Fahrenheit 451 Is Coming True!

I am outraged and appalled at this developing news. In a recent conversation with co-workers (two teachers moonlighting as waitresses because teachers are undervalued), I have discovered some disturbing changes to the federal and state curriculum for middle school and high school students. 

If you remember correctly, Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury that takes place in a society where, over the decades, books were ruthlessly abridged to accommodate a shorter attention span and watered down to avoid disturbing the status quo. Eventually firemen start burning books to appease the public. Thankfully books are not being burned in your local high school (yet!). However, new changes to the curriculum call for only one fiction novel to be read during the school year and the rest to be replaced with "information texts" such as non-fiction articles, letters, speeches, and if you are lucky and your teacher fights for it, maybe one short story! Their reasoning? To improve reading comprehension based more on "real life" examples. They said that since attention span is shorter in students they need to constrict the breadth of study to help them develop better comprehension....#$$#&%&^%@*. I don't even know what that word would be except frustration in symbols. 

One of the teachers, who teaches junior English, is only able to teach To Kill A Mockingbird this year for the American Literature course. Is it just me or what about The Scarlet Letter, As I Lay Dying, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Great Gatsby, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn??!?!? You know- Hemingway, Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a little person named Mark Twain? 

Now, I'm not saying that studying letters from Abigail Adams to her husband and the Gettysburg address is somehow wrong. They are a beautiful part of our literary history, but it is much harder to connect to a character in two pages versus two hundred. And when a student cannot connect with a character or relate to the material, it will go in one ear and out the next day. For me, that is the beautiful part of literature- connecting to a world and a person far away and yet feeling that my situation and feelings are understood, Being transported to another world and time, and somehow realizing the universality of emotions. Of course we will have our favorites and even some we dislike. I mean, Siddhartha, my freshmen year? Thumbs down. And Stranger by Camus? Bleh. For my senior year, 1984 gave me nightmares. But, I learned valuable things about literature and myself through those experiences. There is something inherently character building in the exploration of literature. We discover ourselves, what we believe and what we like as we place our minds in a thousand different contexts. 

So what do we do? Speak out. Talk to your school board. Promote reading in your community. Volunteer at the schools. Let the world know that we will not allow this to happen. Even if I really wanted to burn Lord of the Flies after reading it sophomore year.