During a summer week I've been trying to obliterate from my memory, I hunkered down in an Undisclosed Location reading essays written by high school students for the Test That Dare Note Speak Its Name, and at least a zillion of those essays tried to analyze Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Some of the essays were good and many were mediocre, but all of them filled me with wonder: High school students are reading Ralph Ellison?! Wow! Way to blow their minds!! Send those students my way!
Now comes word (during Banned Books Week, of course) that a school district in North Carolina has removed Invisible Man from school libraries for all the usual reasons: "inappropriate" language, sexual content, violence. One school board member proclaimed that he couldn't find any "literary value" in the book (read it here).
At this point I'm tempted to return to Russell Baker's 1982 newspaper column "The Only Gentleman" (read it here), in which he pokes gentle fun at book-burners by suggesting that instead of arguing that reading Mark Twain damages high school students, school officials should argue that "assigning the book to adolescents damages Mark Twain."
Baker asserts that "Huckleberry Finn can be partly enjoyed after the age of 25, but for fullest benefit it probably shouldn't be read before age 35, and even then only if the reader has had a broad experience of American society." Further, he calls Moby Dick "a book accessible only to people old enough to know what it is to rail at God about the inevitability of death."
He has a point: expecting starry-eyed high school students to comprehend Ahab's wrath or Huck Finn's "conversion" would be like asking them to, I don't know, build a robotic locker-opener for a disabled classmate.
But wait--they did that. (Read it here.) We ask students every day to perform tasks beyond their abilities, to stretch their minds beyond their current understanding, and if we want their reach to exceed their grasp in STEM fields, why not in literature?
Sure, Invisible Man is tough reading--the Randolph County School Board got that right. And it's certainly true that the satirical method of the novel uncovers some uncomfortable truths about mid-twentieth-century American life, but, as Russell Baker pointed out so well 30 years ago, reading satire requires a sensitivity to nuance not always grasped by inexperienced readers. The sad thing here is not just that high school students in Randolph County won't be permitted to read Invisible Man but that their elders don't know how to read it.
Send 'em all back to school. I'll show 'em what to do with "inappropriate" language!
1 comment:
Well said.
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