Revision World Jekyll And Hyde

[Lorna Schildt]

Inhis poem "Mending Wall," Robert Frost explores our love/hate relationship with walls. On the one hand, we believe that "good fences make good neighbors." At the same time, we worry about who is being walled in and walled out. Book lists inspire a similar ambivalence. No sooner is one constructed than forces on every side begin marshalling arguments either to augment or bring it down. Personally, I think book lists make good reading.

However authoritative a book list pretends to be, most are actually quite arbitrary. Lists include and exclude texts based upon criteria that are sometimes unclear even to the list makers. When the Modern Library released its selection of the hundred best novels written in English in the 20th century, the list was met with outrage. How could James Dickey's Deliverance be better than anything Joseph Conrad ever wrote? How is it possible that not a single book by Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Patrick White, Toni Morrison, or John Updike appears? Is Ulysses really the best novel written in the 20th century? So make your own list, said the publishers of the Modern Library, and then proceeded to provide a Web site where readers could create alternative lists. I like that response. Readers enjoy making lists of "best" books almost as much as they like poking holes in other people's lists. Besides, lists are fair game. The fact that they inspire challenges is part of their value. Criticizing someone else's list helps us refine our own criteria for what makes a book worthwhile.

California's Department of Education recently created a new book list, Recommended Literature: Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve. The list is descriptive rather than restrictive. It is designed to provide guidance for teachers, parents, and publishers about the kinds of books children should be reading. But no sooner was the site containing the new list up and running than criticism began pouring in. As one of the contributors responsible for creating the list, I feel compelled to defend our choices, but the teacher in me longs to scrawl across the top of the page in red ink, "Needs more work!" Though the list was intended to be a living document and a work in progress, without funding to support revision, it is likely to remain in its present state for some time to come. What is needed is a clear plan, with dollars attached, to provide for an annual review of the list, not only to delete out-of-print books and add new titles but also to take advantage of criticisms and suggestions about what should be on the list.

Many well-intentioned teachers have abandoned the classics for what they think will be more user-friendly titles. This is a mistake. Just because students can't read a book on their own doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't read it with help. Instead of choosing more seemingly "relevant" stories, we should be showing all our students how classic heroes struggled with the very same monsters we face today.

If I were in charge of the world, I would mandate that every ninth-grader read Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. How better to help young people consider the dark side that lurks within us all? The short novel is rich and layered, unfolding like a mystery story. Teachers shouldn't be put off by the fact that many students would find the text difficult. I have stopped telling students, as I hand out books, that they are going to love this text and instead tell them that what they are about to read may at first seem quite hard. I even warn them that, at first, they may hate it. I promise to help them through and also assure them that in my professional opinion, they will ultimately feel that the struggle was worthwhile. Stevenson's first sentence describes the story's narrator, the dour Mr. Utterson:

I invite students to think about why it makes good sense that this tale of extraordinary horror should be told by such an utterly reliable narrator. I also help them negotiate Stevenson's complex sentences. We talk about his word choice and define unfamiliar vocabulary. Together we picture Victorian London in our minds' eyes. I call this teaching.

It seems wrong to me that schools should reserve the classics for honor students. Ignoring the elitism that such a curricular decision betrays, teachers defend a watered-down reading list for "regular" students by explaining to themselves and others that most teenagers simply can't understand the difficult vocabulary. Besides, they argue, today's kids won't read anything that is old. I worry that in our determination to provide students with literature they "relate to," we end up teaching works that students actually don't need much help with. And I worry that we do this at the expense of teaching classics that students most certainly do need assistance negotiating. This is not to suggest that we stop putting contemporary literature into students' hands, but only to urge that we teach in what Lev Vgotsky calls the "zone of proximal development." He wrote that, "The only good kind of instruction is that which marches ahead of development and leads it." If students can read a book on their own, if it is a mirror book, it probably isn't the best choice for classroom study. Classroom texts should pose intellectual challenges to young readers. These texts should be books that will make students stronger readers, stronger people for having studied.

When an excerpt from Jack London's White Fang appeared on California's 2001 exit exam, many teachers argued that their urban students didn't have the background information to read the passage with comprehension. I would argue that few of us have been out in the Alaskan wild or had much experience with wolves. We acquired our "background knowledge" from books. If the only stories students are reading are ones set in their own time and their own milieu, how will they ever know the rest of the world? How will they know history? If we only hand students books containing words they already know, how will they learn new ones? Any recommended list of books worth its salt should include titles that challenge students and encourage teachers to help young people stretch.

It seems to me that a list succeeds or fails not on the basis of a book that's on or is missing but because of the range it suggests. Tim Rutten, the Los Angeles Times culture correspondent, is evenhanded with his praise and blame. He describes the California recommended literature list as

The committee paid careful attention to offering a balance of male and female authors, contemporary and classic texts, and to ensuring ethnic diversity. The list includes titles in five languages other than English: Spanish, Hmong, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Filipino. The selection committee's sins were of omission rather than commission.

In a provocative editorial for the Sacramento Bee, Peter Schrag decries the "omission of almost any of the great affirmative themes of American or Western history." Schrag points out the omission, other than books about the Japanese internment camps or the Holocaust, of stories about the main figures and events of World War II. He continues:

California's recommended literature list could be an awesome document. But to be so, it will need constant revision by teachers, scholars, librarians, parents, and students. Like the wall in Robert Frost's poem, a list needs constant attention. "The gaps I mean, / No one has seen them made or heard them made, / But at spring mending-time we find them there." A Web-based list should be easy to mend.

Carol Jago teaches English at Santa Monica High School and directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She is the author of With Rigor for All: Teaching the Classics to Contemporary Students (Heinemann, 2000).

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