choice in the books they read for class DENYING them "exposure to some of the great works"? That would have to be a teacher putting out a list of great works they're forbidden to read, wouldn't it?

I was required to read "Pride and Prejudice" in the 10th grade, and absolutely detested it. In deferance to the widespread veneration of Austen, I have since tried to read several of her novels, but,inevitably, about halfway through, I throw the damn things across the room in exasperaton and pick up a hardboiled mystery novel instead. My blind spot, I concede--but I doubt it has much to do with Austen having been forced on me at a tender age. I just think she's smug, dreary and bloodless.

On the other hand, about a year later, I read "Tristram Shandy" all the way through with intense pleasure, despite the book's legendary "difficulty". This was all on my own, with no English teacher involved. I have since learned that Austen took up novel-writing in angry response to Sterne's "indecencies". No surprise there.

About the same time, I read "The Nature of Physical Reality" by the physicist/philosopher H. Margenau, though it's a long way from being kid stuff (you had better be able to understand that the Schrodinger equation is the equation of unitary evolution of the state-vector.) I learned an awful lot, though I have since come to disagree with Margenau on the adequacy of quantum mechanics as a "complete description".

A few years later, I read "Moby Dick" simply because I felt that I ought to read at least one book on the reading list of my college "American Literature" course. It was, as they say, a life-changing experience, not least because it is entirely free of "Austenism".

Those are the highlights (or lowlights) of my admittedly eccentric course as an adolescent reader. They still shape my thought about literature and much else.

Is the goal "to produce eager readers" or is to teach the specific work as part of a shared culture? I always thought it was the latter. The "classics" I was taught sure didn't lead me to anything else. A desire to read literature seems incidental to what is taught in K-12.

"...teach the specific work as part of a shared culture": If hardly anybody but students with guns to their heads or their teachers holding the guns reads that specific work of art, how much a part of a genuine "shared culture" is it, anyway?

You could make the argument that "The Da Vinci Code" or the Harry Potter novels are not part of a "shared culture," but only part of a shared contemporary phenomenon. Shakespeare and Jane Austen go back far enough, and are still read today by a large number of people, so they'd qualify as part of a shared culture. "Moby-Dick"? I don't know. (I read it once in my twenties, and again in my fifties but "got it" only the second time.) Diane Ravitch is totally deluded if she thinks some "child" is going to "pick up 'Moby-Dick'" on his or her own and read it for pleasure. (Please, no rebuttals from associate professors whose precocious little Seths and Morgans allegedly grabbed "Moby-Dick" from a Barnes & Noble shelf and bought it with their allowance money.)

The trouble with a lot of praise and criticism concerning certain novels recommended as part of the student canon is that they concern mostly--or only--the novel's plot, characters, and "message." (The last is a particularly objectionable criterion. The great "Huckleberry Finn" is supposedly bad for us, while Khaled Hosseini's soap opera "The Kite Runner" is supposedly good for us.) But what about the language? A literary-agent friend of mine said I absolutely had to read Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America." When I replied that I was a little tired of "alternative history" (Philip K. Dick's absolutely great "The Man in the High Castle" being the exception), he replied, "It's the sentences, man, the SENTENCES." With all due respect to fossil, who knows a hell of a lot more about modern English literature than I do about math, he might consider Jane Austen's language as a virtue in itself. Her prose is beautiful.

I tend to side with Twain on Austen's novels: once you put them down you can't pick them up again.

I too am ambivalent over this issue of popular reading for reading's sake and 'quality' reading of more difficult books or 'classics.' But I think we're operating with the wrong dichotomy, that of accessible pop trash versus dry, fibrous classic. Like others have suggested, there are high-quality works of literature, old and new, that with a reasonable effort young students can get into. I think what we're really talking about here is effort verus laziness. The Harry Potter series is lovely, and so easy to read. But isn't part of the point of education to convey to students that most good things don't come easily?

This is all to say that I suspect, without any research of my own, that young students aren't shying away from reasonably accessible 'classics' like Animal Farm or Robinson Crusoe because they're 'classics' or because they're old or because they're just too difficult, but because this generation of students (not unlike millennials like myself) simply doesn't expect to have to put forth effort to obtain information. Whether it's reading or tedious math, schools need to teach students how to *work*, work being a prerequisite for understanding for oneself whether one really prefers Tristram Shandy to Harry Potter, or vice versa.

Might not "once you put [Austen's novels] down you can't pick them up again" be explained by "most good things don't come easily" and "schools need to teach students how to *work*, work being a prerequisite for understanding for oneself whether one really prefers Tristram Shandy [or Jane Austen] to Harry Potter"?

It might, in theory. But above I was paraphrasing one of Twain's quips, the context of which is actually pretty relevant. Twain famously hated Austen's novels, so much so that he gave them tremendous attention. He worked at reading them, going back to them, trying to read them again. He wrote a good deal about his struggle with Austen's novels, and we can see from his writings on Austen that however Twainish he was being with the occasional quip, he really labored over literature that he disliked or found unworthy. He earned the opinion he gave. I'm no Twain, but I've read and re-read Austen, and I still loathe the stuff.

What I was *not* suggesting in my post above is that one who doesn't like a given, respected piece of literature need only work harder to 'learn to like it.' Rather, one has to do the work of reading the book and taking it seriously before one can even form an opinion, positive or negative. But many students today, in my meager experience (and I'm no curmudgeon), simply aren't used to giving the prolonged and singular attenton to a book that is required in order to develop a meaningful opinion of it. This is a catastrophic conflation in the minds of both students and educators: we take a negative opinion of moderate levels of intellectual effort for a negative opinion of 'classic' literatures.

This debate is a great deal like one we have in music. What makes a work classical? What makes a work high art? In Austen's day was her work considered in very much the same light as the Harry Potter novel is today. Her intended audience may have been a little older but her work was still considered contemporary and popular. Today her works are classical lit. because they have stood the test of time and retained their appeal to some audiences. The question is, will Rowling's body of work be considered classical literature in the same vein as Austen's in a few generations. Only time will tell.

suomynona is right that readers are entitled to their tastes in canonical literature. If one works diligently to appreciate a canonical work such as "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Brothers Karamazov" and still doesn't like it, one is entitled to say thanks but no thanks and move on. However, suomynona's dislike for Jane Austen was delivered via a "quip" from Twain which amounted, essentially, to "Borrrrrring!", a rather philistine dismissal. I myself side with the Austen detractors who say that she wrote about "small country matters" and wonder why so many self-sufficient contemporary women like stories about subservient women seeking husbands who'll support them. (Granted, Elizabeth Bennett displays a whole lot of intelligence and moxy in landing Darcy, but it's sort of like a story of an American slave who displays a lot of intelligence and moxy in getting to work up at the Big House instead of in the cotton fields. If I were an African-American, I don't think I'd celebrate the latter character, and if I were a woman, I don't think I'd celebrate the former.) Nevertheless, Austen's language--the equivalent of composition and brushstrokes in a history painting or melody and orchestration in a piece of choral music--just about makes her novels worth reading.

Anyway, there are two different discussions going on here: 1) How to get students into the habit of reading on their own, and 2) How to teach them, by example, about literary greatness. You can manage (1) without (2), but it's very difficult, if not impossible to manage (2) without (1). And if having middle-schoolers choose the books they want to read gets them into the habit of reading on their own better than forcing Great Books down their gullets, then by all means go with (1).

Actually, goxewu, Twain's quip about Austen is not at all about the novels being boring. It's more to do with the criticism of Austen that you've mentioned yourself: Twain disliked and didn't care about the characters; he found them superficial, self-righteous, cloistered, and irrelovent. And so do I. Which is why my dislike of Austen, too, is not at all a 'philistine dismissal' based on boredom. I admit I used to one-liner from Twain almost accidentally, as a jibe and an aside; but now that you've prodded it, I've realized that it actually recalls sentiments from Twain's criticism of Austen with which I'm deeply sympathetic.

Likewise, Twain loathed Austen's prose in addition to her characters, and he was rather explicit about this in some of his letters. But I'm not so sure, when we're talking about liking or disliking books, that one can compartmentalize as easily as you seem to suggest. Maybe Twain's problems with the characters affected his reading of the prose?

Finally, to your conluding point about preferring that kids just read over having them not read or be put off by reading as a result of having 'Great Books' forced upon them:

I'm not convinced that reading in and of itself is a virtue. I still think it matters foremost how we read, and to an extent what we read. Lots of reading material does little more than sell things to children. If students can't develop a discriminating taste--yes, through the work of reading 'Great Books' and Harry Potter alike--then all we're really teaching them to do, as readers, is to passively consume whatever comes easiest. Despite the real and legitimate canon battles that continue to exist and hopefully will continue to exist as productive aspects of literary study forever, we have a sense that it's more produtive for students to Orwell and not get all of it than to read Seventeen Magazine or beach-blanket romance. We should be careful not to forget the reasons why reading is important amid the struggle to just get young students to do the work of reading.

...and I apologize for the numerous typos in that last post. Wow, I need to do the work of proofreading...

"...once you put them down you can't pick them up again."

The clear implication of that statement is that Austen's novels are boring. suomynona tries to explain away the obvious implication in subsequent posts, but in its original context--an opening one-sentence paragraph preceding a change of subject--it definitely signals boredom.

This quoting famous authors is stale. Argument by authority ("Well, Mark Twain himself said, ....") is the weakest form of argument. Religious fundamentalists do it all the time, and with the ace of trumps: "Well, God himself said, ..." suomynona, to be sure, uses Twain only for his quip value. But "once you put them down you can't pick them up again" isn't really all that witty. Decades ago, back in the eighth grade, a classmate of mine said in his oral book report (not surprisingly, about a "classic" he'd been assigned), "This is the kind of book that, once you put it down, you forget where you left it." Pretty witty...for a 13-year-old kid. And no, he probably hadn't read Twain on Austen.

"I'm not convinced that reading in and of itself is a virtue."

Well, I am. You have students who don't read, you have nothing to work with in terms of swaying them one way or another concerning what, exactly, they read. This seems to me rather self-evident.

An anology: Say you want students to be physically active on their own. Do you require all of them to learn a canon of venerated sports, or do you say, "The object is to work up a sweat, elevate your heartrate, and give your muscles a little work, so pick a sport you like and go for it"? Tell them that they must ALL learn baseball, football and basketball in order to do this, and you'll get crappy results. Tell them to pick an activity they like and report back about it ("How much sweat did you work up?" being analogous to "How far have you gotten in the book?"), and you'll get good results.

To say that it matters "foremost" "how we read" is nonsensical. We have to read--first and foremost--before it matters "how" we read. The same for "what" we read.

Proponents of limiting middle-schoolers' choice to "classics" are rather vague about exactly what it is that the students are supposed to get out of reading these "classics" as opposed to reading what they want. Is it experience with difficult prose? One assumes, then, all Faulkner and no Hemingway. Is it moral lessons? Then tacky "inspirational" novels would serve just as well. Is it something about the complexities of human existence? There's time enough for that after they've gotten into the habit of reading. Is it some form of rarified literary beauty? Again, premature. Has any middle-schooler ever said, "What I liked best about 'Vanity Fair' was the diamond structure of the plot"?

"'...once you put them down you can't pick them up again.'

The clear implication of that statement is that Austen's novels are boring."

X is the case because the clear implication is that X is the case? This is flatly circuitous, which is to say, flatly illogical. It's no more 'clear' to think that one would put down a novel and not pick it up again because one is bored anymore than because one dislikes the characters or the prose...or for that matter one is dissatisfied with x,y,z about the novel so much so that one is inclined to put it down and not pick it up again. You've read into the quote something that you simply cannot logically infer from it. And incidentally, in the actual historical context of the quote, what you've inferred is patently wrong. So I don't know what you go from here.

Beyond that, I've made it more than clear that I hadn't even given much thought to the quote in terms of the actual discussion at hand, and that I hadn't even recognized the applicability of the quote to this discussion until afte you (thankfully) interrogated it. I've likewise made it clear--and you have too--that it was just an opening one-sentence paragraph, something I thought funny, initiating a change of subject. As such it was disconnected from any argument I proceeded to make on that actual topic. It was obviously, as its own paragraph, an aside that, as I've explained, I found humorous. And you've pointed out that it was its own isolated quote. Yet now you've co-opted this isolated Twain quote as a fundamental part of my argument so you can say I'm 'arguing from authority.' But as you can easily scroll up and read, I justified my opinions on Austen with the fact that I've read and re-read Austen, and not at all because Twain has. Once I recognized the significance of the Twain quote to this topic, I elaborated by sharing the context (since you obviously were clueless about that context). Your suggestion that I'm arguing from Twain's authority simply by sharing the context of the quote from Twain that YOU questioned is pure sophistry.

And I'm not surprised that someone who takes reading blindly and unconditionally as a virtue wouldn't see the potential pitfalls of bad reading, or of misreading. Of course young students should be reading critically rather than not reading at all. But are we willing to concede the prospect of challenging students with texts that requrie them to develop critical reading skills and require them to work simply to get them to read just about anything? A cereal box? An issue of People? Are you comfortable with cultivating a generation of kids who love reading drivel, or who lap up misinformation and political demagoguery because it's constructed to give them the low-effort takeaway?

Your analogy assumes that there are straighforwardly positive effects to be had with just reading anything, just like 'just working up a sweat' one way or another is straightforwardly positive. Well, here's my analogy in terms of yours: I'm a student who doesn't want to play baseball, so I decide I just want to 'work up a sweat' by beating myself over the head with a baseball bat. Hey, I'm getting some exercise, right? Think that's an absurd image? So is the image of a 15 year old writing a 'book report' on Perez Hilton's take on Octomom's elective surgery.

I think I've been pretty clear about what, at minimum, students get out of reading literature (even if we have to call it 'classics'): they get something that was written for a purpose other than to please or sell merchandize to 21st century children. Consequently they get something that they have to work to relate to, rather than assuming that all information should be tailored to them, or spoon-fed to them in their parlance and on their terms. And they may get a little cultural capital, historical perspective, stylistic (writing) lessons, rhetoric lessons, multicultural exposure, etc. along the way (to name a few specific things).

suomynona protesteth too much.

1. "...once you put them down you can't pick them up again" was, to repeat, half of a one-sentence opening paragraph after which the subject was abruptly changed to reading popular literature as opposed to the "classics" (scare quotes originally courtesy of suomynon). Why would one not be able to pick up a Jane Austen novel once it's been put down? Because it's too heavy? Because it's too difficult? (I rather doubt Twain would be admitting to that). No, the clear meaning of the quip is that one loses interest in it, i.e., it's re boring. The flailing X,Y,Z defense doesn't change that.

2. "Yet now you've co-opted this isolated Twain quote as a fundamental part of my argument so you can say I'm 'arguing from authority.'" If Harvey J. Finsterwald, suomynona's CPA neighbor down the street had said the quip instead of Mark Twain, suomynona wouldn't have quoted it. But the quip is trotted out as "Look, folks, at what the great Mark Twain said about Austen's novels"--therefore argument by authority. Not a developed argument, but argument nevertheless.

3. I didn't say that argument by authority was suomynona's only argument. But the existence of other arguments doesn't mean that argument by authority doesn't exist in suomynona's quoting Twain. Obviously, it does.

4. suomynona is up against a logical stone wall in the "foremost" business. One has to read BEFORE one can worry about "how" or "what" one reads; if suomynona can make time's arrow fly backward, I'd be most interested in how. And yes, unconditionally, reading is better than not reading, unless suomynona wants to go down the road of deliberately keeping certain unsavory people illiterate so that they can't read bad stuff.

5. "Are we willing to concede the prospect of challenging students with texts that requrie them to develop critical reading skills and require them to work simply to get them to read just about anything?" The fallacy in this comment is that "critical reading skills" can best be developed with difficult texts. I my long-ago second-semester freshman English class, we read at 1940 Chicago Tribune editorial against Roosevelt's Lend-Lease program in order to see the devious use of language in it (i.e., to develop "critical reading skills"). The editorial was about as far from great literature as one could get, but it was perfect for developing "critical reading skills." Ah, you say, but you had the professor helping you with the analysis. Hello? Did anyone say anything in this discussion about students reading material of their choice WITHOUT any participation by, or discussion with, the teacher?

6. The rebuttal analogy of a student's reading what he or she chooses in order to get into the habit of reading with a student's hitting his- or herself over the head with a baseball bat is, in a word, ludicrous. To state the obvious, hitting oneself over the head with a baseball bat will almost instantly curtail, halt or even prevent further working up a seat. Is there any reading material whatsoever that will do that with reading? And if there is, it's more likely to be an overly difficult "classic" work of literature.

7. A 15-year-old's writing a "book report" on Perez Hilton's take on Octomom's elective surgery (I'll let slide for the moment that there'd have to be a Hilton book on the subject in order for it to be a "book report" and not simply a "reading report") is actually not a bad idea. Discussion with the teacher would include, among other points: Perez Hilton as authority, the social impact of Octomom's having those eight kids, the place of elective surgery in our culture, and medical privacy versus public parading. You'd probably get more "critical reading skills" from the 15-year-old out of that than say, discussing Dreiser's "An American Tragedy."

8. A whole lot of "classics"--including Shakespeare and Dickens-- were written "to please. As to "sell[ing] merchandize [sic] to 21st century children," what is suomynona talking about? If it's Harry Potter, well, the merchandising is a small price to pay for getting kids to read on their own.

9. "...something that they have to work to relate to." Here we go again with this character-building through literature. We're talking habituating kids to read on their own, not teaching them to endure intellectual pain. That's better addressed after they've started to read a lot.

10. "...they may get a little cultural capital, historical perspective, stylistic (writing) lessons, rhetoric lessons, multicultural exposure, etc. along the way." Then again, they may not, or they may get those things in the literature they choose to read. The "classics" as usually construed, by the way, usually offer little in the way of "multiculturalism" in the way that term is usually construed.

One of the unaddressed gorillas in the room in this discussion is the teacher's workload. If kids read the books they want, the teacher likely won't have read them and will have to do some work--at least a little excerpt-reading and Googling--to have a profitable discussion with the student. This would probably help the teacher, who then couldn't use the same old yellowed notes on an assigned "classic."

Typo apology #14,362: No "re" in front of "boring" in #1; it should be "read a 1940 Chicago Tribune" in #5. There may be others. And if suomynona's "merchandize" is merely a typo and not a misspelling from orthographic ignorance, my apology for that, too.