On Blogging in the Late Weimar Republic

Crisis? What Crisis?

Reading the headlines of Alltop.com’s “top education” sites‘¹ brings to mind the cover of the old Supertramp album, showing a man sunning himself in a bathing suit on a lounge chair, surrounded by grimy industrial waste. The album’s title? “Crisis? What Crisis?”

Economically, American banking deregulation has dragged the US, and the rest of the world, into a crisis creating comparisons to Depression Year 1937.

Politically, the McCain/Palin campaign is whipping up hatred that makes such sober and respected political commentators as conservative David Gergen openly express fear that civic violence could be the result – and others worry that the unthinkable return to political assassination is now possible.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues its assault on the constitution by violating the 200-year-old law of Posse Comitatus, which protects US citizens from being oppressed by their own military, by deploying an Army Brigade to police American streets, and be answerable only to him. Soldiers disobeying, say, an order to arrest members of Congress, or citizens protesting Wall Street, would be court-martialed and serve prison time for serving their democracy instead of their dictator.

And Sarah Palin, the naughty librarian (who can’t name anything she reads, and who may as well gyrate while she winkingly chants “Drill, Baby, Drill”) doesn’t care about the causes of global warming – a position I’m sure would not be shared, could we ask them, by the 25% of mammals now endangered worldwide.

Everything is Political – Except Edubloggers?

So how many education bloggers show the slightest indication, on their blogs, that they find addressing these crises worth “suspending their edublogging campaigns”?

Answer: a whopping 17 – out of the 130 blogs with over 600 posts on Alltop’s education page.

So without further ado,

The “I Didn’t Wordle as Rome Burned” Award

1. The Chancellor’s New Clothes (Our Political Role Models: recommended)
2. Iterating Towards Openness (Scary Sarah: recommended)
3. ODonnell Web (McCain’s hate speech: recommended)
4. History is Elementary (close reading of rescue bailout bill: recommended)
   
5. Borderland (always recommended)
6. Stephen Downes’ OLDaily (economy: recommended)
7. Joanne Jacobs (on Ayers as still-revolutionary)
8. NYC Educator (McCain’s anger issue)
9. Piloted (teaching campaigning)
   
10. My Wonderful World Blog (foreign policy debate)
    
11. Assorted Stuff (on This American Life’s Wall Street podcasts)
    
12. Facing History and Ourselves (educating about campaigning)
    
13. Factchecked (gasoline as political issue)
14. Education Week (Ayers smear)
15. ASCD: In Service (education debate)
16. The Fischbowl (debates 2.0)
17. MindOH Blog (vote)

A Maverick’s Plea for Reform

I’m aware of the many reasons that educators might not openly advocate their political views. I can only hope it’s ye olde self-censoring fear for your jobs that causes this silence, instead of indifference or worse.

All I know is, for this month at least, there are more important things to spend time on than writing about classroom blogging policies, PLNs, global collaborations, Moodles and Nings and Wordles.²

A bit of reading on the Weimar Republic’s failure, and replacement by a famous military dictatorship in the midst of an economic and military crisis – accompanied by extreme racism – might be a good place to start.

I’ve also enabled Diigo to post my daily bookmarks and annotations here. I’m on sabbatical this year, so decided to share what I have time to read. Feel free to check out my Stumbleupon bookmarks too.

I hate feeling like some silly Cassandra.

But I’d hate even more to be one of the Trojans who laughed at her.

~     ~     ~

1. and we all know what a debatable claim that “top” is
2. Anyway, haven’t they all been written into the ground by now?

37 Comments

• At October 11, 2008, Harold Jarche wrote:

  I've been accused of being too nice on my blog (perhaps it's a Canadian thing), but I strongly agree with you, Clay. It's time to get more subversive.

  Harold Jarches last blog post..The second week of Work Literacy

• At October 11, 2008, Dean Shareski wrote:

  Clay,

  While I admire your passion for politics, I certainly don't feel knowledgeable enough to shed any light on the situation. Certainly as a Canadian, I'd be less qualified than most but even as a federal election in my own country is 5 days away, I'm not even sure who I'd vote for and would only be able to write about my confusion and frustration with the lack of clarity.

  I admit it, I'm not a very good citizen. But what concerns me is that just like I would take an non-educator's writing on education with a grain of salt, I have a hard time finding folks who's opinion's on politics I trust. Those inside politics are rarely able to speak objectively.

  In general, the people whom I most trust are politicians and critics who can see both sides of an issue. No one is all bad and no one is all good. US politics is so polarized that I can't find anyone who can provide a balance. That's not to say people don't have a preference but the discussions are rarely more than a hard slam against the opponent. When a Democrat criticizes Obama, I listen. When a Republic credits Obama, I listen. Same is true for McCain or any other politicians. I'm looking for objective voices. They are hard to find.

  I'm not smart or knowledgeable enough to provide a balanced look at politics. Maybe it's lame but that's my excuse.

  Dean Shareskis last blog post..I’m sure I’m doing it wrong

• At October 11, 2008, avoicein wrote:

  Thanks for mentioning us.

  I can tell you one thing - I'm not going down without a fight.

  avoiceins last blog post..“Hey Sarah Palin” Song

• At October 11, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  I get your intent and don't mean to nitpick, Harold, but I'm having trouble with the choice of "subversive" to describe the simple act of voicing your positions on social and political issues. In the 19th century, it was a normal part of citizenship, wasn't it?

• At October 11, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  You know I love you, Dean, but I want to agree that for educators who talk about being "lifelong learners," saying "I'm not knowledgeable enough" about politics does seem lame. We're all about critical thinking, reading, learning, communicating.

  That was sort of my point about "suspending the Moodle-talk" to learn about things we should know to be good forces (which simply means informed and critical ones) in bad times. If we're not, then what's the value of our vote?

  As for objectivity, you know that's a myth, right?

  And in the age of YouTube and blogs, we're privy to campaign moments, arguments, evidence, and points of view that the media won't show us, so we really can inform ourselves now better than ever before about political and social issues.

  And for the record, I've criticized Obama on these pages more than once - most strongly for supporting the bailout without being open to other approaches.

  But there is simply nothing in the same universe of egregious shame that Obama is doing to compare with McCain/Palin.

  And so we share our thoughts.

  You're Canadian, though, so it's not as big a problem for you, you lucky dog.

• At October 11, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @A Voice,

  And that's why you're one of maybe three edublogs in my Reader.

  Great Palin song, by the way.

• At October 11, 2008, Harold Jarche wrote:

  Not sure if people wore their politics on their sleeve in the 19th C. In Europe and the British Empire it was all about King and Country, and politics were for the rich. Around here, many people voted the way their parents did.

  Also, the simple act of voicing my opinions on social and political issues could be very subversive - to my business and my ability to earn an income.

  Harold Jarches last blog post..The second week of Work Literacy

• At October 11, 2008, Jeff Wasserman wrote:

  Because my blog is also a classroom resource, I'm loathe to express my specific political views on it--my school admins are drowning in complaints that teachers are espousing pro-Obama or pro-McCain views in their classrooms, and I'm not getting into it. The simple fact of the matter is that my students are (mostly) too young to vote, and their parents have made their minds up already--my district is full of high-dollar-amount donors, $1000/plate fundraiser host families, etc.

  I did bring my sophomores to a State Rep debate held in the high school, and they had a lot to say about it. These kids are tuned in to the process, and how it's covered in the media. They're savvy. Some support Obama, some support McCain, and they'll argue their positions as long as I'll let them. It's heartening to see.

  No, I'll keep my personal politics off my blog and save them for my Facebook arguments with my irrationally conservative and xenophobic friend. If it were a personal blog, or if I weren't a public school teacher, perhaps I'd think differently. But since my biggest audience is teenagers, I'm just not gonna do it.

  Jeff Wassermans last blog post..Welcome to the desert of the real

• At October 11, 2008, KarenR wrote:

  My professional blog is about education and like Jeff and some others, I just don't feel comfortable including my personal political views there. Instead, I maintain a personal blog where I put those kinds of things (http://simplykaren.org/wordpress/). There is a link to that site on my professional blog so if people are interested in learning more about me and my views beyond education and technology, they are free to explore but I am not forcing it upon them. I am trying to maintain some separation between a personal and professional life, I suppose.

  I have found myself crossing that line with Twitter, however, and felt a little uncomfortable with doing that but it seems less permanent, I suppose.

  KarenRs last blog post..A Little Freedom and Personal Space, Is That So Bad?

• At October 11, 2008, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Rome's been burning for awhile, now. I'm guessing my last comment suggesting that you keep sharing thoughts on Gilgamesh for me (and Nero) to enjoy did not fly.

  Anyone who pays any attention to history, to politics, to our society can see what's been going on--and it has been going on for several decades now.

  My daughter was beaten by a police officer back in October, 2001. She was jailed. Officers had badge numbers covered up. She was in a peaceable assembly protesting the Bush administration's plan to bomb people who had nothing to do with 9/11.

  Thursday at lunch, one teacher said that voting for a Democrat is akin to inviting terrorists to bomb the US.

  I read Naomi Wolf's words years ago, and they rang true. I kid about my tinfoil hat, but these are troubled times.

  In the classroom, I (attempt to) teach children how to think critically. My own views do not (or should not) matter.

  I have faith that if I teach children how to think, they will reach reasonable, humane, and (dare I say it?) loving answers to the ills around us.

  I hold a position that wields tremendous power over other clans' children (loco parentis is a big deal to me)--if I espouse my positions publicly, it betrays my faith in the rational approach, and undermines what I am trying to do.

  I am not saying we should not be screaming from the rooftops, though it is a shame that we are such a nation of sheep, blind sheep at that, that only the loudest get heard.

  I am saying, though, that once I start screaming from the rooftops in an edublog forum, I am betraying my trust in the ability of a republic to educate its children.

  (Not that I am not almost there already--but if I give up my faith that humans can think and love, and that we can teach humans how to think and love better, then I am not only giving up on my livelihood, I am giving up on life.)

  I do scream and shout, just not in the ed world. If you ever visit my classroom, you'll hear some very interesting things from children once they are allowed to think on their own. You will hear views contrary to my own, but that are on their way to being reasonable.

  I had a very engaging months/years long on-line discussion with a brilliant young man studying at Oxford, a man who held some views obviously pushed on him. We disagreed on just about everything political, but I told him that given his mind, he and I would be much closer to agreeing on things as he got older than he knew.

  And, years later, the transition has been startling to some, but not to me.

  Faith.

• At October 12, 2008, Jose wrote:

  Just FYI, Clay, make that 18. My politics have been more NYC-central, but I feel important nonetheless, and if we know anything NYC, it's that that's really Rome, with the US being Italy.

  With that said, that's a fine list there. I need to add some of these people to my Google Reader. Good read.

  Joses last blog post..The Holiest Redeemers

• At October 12, 2008, Dean Shareski wrote:

  Clay,

  I do hang my head in shame somewhat as to my ignorance and apathy. I'm just not convinced everyone has to use their professional space for this. It's taken me a long time to sort out who's opinions are valid in the world of education.

  I'll also admit to a possible naivety about my beliefs in politics, at least from a Canadian perspective. I'm inclined to believe that the differences between parties are much smaller than anyone would like us to believe. As I said earlier no one is all bad or good but in general, I think most if not all politicians do want what's best. And while their approaches might be slightly different, the ultimate results of their implementations of policies would be negligible when juxtaposed against the entire policy and given many uncontrolled variables, particularly when it comes to economics.

  Naive. Maybe but the emphasis of the media and blogs are designed to polarize,smear and persuade. Not convinced that's the best way to learn.

  Dean Shareskis last blog post..I’m sure I’m doing it wrong

• At October 12, 2008, avoiceinthewilderness wrote:

  Ok, so my conscience is compelling me to say that my co-author and I do blog under pseudonyms.

  Writing this way affords us a lot more freedom to condemn the system in which we work.

  Less credibility, maybe, but definitely more freedom.

  I don't know if I would be as honest if I were using the blog as a professional outlet and using my name.

  avoiceinthewildernesss last blog post..Will Canada Take Us?

• At October 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  I hear you, Jeff, and you point to a question that deserves asking: Who is the main audience of each edublog? I suspect that in the great majority of cases, unlike yours, it's other edublogging adults - voters all (at least if they're American)- and not students.

  But maybe I should check out Facebook, which while I have an account, I don't use. But the readership there is less broad.

  Anyway, thanks for weighing in.

• At October 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Karen, I've thought about doing the same thing. But I find myself chafing against this cubby-holing that says I'm an "edublogger" - I've always been political, since day one, on these pages, though not to the degree of late, which didn't seem justified until, er, lately.

  It's something to think about. But it's interesting to me that educators shy away from sharing their own critical thinking about the most important issues of the day. It sort of goes in great irony against the grain of what Web 2.0 is all about.

  But I'm aware that I'm ignoring the question of "what 'edublogs' should be allowed to say" - and now we're back to the old debate about whether there are any "rules" at all about our use of this world, and whether there should be.

  Shirky's "publish, then filter" principle seems to apply here. I'll publish, and let the reader decide whether to filter it out, or let it in.

• At October 12, 2008, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Subversion rarely works well, and pseudonyms should be condemned in an open, democratic society.

  On the other hand, not sure any open, democratic societies exist.

  I don’t know if I would be as honest if I were using the blog as a professional outlet and using my name.

  This is the crux--real change requires removing the masks. Real change requires risks.

  And few of us are willing to take off our masks.

  And few folks pay much heed to people behind masks.

• At October 12, 2008, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Dear Clay,

  I am dragging this over to my site: What is our responsibility as teachers as Rome burns.

  It's sort of a blog hijack, but a somewhat different issue than the one you pose.

  (I got a belly full of fresh clams, and saw a rare midday rainbow colered halo bordering the sun--hardly a rational response to the fires around us, but mircles nonetheless.)

  And you got me thinking. I may alter my behavior a tad.

  Michael Doyles last blog post..What I wnat to teach in biology....

• At October 12, 2008, Louise Maine wrote:

  I have been frustrated since I have been in elementary school (even wrote to Pres. Carter) and no one seemed to care and thought I was highly emotional. I may not put it in my blog, but I am highly polarizing at get-togethers, family dinners, and the lunch room, let alone the classroom. Lack of resources and energy, etc. are all coming true. My husband did not understand cheap oil and what I told him in 1990 is now here. Hate to tell them, I told you so, but I am.

  Do you think people listen? Not really. I am focusing on teaching at this point. Watch the blog through the year. I am not so concerned about edublogging and writing what has already been written by others. I am focusing on the journey I am leading my students that infuses issues throughout the year. Currently in my 3 different courses it is global warming (this is the slowest of all my classes), biodiversity (starting with white-tailed deer here and moving outward across the globe), and plants in Academic Biology (humans use 1/3 of all the plant productivity to our use).

  A species with that large an ego will not be here for long. A just god would surely would not have envisioned a planet this way. I do say this to students. Wait until we get to the real problem: human population. There is a firestorm.

  I also do not have hope for the next administration, too much is wrong and no right answers. Am I cynical? - you bet. Many adults do not have the information to really understand the issues. How do you get them to be critical thinkers and search for truth? I am impressed that this year even my lowest students are showing interest in discussion and questioning about such topics.

  I have another blog that I have made one post about oil and what it really represents. I rarely write there and it is a hodgepodge of stuff. Maybe I should split it between the other blogs I have. Your post is giving me pause and rethink this again. I still think chronicling what we do and what we learn may be a much better way to get a message out and get some one to think.

  Louise Maines last blog post..Knee deep in projects

• At October 12, 2008, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience « Living on the Lip of Insanity wrote:

  [...] October 11, 2008 by Kate Tabor Clay Burrell writes a blog that is engaging and literate and that on occasion terrifies me. His recent series of posts raises real questions about the Bush administration and the current election, but also about what we, as teachers, are doing in the face of Rome burning. [...]

• At October 12, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  So, like Michael, I'm posting my response on my blog. Because I teach American Literature I have the luxury and the pleasure of teaching On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. So, I direct your attention to our American historical radical left - another fine New England transcendentalist.

  Kate Tabors last blog post..On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

• At October 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Kate, I hope everybody takes the time to see something from English class actually made - gasp - relevant to citizenship today. Great post. Thanks for brightening my day.

• At October 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  I've got a reply to your post/comment brewing, Michael. Hope to write it when my wife goes to church.

• At October 12, 2008, Michael Doyle wrote:

  I realized after posting that what happens on a blog is very different from what happens in the classroom.

  Now my brain is spinning around with a different sort of response to your post. Where does the classroom end? I do, after all, buy beer at the local liquor store, figuring students my as well see that I am an adult who drinks beer.

  I have to be very careful about my motives--it may be that I am avoiding the unfolding catastrophe around us.

  This week, we're talking about the influence of humans on our environment. It's a tough subject to present, not because it's controversial, but because it's so unnerving that some kids may lose hope. The key is to kick their naivete without bruising their hope.

  FWIW, the schiool already got a phone call about the way I handled the Large Hadron Collider. (I didn't say the world was going to end--I asked the class who gets to choose what technologies we pursue when the endgame is unknown. A kid, understandably, only heard half what I was saying and got scared.)

  So I am thinking. Again. A lot. WHich is why, of course, I come here.

  Michael Doyles last blog post..What I want to teach in biology....

• At October 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Louise, interesting comments.

  I've changed my approach of late to play political echo chamber of stuff I'm finding elsewhere, in hopes that the viral nature of the web can increase exposure of things like that Palin Debate Flowchart I found elsewhere - and that around 1,000 people have visited from email sharing from earlier readers. The guy who made the flowchart has benefited from so many of us sharing his work. I think he made Digg's hotlist.

  I don't know if it will make a difference, but it's within my sphere of influence to try to create the conditions for that difference. But again, especially in light of recent research I've read on the nature of political belief - that it's emotion-based instead of rational - I have my doubts. But I figure maybe the same people that are the decisive swing voters may be less emotional and more rational.

  There's another aspect of all of this that intrigues me, and that's the role bloggers can play in amping up the news that the mainstream media underplays or ignores. Palin's witch-hunting Pastor Muthee is the best example, or maybe her cozying up with Alaskan secessionists (the opposite of "country first-ers"), both of which the mainstream media ignore, while at the same time heavily covering the Obama/Ayers and Obama/Wright allegations. We in the blogosphere can do our collective part to redress that media imbalance by shining our lights on its blind spots.

  Again, that may be fruitless, but also may not be.

  I have to think there is hope for the next administration - though I'm not convinced Obama is sufficiently free of corporate and lobbying influence to to fulfill that hope - and that there are right answers - energy independence a la Obama's declared ambition to create a Kennedy-esque "man on the moon in ten years" program to fund alternative energy to free us of our bondage to the Middle East, which would also reduce our military adventurism in that region, and open up new diplomatic possibilities to solve problems in that region (or at least stop causing them).

  I've rambled enough. Thanks for your comment.

• At October 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Michael, you're getting closer to my point with that distinction between what happens on our blogs and what happens in our classrooms.

  Other adults, who vote, read our blogs - more than students do, I would wager. And those adults are the ones whose votes might benefit from our own reflections on the issues, and our sharing of what we're seeing and discovering and thinking.

  On a shakier note, I'm still scratching my head over the in loco parentis argument. While I get it on the gut level of "nobody should influence my kid's values but me," I get it less when I reflect that a) by definition, your average parent was your average C student as a child, and thus hardly the bastion of wisdom and independent, deep thought we'd like him or her to be - so maybe their kids need to hear the arguments, identified as precisely that, arguments which permit counter-arguments, of other adults who happen to be their teachers; and b) so many less disinterested parties play the role of in loco parentis - the media, preachers, and unthinking ideologues of all sorts - that it's disturbingly ironic that the only authority figure without the prospect of profiting from converts or consumers (and I mean teachers) have to muzzle themselves and cede the field to Bill O'Reilly OR John Stewart OR Rick Warren.

  The rub, of course: those types above are idea-peddlers for profit, totally free to hawk their thoughts, while teachers are employees of the State, and thus in jeopardy if they expose the young to ideas beyond the right answers to the safe and irrelevant test.

  It's mind-boggling, really.

  I'll stop there for now.

  Thanks for the input. Always a pleasure.

• At October 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Jose, I stand corrected. I just read the pop-up first paragraphs of the latest posts on Alltop, so if I missed something, my bad :)

• At October 13, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  In today's NY Times Harold Bloom has an op-ed piece that suggests our next president turn to Emerson.

  Out of Panic: Self Reliance

  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12bloom.html?ei=5070&emc=eta-1

  -KJT

  Kate Tabors last blog post..On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

• At October 13, 2008, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Just to be clear on the loco parentis--I never said I did not influence a child's values. If I'm not influencing a child's values, I'm in the wrong field.

  I'm not terribly worried about losing my job--my background allows me to make ridiculous amounts of money for less hours than I spend teaching.

  It is not my business to preach. It doesn't work, anyway. I'm not terribly good at muzzling myself for job security (if I were, I wouldn't be dropping the F-bomb as frequently as I do). I am decent, I think, at promoting thinking. If my kids were college students, I'd have no problem with espousing my views in the classroom. They're not. They're still embryos. I need them to trust critical thinking, and to trust their results when they think.

  So, yeah, I want to influence values--but not in the typical my-teacher-beat-up-your-mommy sense. I want my kids to think.

  Michael Doyles last blog post..What I want to teach in biology....

• At October 13, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  It's less a question of trying to influence values, in my book, than trying to influence the reasoning through which we all arrive at values.

  A teacher who says "My values are right because I'm the teacher" is not a teacher, but a preacher - appealing to his/her own authority.

  A teacher who says, "Let's examine positions A, B, and C," and their foundations in evidence, facts, and reasoning, is not beating anybody up, but instead helping learners question everything - hopefully as a scaffold to them having "justified true beliefs," in IBO language, for their worldview.

  A teacher who does neither is just a test-prep professional who probably hasn't him/herself wrestled with questions of citizenship and intellectual/social responsibility. (And that's not aimed at you, Doyle, which by now I hope you know.)

  The best teachers know that they can set up units of enquiry that create the conditions for students to examine the foundations of conventional beliefs across the spectrum, and help students discover they have no good reasons to back up what they think.

• At October 13, 2008, John Larkin wrote:

  Well, If I was a US resident I would be voting for Barack Obama. That's my position. In fact I would encourage people to get off their fat arses and vote. For anyone. As long as they utilise their right to vote. I wonder if there are US citizens that have never voted? I believe voting is not compulsory in the USA. It is compulsory here in Australia.

  I have not blogged about the US Presidential election. In the past I have blogged about our previous Prime Minister John Howard and the detrimental effect his party and its policies were having on our society. he was such a complete anal retentive ignoramus. He sullied the reputation of my country. I had blogged about Bush on my older blog.

• At October 13, 2008, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Alas, the teachers who feel the need to endorse ideas without truly going through the reasoning far outnumber those who take time to examine premises and reasoning.

  I frequently remind the class that while most of them won't remember a lick of content (and even if they do, it will be outdated in a few decades), they will keep their ability to think critically. (It does not help that as a culture we pretend to believe that learning "science" in high school is our ticket to economic success against the big, bad Asians. It helps even less that for many of those in charge, they're not pretending.)

  Now this may sound silly here, and I hope it didn't sound to silly in class (I had an administrator in the room at the time), but I asked a child who had no idea how to change a tire to imagine what she would do if her phone broke and she got a flat tire miles from help.

  She looked startled, but we broke down the problem together, and without getting into details, developed a way to solve it. If my administrator questions it, I'll tell her it falls under NJ Standard 9.3: promote critical thinking skills.

  By the time one is finished with public education, you should know how to approach common, simple problems. It's clear we are failing that.

  A thinking citizenry could not have possibly allowed the 2000 election to be as close as it was, nor would it have allowed it to be swiped as it was.

  Michael Doyles last blog post..What I want to teach in biology....

• At October 14, 2008, diane wrote:

  I wrestled with this "challenge" and finally posted the result: I feel I have a professional obligation to use my influence responsibly, to refrain from promoting a specific candidate.

  That said, my horror at the McCain/Palin ticket, and all that it represents, is probably evident to my more astute students.

  I don't feel there is any real choice in this election. It's possibilities or disaster.

  dianes last blog post..Politics in the Classroom

• At October 14, 2008, Sometimes I Cringe | Metanoia wrote:

  [...] http://beyond-school.org/2008/10/11/wordling-as-rome-burns/ [...]

• At October 18, 2008, Adrienne wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  I've hummed and hawed about this for a couple weeks now and I guess I need to come clean.

  You know that like Dean Shareski, I'm Canadian. I therefore feel my opinions on the subject of the upcoming American presidential election are mostly irrelevant and unimportant.

  While I think voicing an opinion is important – I have never been one to be silenced – I see little point getting riled up over an election that I have no control over or impact on. And though I do have things at stake (as simply a citizen of the world, which America influences), on a daily basis I have much more pressing concerns.

  Another reason I withold somewhat: privacy and courtesy. I am by far the most liberal of my large extended family, many of whom are card-holding Conservatives in Canada, and I need to respect that. My public outcries have the potential to harm some of them who are running for office at the provincial level. I feel strongly about my beliefs and values, but I also care about my family and do not want to polarize what is already a delicate circumstance. (Part of it is self-preservation – I’m already polarized enough, being the “crazy” one who moved overseas!)

  I have to admit that in the last several weeks I have been suffering from American election fatigue and I have had to avoid the bloggers – edubloggers and otherwise – who are so ultimately focused on politics at the moment. This is part of the reason you’ve not see me around Beyond School lately; I’m a bit sad but I just don’t have much to contribute to this conversation and so I have been devoting more time to others in my reader. I’ve also had to literally turn Twitter off during the debates because the commentary from all my active, American, political Tweetpals is so distracting from my other areas of focus.

  I tend to visit fewer American edubloggers in general because I sometimes find the focus to be overly about American education that it doesn’t apply to my current situation or experience. I was initially drawn to Beyond School because, though you are American, you were working overseas. I’m looking forward to when it all is over and you return to blogging the other “usual” stuff. I feel I’ll have much more to say then. In the meantime, I do commend your forthrightness and the way in which you challenge your readers to think – about all things, politics included. Just know that in that, I’m not really your target audience.

  Adriennes last blog post..Absence = Affirmations + Aspirations

• At January 2, 2009, Happy Birthday, Beyond School - and Rest in Peace? | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] too many seemed seduced. Another snake ascended the ball, a political one, fangs thirsting to sink venom into that catastrophic hockey-mom’s neck - for the sake of [...]

• At January 21, 2009, Education - Change.org: I have a Dream - That Obama will have Vision wrote:

  [...] not the only educator, it seems, on an Inauguration Day for which I worked and wrote tirelessly, and in which I passionately believed, to be strangely apprehensive, now that that day has come. [...]

• At February 27, 2009, Science teacher: While Nero fiddles.... wrote:

  [...] Burrell has taken edubloggers to task for sticking their heads in the sand as the world burns (see "What Crisis? Edublogging as Rome burns"). I am not going to disagree with him on the fact that Rome is clearly burning. My question is what [...]

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

“Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read!”
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy song,
Every child may joy to hear.
–William Blake, Songs of Innocence

“And I stained the water clear”: look at that line a few times, and see the beauties of that exquisitely ambiguous modifier, “clear.”  It’s a line to cherish.¹ And it has to do with the thoughts below – after which, in the next post, we’ll get to an also exquisite sacred sex scene (and I’d like to call it a love scene to avoid the appearance of sensationalism, but it’s not a love scene) from Gilgamesh, along with laughs, I hope, about trying to teach it to today’s teens, in today’s classrooms. But first, an interlude:

When “Corrupting the Youth” is Good

“Good people” can be dangerous.

Socrates and Jesus, for example, in the eyes of the “good people” of their times,  were both criminals. ² They were criminals because they challenged those good people’s conventional views of religion, of the sacred, of moral right and wrong.

How do you know?

They both attacked the gods of their day. Socrates questioned both the truth and the righteousness of the Olympians; and Jesus (though less consistently) similarly questioned the teachings and the righteousness of the Hebrew priests and the “good” church mosque temple-going Christians Muslims Jews around him.  Both were reviled by the good people back then, and both paid with their lives for the same “sin”: critical thinking. The good Athenians killed Socrates with poison, the good Hebrews – the Romans, actually – killed Jesus on the cross.³

Today, we do well to revere Socrates and Jesus for pushing human thought forward.  We would also do well, though, to see their examples as reminders of something else we tend to forget: namely, that good people of any age often appear, in historical hindsight, to be the opposite of good. Again, good people – pious people – killed these two men.

Socrates today is held up to students as the model of that practice called “critical thinking.”  But in his own day, that very act, critical thinking, led to criminal charges against him for this :  “Corrupting the young by teaching new gods.”

Look at that. Socrates was killed why?  Because the adults in his society didn’t like the questions he was entertaining with their kids – about religion.  He was killed for asking, around young people, what we all see as a common sense question today – “Why do we believe in Zeus?”⁴

As a teacher who loves common sense, finds it less common than we think, and loves the idea of giving more of it than of grammar to the young in my classrooms, that story has always made me nervous.

I love critical thinking for many reasons, but the biggest one is this: it requires, always, an honest awareness in the thinker that he or she may be wrong.  Socrates, while less a hero of mine due to recent readings I’ve done about his politics, still wins my respect with this classic one-liner:

I only know that I know nothing.

Scientists understand the wisdom of that statement, and so do philosophers.  Priests and their “good people” followers, though, show no understanding of this wisdom. They assert truth-claims without evidence, and worse, they attack modern-day versions of Socrates and Jesus for thinking critically about their beliefs.

Schools are very bad places for a teacher to promote critical thinking about anything important.  The cliché “critical thinking” in schools is only allowed for safe subjects – an oxymoron I’ve mentioned many times in these pages.  Touch a subject that will offend a single parent or student, and your job is at stake.  That’s why so many classes are so boring.  They refuse to acknowledge the many elephants in the room, or to state that the emperor is wearing no clothes – especially when it comes to whichever god and flag are flying above your country.

And that’s why so many types of hugely influential beliefs that make no sense persist today.  Kids go through twelve years of school without those beliefs ever being touched by a serious question, they graduate, and bam: the beliefs live on for yet another generation: Bush really is communicating with God, while in the same universe, Bin Laden, in another country’s school system, really is obeying the Word and will of Allah.  McCain and Obama consent to be interviewed on national TV with Rick Warren, and thus legitimize a man whose ministry supported a “Left Behind” video game in which post-Rapture Christians kill non-Christians on the streets of New York – and they’re the good guys.  To question these things is not important?

I say it is. We see the Crusades of the 11th Century  being re-played now in the 21st.  Maybe questioning will reduce their chances of continuing into the fourth millennium, if we make it that far.

*    *    *

Critical Thinking as a Litmus Test

Reading the comments on my last post (the first Gilgamesh essay), and of the people who also commented on it on StumbleUpon,⁵ it occurs to me that critical thinkers serve as litmus tests for the people who disagree with them.  They fall into two categories:  those who challenge the thinking, and thus pass the test and prove themselves fellow critical thinkers; and those who attack the thinker instead of the ideas, and thus fail the test and show themselves to be non-critical thinkers, like the poisoners and crucifiers of old. Thank goodness free speech is now protected by law.

If the first Gilgamesh “lecture” had happened in a classroom instead of here, those non-critical thinkers would have been demanding my resignation – because they don’t want their children to think beyond what they, the parents, believe. ⁶ It’s funny how parents don’t care if their kid goes more deeply into, say, math than them; that’s fine. But have my kid go more deeply – and more critically – into religion than I ever did?  Into politics and my country’s history?  That’s a different beast altogether.  As a rule, parents aren’t okay with that at all.

So that’s the challenge to critical thinking in so many of our classrooms today, and a reason for its boredom-inducing absence. If only teachers felt secure in speaking their minds, there could be incredible discussions in classrooms.

And for the record: I share my questions about sacred cows not because I delight in doing “ee-vil.”  We may as well accuse Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Voltaire, Darwin, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and millions of other reformists dead and alive of “loving evil” for imagining – and speaking of – better visions of the Good or more sensible versions of the True.

I share these questions because first, I love asking them; second, it’s my way of supporting others who are asking them; and third, imperfect as all of us are, I believe these questions have vital value for happiness, intelligence, well-being, and, um, education. In my eyes, as much as your preachers or your parents, I am trying to do good. I’m just doing it by my own lights, instead of by the teachings of childhood.  I left those teachings long ago, by reading more than the preachers showed me. (I also discovered, in the cult of the early Christian leader Valentinus, an extinct version of Christianity I actually admire. It’s almost Buddhist. See Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels’ eye-opening, and very readable, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas for more.)

How can we think? Magic-based science (Creation Museum, Kentucky, USA)

And then there’s the issue of fairness. Millions of preachers clog the airwaves daily with their claims. Creationists attack science and infest science classrooms and textbooks.  It’s only fair that equal time is given to those of us who want to challenge them with critical thinking.

My last point:  Critical thinking can “corrupt the youth” on one condition: that youth fail to think critically themselves, as they read.  As long as the young think – chew – before swallowing this, or any, adult’s words, they’re not “corrupted” at all. No matter what those adults say.

I don’t know if any of this helped “stain the waters clear.”  I hope it did.

*    *    *

Now on to more fun with Gilgamesh, one of the wisest and – in the “sacred sex” scene that is the next post’s topic, also one of the most beautiful – books I’ve ever read.

Wait a minute. It just hit me.  My god, I’m about to discuss the oldest sex scene in the history of mankind.  Not a bad way to spend an evening.

It should be up in a day or two.

Please keep the comments critical, and thanks for doing that in such a friendly way in the first post.  And sorry for the length.  This was no fun to write, but I had to get it out.

–

Photo credits: Human Questions by AmberflyKezzie ; Creation Museum by rauchdickson

1. See the word as an adverb modifying “stained.”
2. They were both considered something like “bums” by the good people too – Socrates wore tatty clothes, Jesus was a homeless guy – but that’s a different story.
3. Since this crucifixion episode, by the way, has been used to justify Christian Antisemitism and the slaughter of Jews for over a thousand years, I have to add this point to keep my conscience clean: Jesus may not have been crucified at all; he may not, in fact, have ever lived at all, according to many serious scholars. (A comprehensive discussion of the evidence is laid out, among many other places, in a long chapter of The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?, by ex-minister and professor of New Testament Greek Tom Harpur, who seems to want to radically reform Christianity the way Jesus, if he did exist, wanted to radically reform Judaism.)  It’s a fascinating question for those who care to think critically about important things. If it’s true, after all, that means the Jews were framed and persecuted by the Christians for an execution that never happened, and that American voters today are electing leaders on the basis of faith in a phantom.
4. It goes deeper than this, really, since many used it as a pretext for other grudges. But the interesting thing is that this pretext still held in a court of law, and it’s what he was convicted and killed for: teaching common sense.
5. and for the record, as I’ve already said, I agree that the tone in that post is lame at times, and will work on that, and find such feedback helpful, when polite
6. My own resignation was demanded once by a pair of parents – from a long line of preachers – for including the ideas of Bishop Spong as a contemporary descendant of Martin Luther in a history unit about the Reformation. Maybe I’ll tell that full story one day. Right now, I’ll just say that my assistant principal at the time commendably held firm and told them they were free to leave. Instead, they pulled their son from my class and put him with another teacher.  No chance he think beyond his parents’ beliefs that way.

30 Comments

• At August 30, 2008, Unsucky English, Lecture 1: On Gilgamesh | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] "Best of" links in the sidebar are more presentable for first time visitors. Update 2: The first follow-up is posted here. It's more of a preface, [...]

• At August 30, 2008, Catana wrote:

  Misplaced modifier? By today's standards only, not when it was written.

  Catanas last blog post..Skimming the Surface: eye contact

• At August 30, 2008, Steve Ransom wrote:

  Clay, good points here. I agree that to think critically, one must examine ideas and thinking rather than simply attack those presenting the ideas and doing the thinking. Although, there is something to be said for one's credibility in such a line of thought.

  What I find the most perplexing is the notion that if science has not quantitatively proven it, it does not exist and must be put in the category of "superstition". There is so much yet to be "proven" that people know exist yet await scientific evidence. There are also many new discoveries yet to be made. And there has been so much that has been "proven" that was not/could not be proven at the time. Even you bring up the credulous notion that perhaps Jesus did not exist at all and site as support your argument a video clip and one of your own blog posts which fly in the face of staggering amounts of historically valid documentation. Can I "prove" it? No. And perhaps even if I could, my "proof" may never be good enough for someone who simply just does not want to accept that truth. We all tend to be ensnared somewhat by our own biases and predispositions. But, this is one of your main points that I agree with.

  No doubt the Christian church and Christians as a people have failed on so many fronts... all stemming from their failure to live up to the teachings of Jesus and the wiles of human nature. I don't discount that for a second. And science is critical in our society and in our thinking. However, one simply cannot discount faith because it cannot be scientifically, empirically proven (using proven carefully, as science does not claim to be able to prove anything with 100% certainty). Unless something can actually be scientifically unproven, then it still has room at the table for the critical thinkers and those with faith.

  But thanks for the reminder to continue to think critically and to participate in discourse (and to encourage our students to do likewise) that is logical rather than simply passionate and to analyze ideas rather than blindly attack them and those who espouse them. It is a good lesson for us all to remember.

• At August 30, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  Hi Clay -

  Critical thinking is, as you point out, often subject to the whims of the current sensibility. As you suggest - yes, think critically about math; no, stay away from religion - is a trap that we fall into.

  Learning about the hard stuff is hard, and dangerous. It's work and it means that we each have our own ideas and the ideas of others can not be controled or predicted.

  Emerson spoke about this in his address to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard. I'm going to write about the thinker using the male pronoun, but I don't want to suggest that Human Thinking is a gender specific task. Emerson suggests that"...the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking."

  He goes on to describe a man thinking, in active contemplation of the world around him, learning for himself. "The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight." He thinks critically, organizes the world to satisfy himself.

  So - the Soul and nature become one to that thinking man. And he begins to ponder creation. "And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? — A thought too bold, — a dream too wild. He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments."

  Now, if you are Emerson - what do you do with books? They aren't YOUR experience of the world - they are someone else's. That makes them SUSPECT and DANGEROUS to us as native thinkers:

  "The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing."

  Here is the greatest danger- according to Emerson - that we mistake the writer for his work. If we agree with the book, the writer is a hero - if not, a bum.

  He calls it "grave mischief...the act of thought, — is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged."

  And then we forget the origins of the books: "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

  Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm."

  This happens with holy books, both "sacred" and "secular."

  The greatest danger to us as "critical thinkers" is that we turn our thinking over to others and to the books that they write. We let the work (and the writer) think for us. He says that a good book will pull us out of our own orbit - make us a sattelite and not a SUN!

  "Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system."

  And here he gives us his belief in critical thinking: "The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.

  He says - now don't get me wrong. I love books and writers, and to read a good book helps him write his own BUT there is an active engaged way to read. "The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part, — only the authentic utterances of the oracle; — all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakspeare's."

  Finally, he gives us his manifesto: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."

  So - what does that say for the mindless recitation of facts and the sycophantic enslavement of the scholar? He demands a new way of thinking for every age.

  Is that empowering or terrifying? I think you would agree that the most patriotic and equally subversive thing that we each can do it to read, experience, and think for ourselves.

  Off my transcendentalist soapbox.

  Kate Tabors last blog post..Mindset to begin the year

• At August 30, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Maybe you're right, I can't say. But can you meet me half-way, and agree that the syntax of "noun adjective" - "water clear" - is non-standard even in this poem, which we see in the standard "adjective noun" order of things like "happy song" (not "song happy")? And that the inversion of "water clear" adds an ambiguity that makes this poem the gem it is?

  I'd hate for grammar debates on a secondary point to detract from the poetic beauty of the primary point.

• At August 30, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Steve, thanks for the input.

  I must have implied something I didn't intend, somewhere in this post, to make you think I argue that, as you say,

  if science has not quantitatively proven it, it does not exist and must be put in the category of “superstition”.

  I don't mean to imply that, and I don't think scientists would agree with it either.

  I think scientists would agree that science knows there are countless things it has not discovered, but that still exist. It's just that we can't call them "true" in an ontological and epistemological sense - we're not certain these "maybes" have being, or that they are true. They still could be.

  It's arguments that undemonstrated (or worse, undemonstrable) things are true with certainty that muddy the waters of "truth." Faith is a good word for those sorts of belief, but the faithful all too often use the "know" word instead of the "faith" word.

  And that's why Bin Laden and Bush are both right, I guess, and dinosaurs lived in Eden. I know that sounds sarcastic, but my intent is just to underscore how unfounded any traditional article of faith is today, when so much conflicting argument and evidence surrounds it.

  I have all sorts of faiths, based on my experience: I have faith that the universe is not evil, that nature doesn't contain a hell for people with independent beliefs to burn in forever, that death is probably as much the (peaceful) end for us as it is for that possum hit by the car on the side of the road, that there's no such thing as the devil or Jehovah or Brahman. But I also know that there's no way I can prove those things - yet - so I can't claim they're "true."

  Off to breakfast. Thanks again for the civility.

• At August 30, 2008, Steve Ransom wrote:

  Sorry... I forgot to mention the additional context of our twittering last night. I thought you would make the connection. Sorry. I do think that there is Truth with a capital T (absolute) and truth with a small t. T(t)ruth can be relative on many plains. Apart from scientific certainty about things that are measurable, it is probably next to impossible to "prove" Truth (capital T) as absolute on many fronts. Dealing with this is problematic, to be sure. I just want to make sure that we use the term "Faith" as not being unfounded or credulous all the time.

  Thanks for the response.

• At August 30, 2008, The American Scholar « Living on the Lip of Insanity wrote:

  [...] wisdom and think critically about all things (even the tough stuff like religion - “When Corrupting Youth is Good) something that he wrote triggered that ghost of Emerson: And that’s why so many types of hugely [...]

• At August 30, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Steve, take this in the spirit of search it's offered in: You say you think there is "Truth with a capital T." Can you name one that is not demonstrable and yet clear for everybody to see? Or name one without any of my silly conditions, and give me an idea of what it means to know an "absolute truth"?

  If I'm asking the wrong (or a flawed) question, change it as you will. I used to believe in absolute truth, back when I was in search of it. But it led me to conclude there's no such thing. Back to faith, which is something closer to "absolute opinion" instead of "absolute truth."

  Thanks again for enriching this discussion, Steve. I know you're sincere, and respect that. You may even change my views, if you care. But not yet ;-)

• At August 30, 2008, Your page is now on StumbleUpon! wrote:

  [...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]

• At August 30, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  For the record, I changed the word "misplaced" to ambiguous. Call me picky. (I worry, though, that it makes the tone more academic from the start than I want it to be.)

• At August 30, 2008, Steve Ransom wrote:

  Clay, it is my belief that there is often Truth with a capital "T" that is yet scientifically unprovable. Again, we get trapped in this circular logic. No, I can't prove it. But that does not mean that it does not exist. I can't see the atom, but I accept it as Truth. I have to admit, as a non-scientist, there is a little bit of faith there in scientific visualization equipment and mathematical equations. Inability to empirically "prove" is not necessarily an argument for superstition, folklore, or fantasy. That's all I really want to stress. Yes, faith becomes part of the equation here. But faith does not always have to be ill-informed or without merit, as you yourself recognize. You simply cannot deny the benefits of faith in things beyond which we can prove empirically (yes, there have also been a healthy number of negative examples one could dangle as well).

  Faith, hope, love... these are things I know to be True. It's not my intention to change your views, but simply to engage in rich, reasonable discussion. It is up to each of us to find what we consider Truth or truth. As your original post inferred, the danger comes when we cease to seek. Thanks for engaging with me in this discussion.

  Oh yes, here is a fun link I found: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/features/article782065.ece

• At August 31, 2008, Calvin wrote:

  Hey Prof. Burell (I'm a student)

  I love your blog, and I've already emailed it to a few of my more open minded teachers for them to check out.

  I do have a few questions though - A lot of your fears about parental retaliation on touchy subjects such as "Lolita" and evolution and religion don't apply to my school here in Canada. It may be because I am in an International Baccalaureate class, but most of my teachers don't shy away from discussing controversial topics and challenging the ingrained thinking of the students.

  What do you think is it that makes the teaching of more controversial topics more accepted in schools? Is my school just a freak exception or is it because of Canada's more secular government? And does this make for a better education (or as you would say, not teachers teaching but students learning) system?

  Keep up the awesome blog posts!

• At August 31, 2008, diane wrote:

  "Stained the water clear" Clear can denote pure and unclouded...or untroubled, certain. With questioning comes doubt but also enlightenment.

  Adam & Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They gained understanding and were therefore capable of making choices.

  Innocence will not protect our students; knowledge is their shield and armor.

  dianes last blog post..Have a Fair Day!

• At September 1, 2008, The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] Unsucky English series so far: Preface ~ Gilgamesh [...]

• At September 1, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Kate, I'm sorry to be late on this. I had to save it until I could focus.

  I'm glad I didn't forget to come back to it. You've moved Emerson up my reading list (and Tabor ;-) ).

  Every book came from a more or less fallible, more or less disinterested, more or less tolerant and intelligent, human. That's the simple and resisted point.

• At September 1, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Calvin,

  I'm hearing from more and more Canadians that the symptoms of medievalism I'm describing don't apply there.

  I read last year about a Minnesota (USA) school district that canceled IB because parents found it "anti-American and anti-Christian." So telling.

  Consider yourself lucky in your school in Canada.

  (By the way, it's "Mr.," - or "Clay" - not "Professor" ;-) .

  Thanks for dropping in. Keep the comments coming too :)

• At September 1, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Diane, I like the implication that the "unstained" water is not clear at all - until the poet "stains" it with vision.

  I hate trying to explicate paradoxes. :(

  Thanks!

• At September 1, 2008, John Larkin wrote:

  "Wait a minute. It just hit me. My god, I’m about to discuss the oldest sex scene in the history of mankind. Not a bad way to spend an evening.

  It should be up in a day or two."

  Well, I see it did get up. Was it as good for you as it was for me?

• At September 1, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Tee hee. I'm swatting punny impulses left and right as I write my way through these posts :)

  And it was good for me.

• At September 1, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  And that every person is entitled to an "active soul." We are all entitled to think for ourself no matter what or who has come before us.

  Powerful stuff when you are 17, 50, or 100 years old.

  Kate Tabors last blog post..The American Scholar

• At September 3, 2008, SchoolFinder Blog: Teaching as a Subversive Activity wrote:

  [...] started with Clay Burrell and Beyond School, who has retired from teaching and is now diligently, perhaps feverously, [...]

• At September 4, 2008, Daz_H's Network on Delicious wrote:

  [...] When Corrupting the Youth is Good | Beyond School SAVE A lot of your fears about parental retaliation on touchy subjects such as “Lolita” and evolution and religion don’t apply to my school here in Canada. It may be because I am in an International Baccalaureate class, but most of my teachers don’t shy away from discussing controversial topics and challenging the ingrained thinking of the students. ewan.mcintosh [...]

• At September 4, 2008, Unsucky English, Lecture 3: Adam and Eve in Bizarro-World | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] the “good people” students tell their parents? Were those parents emailing or calling the principal at the [...]

• At September 5, 2008, OLDaily ~ by Stephen Downes wrote:

  [...] the ethic and spirit of critical enquiry. Clay Burell, Beyond School, September 4, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [...]

• At September 7, 2008, Polymeme | Polymath's Guide to News wrote:

  [...] 3 linksBEYOND SCHOOL : "Piper, sit thee down and write In a book that all may read!" So he vanished from my sight, And I plucked a hollow reed,. And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy song, Every child may joy to hear... READ MORE [...]

• At September 8, 2008, When Corrupting the Youth is Good - Mixx wrote:

  [...] When Corrupting the Youth is Good 1 vote [...]

• At September 10, 2008, When Corrupting the Youth is Good - Mixx wrote:

  [...] Corrupting the Youth is Good view story 1 [...]

• At September 11, 2008, » OLDaily 04/set/09 - Redes de Aprendizaje El Blog Boyacense: El sitio de referencia de tod@s l@s boyacenses wrote:

  [...] y cuando la enseñanza se opone a la ética y al espíritu de los cuestionamientos críticos. [L] [...]

• At September 14, 2008, Charlie A. Roy wrote:

  An interesting post and great comments to boot. Playing off of the freedom question from the previous blog post I wonder how in a secular school environment students are allowed the freedom to ask the questions of: Who is God, who are they, who is Christ, and why the Church? These questions certainly take critical thought from anyone who dons the descriptor "believer".

  I work in a Catholic school and our students are free to debate these questions all day long. Of course we seek to pass on the Gospel and do so. Our chaplain is quick to remind all of our faculty that if what we believe in the end is really the "Truth" then why would we fear dialogue on these issues and engaging questions about these core issues.

  Long live the debate because from it comes learning.

  Charlie A. Roys last blog post..The Debate on Drug Testing

Related posts:

1. Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

[Since my students just finished reading Nabokov's Lolita, I thought I'd give their responses to the notion that it shouldn't be taught in upper secondary. This is the third in the Why We Should Teach Lolita in High School series. See Number One here, Number Two here, with many interesting comments. If you want to comment, please read those posts - especially the comments - first. The 21st century, social media/web 2.0 context is important here.] Just one for the Long Tail: I posted the question below in a forum to my AP Literature students – all 17-18-year-olds, all, except one, ethnic Korean but Westernized anglophones:

I blogged about teaching this novel, and my readers were split on whether AP Lit students should be allowed to read it. What do you think? Should it be banned from high school “college level” literature classes? Why or why not?

Below is every response in the forum, in the order they were posted. I didn’t cherry-pick, and I only removed names. All said AP Lit students should be allowed to read it; two suggested making an alternate available for those uncomfortable with the premise; one expressed discomfort (not as bad a thing in a classroom as it could be elsewhere). Several addressed the benefit of exposure to this before they hit it in solitude in college. And many were plain puzzled that people think the book is any worse than nighttime television or movies. (A few made me scratch my head. Follow-up discussion time approaches.)

It just seemed right to put their voices here. Here they are:

Student Responses to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:

3.1. I don’t think it should be banned. There is nothing to ban about really. I don’t understand why we have to protected from great literary works just because it has inappropriate concepts like sex. I think AP Lit students should be definitely allowed to read it though I’m not so sure about just the general seniors or other grades that aren’t mature to handle it. It really depends on the maturity level and how the students can handle that inside a classroom. Besides, for AP classes, which are supposed to be “college prerequisite” classes, should be handling students that are ready to take the advanced material for college and should level up to the college level. Out of the shell, I say.

More under the fold . . .

3.2. Practically speaking, we already know this kind of things. Even though we don’t, I think it’s the time to learn to face the reality, to go out of the school’s wall. I can’t even really think of any reason why it should be banned from a reading list, except for the fact that there are many French phrases that are unusually difficult to high school students.

3.3. Frankly, I don’t think it matters whether it should be banned from high school AP classes because it’s not like it has any bold offensive or perverted language. There are parts in which the descriptions and word choices are very descriptive and erotic, but, like [student] mentioned, we’re all at an age where we are not oblivious of these informations. This might sound weird, but in a way, instead of watching porn and fulfilling their sexual desires, it would be more efficient and educational to satisfy their needs while enriching their literary minds.

3.4. I don’t think it should be banned, of course. Honestly before we read this, I thought it would be more provocative than it is because I heard it was a banned novel in many places in the U.S. But it’s not that provocative afterall. More importantly, this is a literary masterpiece. The art far outweighs the maybe provocative aspects of the book. Come on, are we going to ban the painting by Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, just because it is “provocative?”

3.5. I think Lolita should be taught in a college level English class in high school. If were to teach this to students of my own, (if I had any) I wouldn’t know how to approach a book like how we walked through it. Since college level English shouldn’t screen any sort of writing despite its’ content.

3.6. [student] and [student] ’s take on this question is similar to mine. We’re old enough to read this. I mean, we watch soft porn in movies that we watch every weekend, we are exposed to other obscenities in the television every night, so why shelter us from what we already know? There’s no sense in that. It’s better to just accept people’s sexual preferences and instead of shunning them, we should try to understand the psychology of it. In doing so, we will better understand the way our society functions and learn how to handle these kinds of situations should it happen to us. People are still people, diseased with a love for younger people or not. Humbert is a nice gentleman to me. He is not a beast. I would be friends with Humbert. I think that he’s intellectual, humorous, and a genuinely great guy. It’s like AIDS. Just because one has it doesn’t mean that he should be banned from eating at a restaurant. Students should be given the opportunity to widen their take on the world and learn how to become more accepting of good people who have little quirks. And it challenges age old beliefs of what it means to be a ‘child’ so, I believe that students should be taught Lolita. They could read it in their sophomore year even.

3.7. As a high school student who read Lolita, I do not understand why this novel should be banned in high school. Although I might understand that some high school students who are immature and cannot simply feel the weight that the book contains are simply unfit to read this novel, in a high school “college level” literature class, I believe that the students have the capability and maturity to handle this novel. To ban such a novel like Lolita would be limiting the student’s view on world of literature. And we wouldn’t want that to happen. Do we?

3.8. It shouldn’t be banned. It is not like it’s encouraging male adults to have sexual relationships with underage girls. And even if that’s what some might think the whole story is about, then that’s that. Not every books can satisfy everyone’s tastes. And the language is just simpley too beautiful and sensitive to be banned…

3.9. I’m split between banning the book and allowing the book in high school. I say ban the book in high schools (especially the U.S., no offense), because students are not up to the level of understanding the literary and meaning of the book. Also, high schools students themselves are still developing their sense of morality, so by letting them read Lolita, they might interpret things differently. But, I also say allow the book–why not challenge students? After all, high school is a safe ground to practice real life situations, college works, etc.

3.10. At first, I thought Lolita should be banned. At first, I thought it was too provocative. But now, I think the book should be opened to seniors of high school. The novel is more than merely about sex. It deals with the psychological complexities of a pedophile, delving into many psychological aspects that are debatable. The novel provides many topics that would be interesting to have a discussion about. Also, sex is prevalent throughout many literary works (although it is less evident in most books). The book may be shocking to students who first read it but I think once they will overcome the shock as they think more in depth about the novel.

3.11. I don’t understand why it’s banned from college level classes. It is a bit provocative, but it’s not like we are never going to learn about sex. I think there still exists a quite strong feeling against the mention of sex. It’s more weird that people consider it as something weird, since it’s just our way of reproducing, the main reason of life from biological view.

3.12. I’m sort of split on the issue myself. I don’t think it should be banned from high school just because it’s a high school, but I also don’t think students should be forced to read it. If the students are mature enough and decide for themselves that they can handle it, it would be a wonderful experience for them. I think it’s definitely a good idea for an AP Lit teacher to introduce the book to the students, but perhaps it would be even better if another book was left as a back-up option if the student really doesn’t feel like he/she is ready for it.

3.13. Nabokov’s novel Lolita seems to be a should-be-banned topic on the surface, as it is a love story between a forty year old man and a twelve year old girl. But if we take a deeper look, it is not a work that we really should freak out about. Comforting news for the people who think it is not appropriate for students to read is that the novel isn’t really provocative. Rather it opens a new perspective on a topic that people simply label and do not attempt to take a second look. This novel teaches the reader to step back and see the whole forest rather than a tree.

3.14.

…namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course original…

Is it not true that colleges and universities desire student with experience, and open-mind ness for different ideas and concepts? How can they ban a concept, a view, an idea in the 21st century? This is like banning a part of history for us not to acknowledge about the world. This novel cannot be banned from “college level” literature classes. Why do we read and learn about literature? Is it not it to open our minds to new ideas and concepts that we did not think about, to widen our view, and to appreciate different cultures that are “unusual” to us? I have been living in different places, and we all have different cultures. Some cultures might think that not looking at a person’s eye, and looking down while a person is talking is more respectful than having an eye contact. In some cultures, people “PSSSS” at you when they want to call you. These are different minds, different level of viewing the world. 21st century is the ‘Globalization’, and ‘internationalization’ we have passed the time to ponder whether people should be allowed to read books about a black person, or a woman, so why not about human nature? I would understand if Lolita was read to freshmen, or maybe sophomores, who are not mature enough to handle the idea of what is really going on around the world, or maybe average high school English classes in a public school where there are tons of crazy and unpredictable parents who don’t want their children to “grow-up” and “open” their eyes yet. But to college-bound students? That must be a joke!

3.15. I don’t think it should be banned from high school at all. The level of sexuality in this book is not that extreme and even if it was I think that students can handle it whether it is AP Lit or just regular English. Also, since Lolita actually has a moral message, I would highly recommend this book for AP Lit students so they can explore and discredit all those that make Lolita sound like a child molester’s sex experiences.

3.16. I also agree with [student] in the idea that Lolita should be taught in high school. As Mr. Burell mentioned in class, I think it is better for us to be aware of these dangers that lie in the real society. I think simply hiding these factors of society is not helping the students but making them more vulnerable in the society.

3.17. High school is not a “pre-school” to college. The high school curriculum itself also teaches students about health and STDs, whats wrong with a book about “convincing love”. Korean public school students start their sex education in 3rd grade, whats wrong with reading about a somewhat sexual book. To tell you the truth I believe that schools are just somewhat binded by the fact to teach Lolita due to the fact that a middle aged teacher is teaching it to teenagers. Although I agree with the fact that it shouldn’t be taught in normal English classes, to an AP Literature class I think its really a nice choice.

3.18. I think that by the age high schoolers are legible for AP lit, they can handle Lolita. Lolita isn’t a pornographic book, but is rather a book that deals with real-life issues such as child molesters.

3.19. I see no problem in assigning Lolita because high school students should be aware of the power of an unreliable narrator, and Lolita is a great example of that. Some can argue that it is pornographic, but it is not like high schoolers don’t know how a baby is made; in fact, they can hardly suppress their hormones and curiosity.

3.20. High school “college level” means a college course, and I think that the syllabus should follow what the college students study. Lolita isn’t that bad to take, as long as the students are mature enough to not make faces or be obnoxious about the sexual content of the story. Really, I think that high school students should be exposed to these kinds of hard material before they hit college, because if we experience this our freshman year in college with nobody to help, it would be a disaster.

3.21. Those who are afraid to teach the novel are those who have doubts about the mentality of their students. At 18-19 years of age, most AP Lit students should be able to read and understand where the content truly lies. Just by the mere beauty of the wording in this book, it should be taught. It would teach a lot more to read throught this book once on how to be a good writer than to read what Barron’s has to say and write mock essays.

3.22. Hmm. I have to be honest; I was disturbed by some of the parts in the novel. Sometimes the scenes weren’t directly described but the way Humbert Humbert described them—it just gave me the chills. But we got to face it—AP Literature is a college course and is designed for college students. I guess we should have the mindset to learn to read and understand the novel in a mature way although—sometimes it was hard for me to… let’s say, focus on the artful perspective. But my final though is that, we are old enough to handle this. It is a provocative novel but has a lot of deeper meanings inside it that is worth taking a look at.

Photo: Beware of the Book by Florian.B. on Flickr

5 Comments

• At April 23, 2008, Adrienne wrote:

  Perhaps you should be sending this to the College Board Powers That Be? :-)

  It does remind me of when I taught The Chocolate War to a group of 9th graders in the UK (at an international school). One of the final assignments was to make a persuasive presentation to a group of peers about the same issue: should this book be required reading, or should it be banned? Like your students, many of mine were puzzled that others viewed the book as so dangerous and immoral. Others suggested perhaps it should be a choice rather than required, but not one of them suggested it should be banned -- not even the sweet, conservative Muslim girl who told me at the start of the unit that she was feeling uncomfortable reading some of the more graphic sections. Even she was able to recognize that there was value in reading such a text -- even though it tore right through all that she felt personally and morally opposed to. If nothing else, it probably strengthened her faith rather than destroyed it.

• At April 24, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Sorry to be late on this one :(

  Just goes to show, doesn't it, that the "danger" is not that students can handle it - both our experiences suggest they can (though the student feedback made me consider offering an alternate for those who don't feel they can handle differing viewpoints or mature content - bye-bye Shakespeare?).

  So it seems we fear not immature students, doesn't it? It's the immature parents we fear. So weird.

  And whether "faith" is strengthened or weakened by encounters with the world? That's the student's personal road - that's education. Both results are growth somehow.

• At October 24, 2008, vel wrote:

  I was taught Lolita in an AP Language class back in high school and it was exceptionally well done. However, I went to a liberal selective enrollment public school that never really had to worry about parents or the board breathing down its neck.

  As someone who comes from that kind of background, I am always a little shocked when confronted with the kind of narrow-minded people who will try to keep books like this out of the curriculum despite the fact that it is, in my opinion, one of the best novels of the 20th century.

  The hypocrisy is ridiculous when teenagers, many of whom are having sex, are prevented from reading/experiencing media that is remotely related to sex in the curriculum. Additionally, parents that cry out against them are still the same ones that let their 14-year-old play hours of GTA:IV and watch highly sexualized commercials, movies, and TV shows.

  These kind of parents lack trust in their children and in their children's teachers. It's a strange situation.

• At October 24, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Vel,

  Well-said.

  And it is strange.

  But my, wasn't that a wonderful read?

  Have you checked out Nabokov's Pnin? A little novella about a weird little emigre Russian professor of Russian language adrift in America. Laugh-out-loud funny, heartwarming, quirky goodness.

• At October 25, 2008, Your page is now on StumbleUpon! wrote:

  [...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]

Related posts:

1. A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Extending my last post on why I think Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita should be required reading at some point in high school language arts classes:

In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus kills his father, then marries and impregnates his mother: we teach this parricidal, incestuous, antique “classic” to 14-year-olds.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince’s uncle murders his brother and marries that brother’s wife, enjoying her in “incestuous sheets“: again, we teach this 400-year-old Renaissance “classic” to 15-year-olds.

And let’s not forget the sentimental favorite about a 12-year-old whose father is trying to marry her off to a prize bachelor of at least 25, and in which instead the 12-year-old heroine elopes with her maybe 14-year-old lover, and spends a night of tender love-making a few paces away from her iconic balcony. Their pillow-talk the morning after their love-making is something we have 13-year-olds recite by the millions in our annual, usually painful, front-of-the-classroom recital days. Yes, I’m talking about Romeo and Juliet. Juliet would be a middle-schooler today – and her father would be in jail for pandering her to his cellmate Paris, the noble pedophile.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 40-year-old pedophiliac professor of literature marries an over-sexed 12-year-old’s mother, who shortly thereafter dies in a freak accident, plunging the professor and the 12-year-old in a morbid love affair that ruins both their lives. Often brutal, as often tender, more often laugh-out-loud funny, but never vulgar or graphic, this acknowledged masterpiece and “classic” of modern, 20th century literature – “the only convincing love story of our [20th] century,” according to Vanity Fair – sends educators running for the hills.

It’s a tragic irony and a very telling double standard: teach controversy from old, safely removed times? No problem. (Well, maybe just skim over Paris’ age, Juliet’s loss of virginity, Oedipus’ and Gertrude’s incest.) But teach the same issues about modern schoolgirls? No, no, no. That hits too close to the real world. Let them learn about that, if at all, from their sensationalistic prime-time TV’s at home: To Catch a Predator, anyone? School is not the place for unsafe subjects. We only think critically about safe ones here.

That we should think about these subjects in our classrooms – our young females, in particular, but our young males too, as is shown below – can be supported by a few statistics (USA only):

• Teens 16 to 19 were three and one-half times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• According to the Justice Department, one in two rape victims is under age 18; one in six is under age 12.
• While 9 out of 10 rape victims are women, men and boys are also victimized by this crime. In 1995, 32,130 males age 12 and older were victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• Nationally, nearly one million young women under age 20 become pregnant each year. That means close to 2800 teens get pregnant each day.
• Approximately 4 in 10 young women in the U.S. become pregnant at least once before turning 20 years old.
• In the U.S., 1 in 4 sexually active teens become infected with an STD every year.

Some comments from my last post, and from the thread on Bud Hunt’s post that splintered this discussion (not your fault, Bud – you asked them to come here), give us some main reasons we choose to be (un?)witting accomplices to daily contemporary tragedies by only teaching the ancient, irrelevant ones. PaulC, who started the meme, commented:

Do I want to take a chance and have the Parents’ Club down my neck for teaching an ‘inappropriate’ novel? The principal has enough fires to put out.

Of course, the censorship debate arises occasionally for many different reasons, sometimes over trite reasons. It’s worthwhile to take a stand, but is it worth it for the study of Lolita? For that reason I think the novel should be left for post secondary study.

As the above statistics show, the damage is too often done by the time of “post-secondary study.” The principal might be enjoying a no-alarm day in the fire department, the parent enjoying a nice day in denial-land, and the teacher enjoying a nice cool neck, but at what cost to the latest quiet statistic sitting at one of the classroom desks, trying to make sense of this thing that happened last night, and that her school never warned her about in the daytime? This latest example of “fear and irrelevance in education” gives one tragically twisted twist to the term “hidden curriculum.” (Update: But Paul, I hear you: other ways than Lolita exist to educate about this – but are principals and parents using any ways at all, by and large?)

Charlie Roy gives an interesting angle in his comment, largely sympathetic to the idea of teaching the realities of over-flirtatious teens playing with fire and getting burned by unseemly adults via Lolita, when he writes,

I don’t think Lolita would fly at my school. At far as age appropriateness goes it is a hard one to nail. Some argue adolescence has been extended into the early 30’s. If that is the case then it might be an inappropriate read.

I can only respond that, if adolescence is now delayed into our 30’s, as Charlie states, isn’t that because schools perpetuate the situation by infantilizing teens? (See Dr. Robert Eptstein’s The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen)

New York librarian and teacher Diane Cordell nails an irony by now cliche, but no less pernicious, about American “family values,” I want to say, when she comments:

Re. teaching Lolita: about 5 years ago, our HS (grades 11-12) English teacher used “In Cold Blood” as the basis of a class unit. The principal asked me to find examples of other schools using this book, and I did so. No parents objected to the choice of text. When we get back from Spring Break, I’ll ask the present teacher and our HS principal what the reaction would be if “Lolita” were listed as required reading. I can almost guarantee that murder would be deemed more suitable subject matter than sex!

–and Corrie Bergeron, the “crunchy conservative” foil to my own more liberal viewpoint, does the conservative view a good deed with this bit of fresh air:

5th graders are having sex. 1 in 4 American teen girls has an STD. (1 in 2 if she’s African-American.) Not that this is a good thing, but it’s reality, today. Literature deals with the human condition, makes it accessible, gives you a proxy to explore ideas. A safe place to talk about things without getting too personal.

Teach Lolita in high school? Maybe not such a bad idea.

Oh-and-by-the-way… worldview-wise, I have a fair amount in common with the Puritans. But ignorance makes poor armor.

Meanwhile, over on Bud’s offshoot from my post, Joe, a principal, weighs in against my view:

Clay – we are public servants. We work for an elected school board, under the twin rubrics of the state and federal governments. You said: “I shouldn’t have to ask a parent’s permission to teach it any more than I do to have students read James Joyce, Huck Finn, or D.H. Lawrence.” I disagree with that line of thought for the potential pitfalls it could cause. We have an adopted curriculum for a reason. A process exists. Obviously you have a set of values that are important to you. I have a set of values that are important to me. I can almost garuntee that you would not want some of my personal views taught in the classroom. Public education should not be a free for all!

Miguel Guhlin joins the discussion over there with too many interesting lines for me to snatch, but this remark is noteworthy for a connection I want to make to Joe’s, above:

Far better the teacher who, like the local Fireman’s Halloween Haunt House, enjoys the trust of the community that nothing found in that House will be judged objectionable by anyone….

–and that connection, namely, has to do with notions of democracy, and of “public values.” With all due respect, Joe’s invocation of public education being no space for a “free for all,” no place for conflicting “values” to come under the scrutiny of critical thought and inquiry, just strikes me as un-democratic. Miguel’s ideal of ideas not “judged objectionable by anyone” seems (though I think unintentionally) similarly contrary to what democracy is. The public, to state the obvious, consists of wildly divergent and often conflicting viewpoints. If nobody finds an idea objectionable, then how relevant and engaging – at least in a humanities classroom – is that idea? And why are we devoting time to safe ideas, when the health of a democracy consists of citizens informed about those uncomfortable but real controversies demanding civic resolution? Those viewpoints can, and I would argue should, in a healthy democracy, receive scrutiny and debate in our schools. That authentic critical thinking is the remedy for the biases and prejudices that plague every democracy.

Joe, I would argue, mistakes indoctrinating students – teacher teaching what to think – with teaching students to think. Uncomfortable? Yes. But so is the uncritical, prejudiced alternative. And call me idealistic, but the possibility now, with online forums and other ways to include parents and communities in classroom debates about real-worldly issues instead of unreal schooly ones – that possibility, to me, points to schools as true centers of learning, not just for students, but for communities.

Back to Lolita. Most people, first of all, probably haven’t read it, and so are arguing from a position of misinformation, at best, or at worst, of ignorance. I just finished it for the fourth or fifth time. It is every bit as disturbing as it was the first time. It shows the dangerous consequences of young girls not conscious of the effects of their fashions and attitudes; it shows how deceptively normal and respectable pedophiles can be; it uses no curse words, no vulgarities, and generally does not dwell on carnal scenes. More interestingly, though, its fictional editor, in the preface, claims the novel contains a “moral apotheosis,” while Nabokov himself, in the cagey Afterword, claims his novel has no moral at all. That contradiction alone opens up a discussion.

And in the meantime, our students, increasingly out there blogging and tweeting and face(book)ing the ever-more-porous public world, are learning, in the safety of a modern classic, a few lessons that might save them from becoming an addition to the statistics above.

I suppose I could stick to the safe, and teach them to identify oxymorons so they get higher SAT scores. But I’d rather help them learn not to be world-ignorant morons period. Significantly, the word “moron,” according to my Leopard dictionary, originated in “the early 20th century (as a medical term denoting an adult with a mental age of about 8–12): from Greek mōron, neuter of mōros ‘foolish.’” We can keep ignoring the realities of life after age 12 in our schools at our own – and our students’ – peril.

The funny thing? My students are a matter of months away from being legal adults. Doesn’t that underline how weird it is to treat them like children until the very last minute of their minority? And doesn’t that set them up to be quite the naive young adults when they walk, all vulnerable, into the real world after graduation? It’s all so unreal – and we’re talking schools here, so that’s hardly surprising – but sheesh, it’s bewilderingly surreal.

Photo by macropoulos

39 Comments

• At April 15, 2008, reddit.com: Why Lolita Should Be Taught To All High Schoolers wrote:

  [...] online. vote on links that you like or dislike and help decide what's popular, or submit your own!Why Lolita Should Be Taught To All High Schoolers (beyond-school.org)posted 1 [...]

• At April 15, 2008, Your page is now on StumbleUpon! wrote:

  [...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]

• At April 15, 2008, diane wrote:

  "Ignorance is not innocence, but sin." -Robert Browning

  "The innocence that feels no risk and is taught no caution, is more vulnerable than guilt, and oftener assailed." -Nathaniel P. Willis

  diane's last blog post..I'm Afraid Not

• At April 15, 2008, Brian wrote:

  It's an interesting topic and I wonder if this would even be an issue if taught in a small non profit school. I'd be interested in knowing if this topic is controversial in a school like "Hinschu International School"

• At April 15, 2008, Kaelie Curbxstomp wrote:

  Oh, my God, this totally goes with what I was talking about with my English teacher today, so I'm going to relate it to what you were saying...sort of. We were discussing Sylvia Plath and her disturbingly mature writing.

  If you've ever read The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, it is not a book people normally expect--or want--a 15 year old girl to pick up. My teacher was telling me that the District doesn't allow it, because of the maturity and the darker meaning of the work, and even her other works. The stuff that they have us read, like Romeo and Juliet, and Oedipus the King, is not very realistic, because we don't really live in a society like that anymore, and that's why they want us to read it: we may learn something, but it usually isn't life altering/saving. As long as you can't learn anything safe from it, it's okay. But, Plath's stuff is really dark, therefore, they do not want to pollute the minds of their younger students for the well-being of their image, but not neccessarily for the child. Because that book changed MY life. However, this Lolita books sounds interesting. It's modern isn't it? I never did understand why we were forced to read books that are hundreds of years old--they don't usually pertain to the world we live in now; however, I've heard a real story like Lolita, but the girl wasn't quite so young, and the man wasn't quite that old. (Not that 40 is old; just a comparison.)

  Of course, once you get into college, that all goes away and you learn about anything and everything, with very few restrictions.

  Kaelie Curbxstomp's last blog post..White Wall

• At April 15, 2008, Harold Shaw wrote:

  Clay you are a breath of fresh air and someone as a student, that I would want as a teacher - a real PIA teacher, but I would learn, have some fun and think.

  But if I was your unlucky administrator you would be my worst nightmare :). Your independent and outside the box thinking would cause you and I to butt heads and I would win because I write your evaluation :).

  But I am neither, so I can just sit back and enjoy reading your posts, envy the size of your cahjonnes and wish you were on the staff where I am. I would never be in trouble then--you would be the lightning rod. hehehehe - Harold

  Harold Shaw's last blog post..From the Quick Hits Dept.: Transferring Feeds Between Accounts

• At April 15, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Harold, I take your comment in the waggish spirit with which it was offered (and thanks ;-) ), but the truth behind it is troubling indeed.

  If this post at least spurs administrators to lead on this issue in ways other than teaching this very fine novel, then it's done its job.

  What I didn't have time to add - I was almost late to school because of this post - is that the obverse of the predator problem is that we throw out all the good adults in the community (commenters on student blogs, twitter helpers, etc) with the bathwater dirtied by the mere specter of predators.

  We have to educate our young in how to read adult behavior, and how to wisely navigate their relationships with them online. There's so much learning to be gained that way.

  The ostrich approach (thus the photo) most schools opt for is not the answer.

• At April 15, 2008, Harold Shaw wrote:

  Clay - I don't know if this corresponds to this link, but a "real" book worth reading (not a classic) that will teach students a great deal about abuse and that is almost mandatory reading for anyone working with abused children is "A Child Called It" by Dave Pelzer.

  It was a tough read, at time I had to set it down after just a few pages, because I was so "pissed off" and actually cried many times at the severe abuse he suffered. I am not a very emotional "on the sleeve" guy, but that book affected me like no other ever has. He came to our school to give a talk, what an amazing individual! Talk about a book that will "teach" students (many of our students read it and it changes their outlook a great deal) and teachers about the "other" side of life.

  If this doesn't belong in with this post please remove :)

  Harold

  Harold Shaw's last blog post..From the Quick Hits Dept.: Transferring Feeds Between Accounts

• At April 15, 2008, Harold Shaw wrote:

  I hope that administrators do read this but "sigh" most won't , and if they did they would not listen to the spirit and intent you give this post -- most would only see the insubordination/independence or problems you would cause with local parents.

  With all the political pressures on schools and administrators they don't want teachers that rock the boat (usually) and would cut you off at the knees and drop you like a rock.

  The reality in the U.S. at this time is that real teaching like you are talking about is not encouraged in most schools, they would prefer the ostrich approach to keeping kids safe because that is what a minority of vocal, loud (read PIA) helicopter parents want. Like they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, in this case the noisy parent that will call in lawyers and reporters to get what they want.

  To many of these parents they don't care about safely teaching internet safety or how to protect students in unsafe situations with adults. They don't want anyone else to expose their children to anything possibly offensive, even if it is done safely and might save their child from making a bad mistake later. It is easier for these individuals to "bury their heads in the sand" and say it doesn't happen instead of preparing their children for the reality of what they may encounter if they are unlucky or act in an ignorant way online or in the real world.

  With NCLB, funding woes and all the limitations (local political realities) put on schools in the U.S. and many other areas of the world. Unfortunately, Lolita and books of that ilk are not going to be read in the majority of classrooms and the ones that will suffer are not the ones that stop the teaching and learning opportunities that it would provide.

  Keep tilting at windmills my friend. Without your efforts many would not even think about these issues. Thank you Harold

  Harold Shaw's last blog post..From the Quick Hits Dept.: Transferring Feeds Between Accounts

• At April 15, 2008, Charlie A. Roy wrote:

  @Clay

  Great post. Thanks for reminding me about the other torrid novels we teach. I think I'll pick up a copy of Lolita this summer so I better understand what we are teaching. You're probably right about schools pandering to the lengthening of adolescence. I have a friend who teaches at the University level. She claims every year more and more freshmen drag their parents along to their advisory meetings about what classes to pick. I think I hear the blades of the helicopter.

  Charlie A. Roy's last blog post..Intervention Strategies That Work

• At April 15, 2008, diane wrote:

  Harold,

  The most popular book in our high school library by far is "A Child Called It." It's not on any reading list, but students ask for it constantly and it is rarely on the shelf.

  Other librarians in our BOCES have questioned the suitability of Pelzer's work, but no objections have been raised in our district so we keep replacing copies as they wear out or turn up missing.

  I haven't been able to bring myself to read it yet, but I know that "A Child Called It" affects readers in a very real and meaningful way. There are students in our district who have been/are abused physically and mentally. I'd like to believe that some of our books help them cope with their realities, but how much better would it be if the literature they studied equipped them to recognize and protect themselves from such abominations?

  diane

  diane's last blog post..I'm Afraid Not

• At April 15, 2008, Harold Shaw wrote:

  @diane - "I’d like to believe that some of our books help them cope with their realities, but how much better would it be if the literature they studied equipped them to recognize and protect themselves from such abominations?"

  I would hope that some of our books help them learn to be safer in their "world", but if it were only that simple, that is a tip of the iceberg type comment. The abuses can begin before some even read, but we have to start someplace and the classroom is a great place to educate children to be safer (oh that is a novel thought) (not being sarcastic at you personally diane), but isn't that what we are supposed to do with children - teach? Then the powers that be should trust our ability to be professional in our chose profession and allow us to teach our charges in the manner they need to be taught.

  Harold

  Harold Shaw's last blog post..From the Quick Hits Dept.: Transferring Feeds Between Accounts

• At April 15, 2008, diane wrote:

  Harold,

  We are a small school (enrollment K-12 is 634) but have a social worker and psychologist on staff.

  Confidentiality laws protect our children but also prevent staff members from fully understanding the details of their lives. When a student of any age confides in me, I try to respond in the most positive way possible and make sure that the appropriate "expert" is alerted to possible issues.

  These children are not "innocent" of the knowledge of evil. We can't always protect our children; we need to teach them how to protect themselves.

  diane

  diane's last blog post..I'm Afraid Not

• At April 15, 2008, Bill Fitzgerald wrote:

  Hello, Clay,

  Teaching Lolita is something that should be seriously considered -- it humanizes the unthinkable without flinching from it. In that way, it does remind me of Capote's In Cold Blood.

  What's missing from this conversation, however, is any sense of context. *Why* would Lolita be taught? What are the goals? If the goals are simply to teach it as a means of showing that some things are capital-b Bad, then, IMO, you are missing the opportunities provided by a text such as Lolita. To learn about Bad things, have them read the paper. Have them look at statistics, real data, that examines how and why rape/assault/incest are underreported. Better yet, have them do that *while* reading Lolita.

  Or, have them read Lolita and Push (by Sapphire) one after the other. Or read Lolita alongside Mrs. Dalloway, or Pale Fire. Or have them read The Lover by Duras, or have them read Jane Eyre, Lolita, and The Wide Sargasso Sea, in that order. You have options, and these texts will sing better in harmony.

  Lolita can be a powerful text in the hands of a skilled educator, but, as should always be the case when handling something of power, we should be sure to understand out motives, and make sure we are using it effectively.

  FWIW, I'm also not entirely convinced by the line of reasoning that Lolita will serve as a sufficiently cautionary tale as to make students more aware of the risks from sexual predators. There are many reasons to teach Lolita, but to use it as a cautionary tale would be the pedagogical equivalent of following Humbert Humbert to Hourglass Lake -- you're likely to get lost in mirror image, the reflection, or the veil of time, but a moral will be difficult to come by, unless you go out your way to append it. There are better vehicles for that message.

• At April 15, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Bill,

  Thanks for a comment that belongs in my fantasy Comment Hall of Fame.

  I'm zonked, it's almost 5 p.m. (this nocturne's bedtime), so I'll only say I love your suggestions, though the coverage element limits how many novels we can read in this class.

  I put the pedagogical thrust of the thing in a comment on Bud's off-shoot of my post, so I'll paste it here:

  Here’s the pedagogical justification for the novel as the perfect truly modern novel, in the framework of “the Big Four”: Darwin (shift from theology to biology), Marx (shift from Free Will and essentialism to historico-materialistic determinism), Freud (shift from rationalism to irrationalism), and Nietzsche (shift from absolute to “revaluation of all values”): Lolita encapsulates all of those things. I’m teaching the class as a chronological survey of literature from the Renaissance to the post-modern, which these students are just ready to synthesize after studying Freud in AP Psych and studying the birth of the modern in the Norton Anthology.

  --so that's a sketch. Still, there's much to be said for flattering you through some good honest theft of your suggestions. Thanks for those.

• At April 15, 2008, On Teaching Lolita in the High School Classroom | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] 15 April: After reading this and the comments, be sure to read this follow-up post and the comments there. Interesting stuff in those [...]

• At April 15, 2008, Bill Fitzgerald wrote:

  Hello, Clay,

  Steal away! What's ours is ours :)

  I love your big 4 -- and it made me think of two more: Rhys' Good Morning Midnight (btw, have I mentioned how much I heart Jean Rhys?) and Notes from Underground --

  RE coverage: I feel you -- for me, the hardest part of planning lit courses involves deciding what to leave out.

  I'm also a big fan of books in threes -- it forces students away from either/or, and helps engender bigger picture questions/discussions.

  RE: being zonked: sleep well! It's late where I'm at -- pushing 2 am, and I've had a night filled with UI design. The digression into literature has been vastly appreciated.

• At April 15, 2008, tankilo wrote:

  I had an idea on how to help get this taught.

  Find out the most conservative pastor in your school district.

  Approach them saying "I want your help in setting up a lesson plan that will actually help children deal with the evil in the world".

  Let him suggest a few books, and you suggest a few books, and if he hasn't read "Lolita", buy him a copy and say "this is a really well written story about the dangers of having sex". Let him read it, and if you can get his endorsement, that will help your principal defend the book selection.

  tankilo's last blog post..tankilo: @iboughtamac Okay. Updated bio link to a blog. MySpace's setup/layout is a pain anyway.. Trying to get everyone to twitter anyhow.

• At April 16, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @tankilo, that is one of the most devious and delicious uses of marketing i've read in a long time- getting the town witch doctor to endorse the competition to his own medicine!

  i can't say i'm crazy about giving educational authority to a guy whose ancestors burned people for divergent thinking, but it's definitely a fun one to imagine.

• At April 18, 2008, Meme: High School Daze to Praise | Ms. Michetti's Virtual Classroom wrote:

  [...] follow Clay Burell’s blog and found myself really interested in what he has been saying about teaching Lolita.  And then I saw that he had responded to this meme, originating from Paul C [...]

• At April 20, 2008, Miguel Guhlin wrote:

  I love reading and the triumph of good over evil draws me like moth to a flame. Literature gives us a distance with which to study base human emotions and the actions that are jerked out as if by an clumsy puppet-master. T

  hough my comment and the interpretation given leaves my exact position in the shadows of a safe haunted house, have no doubt, I want my 15 year old daughter to study the classics, to find beneath the cloak of societal acceptability--granted by the ignorant--the horror that lurks...and the good, as well.

  While we are each flawed as humans, the love of the Redeemer can help us. But so long as we hide in the dark, cling to it like an inadequate blanket on a chill night, we make a choice to be less than what we could be. Transparency of our motives, reflection, before and after, action...that is the only way.

  In the final analysis, each of us must learn to accept and love who we are--the good and the bad, and to use the energy of dissonance to transform. If a conversation in an English class can move us closer to that goal, then, that is what must happen.

  I find it ironic, though, that you advocate for this from the relative safety of an International School, while Americans in the land of the free cower in fear of what they may say. I went for fingerprinting two weeks ago...too many criminals among our ranks, not enough teachers. The witch hunt begins. We can't all move across the sea, nor should we...a rose in a junk yard is all the more treasured when it survives enough to bloom.

  I fear that "schooliness" and "learning" are mutually exclusive in these times and that when we refuse to acknowledge who we are, to even discuss the possibility of what is unearthed in the tombs of great tomes, the only way to learn will be to walk away from our schools.

  But, that's my fear. My hope is that I will raise a generation of people who are unafraid to stare into the mirror, to see what lies behind the beautiful smile or the frown, to accept oneself as s/he truly is and do what must be done, what is right...I know I have a long way to go, but I am pleased that at least, I know my ignorance.

  Again, you've inspired me to ramble. Thank you for the space. More at my space.

  With appreciation,

  Miguel Guhlin

  Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net

  http://mguhlin.net

• At April 20, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Miguel, thanks for the addition. I hope my parenthetical made clear that your comments on Bud's post were more complex than my quote of you on mine.

  The irony you note is one I've noted many times. One of my hopes with Students 2.0 was that it would serve as evidence that American students can blog publicly (and beneficially for both learning and college admissions bullets *sigh*) without, as I put it somewhere in these pages, "being torn apart by wolves." I wonder if any US evangelists are using it as such evidence as they argue for blogging in US schools.

  For the record, I have never taught in the USA. I left to explore the wide world, and the US Army was this working-class Humanities graduate's ticket out (I was stationed in Germany, an Arabic Linguist for Military Intelligence). And I only started teaching in China as a plot complication in a (cue dramatic music) doomed love affair.

  Somehow your post has inspired a little fantasy in return: wouldn't it be grand to teach a "Banned Books" elective class? D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Ginsberg . . . . who else?

  Thanks again, Miguel.

  Clay

• At April 20, 2008, diane wrote:

  Clay,

  Who else for your Banned Books list? How about Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, & Harry Potter? Authors Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, Judy Bloom, Robert Cormier, Philip Pullman, Mark Twain? Books have been challenged, sometimes banned, for containing witchcraft, magic, sexual content, even inappropriate attitude towards adults/parents. There is always someone, somewhere, ready to be offended. People whose beliefs can be so easily shaken must build high walls indeed to protect themselves and their children from "unwholesome" influences.

  diane

  diane's last blog post..Saint Expeditus: He's fo' close scrapes

• At April 21, 2008, …well, well Will | ...technology with a twist wrote:

  [...] across a post at Beyond School that, at first, made me smile, but now has me thinking [...]

• At April 22, 2008, Paul C wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  Thanks for initiating a great discussion. I included a link and quote from your pick along with other picks so far at quoteflections.

  Paul C's last blog post..Meme: High School Daze to Praise (3)

• At April 22, 2008, Lorne Cooke wrote:

  While you raise some interesting and provocative ideas about literature studies in general, I must take some exception to the starting point you use in the examples you cite. Sophocles' Oedipus the King BEGINS after the fact of his patricide and incest. Furthermore, Oedipus' father, King Laius, attempted to murder his baby son on the basis of an oracle's prediction that he (Oedipus) would one day murder his father and marry his mother. In an attempt to thwart this destiny, Laius abandons the child in the mountains. Rescued by a wandering shepherd, Oedipus is taken to Corinth, where he is adopted by King Polybus, and never learns of his true identity.

  On hearing from an oracle the same prediction that he would one day murder his father and marry his mother, Oedipus runs away from those he assumes are his loving parents for fear of doing them harm. On his travels, he encounters his real father who he slays in a duel. Arriving at Thebes, he vanquishes the Sphinx (remember the riddle of the Sphinx?), and is elected King, finally marrying Queen Jocasta his mother, thus fulfilling the prophecies of the oracle.

  This is the starting point of the play, and it begins with the wrath of the gods being visited on Thebes because the death of King Laius needed to be avenged.

  Scholars over the centuries have pondered the true meaning of Oedipus the King. The point of the story is not the incest or the murder that Oedipus committed. Did he really commit either, being ignorant of his crimes and of his past? The question behind this story is rather of pre-destiny and free will.

  I'm not sure if you have actually read this play, or ever seen it performed. But I would suggest that this story, as all enduring literature, provokes thought and asks questions in an unassuming manner. That Oedipus and Jocasta suffer horribly as a result of their actions is a fact of the story. Our reaction to it is neither indictment of their action nor condonement of their innocence. It should, on the other hand, represent a vehicle whereby we can sense within our selves our own evils and come to terms with them. As well, we can recognize the perennial struggle in all humanity between good and evil, free will and destiny, crime and punishment. To relegate such a timeless classic to the trashiness of contemporary dime store sex thrillers unjustly condemns this great work.

  Please read the play! Then, try and understand the gist of it.

• At April 22, 2008, Bill Fitzgerald wrote:

  @Lorne --

  You realize that with a few selected edits just about everything you say about Oedipus can be equally true about Lolita --

  It's also difficult to reconcile twin statements like this:

  "That Oedipus and Jocasta suffer horribly as a result of their actions is a fact of the story."

  alongside

  "The point of the story is not the incest or the murder that Oedipus committed. Did he really commit either, being ignorant of his crimes and of his past?" --

  Even Oedipus would agree that he killed his father and slept with his mother -- and he'll share his eyeballs to back it up!

  Of course, it took a blind man to get him there -- unless, of course, we want to take Eliot's more gender neutral version of the blind man with withered dugs.

  And this is (for me, anyways) one of the values of this thread: the effort to pigeonhole certain works as acceptable while rejecting others as classics is fraught with imprecision. 60 years ago, students would have read Lochinvar, and would have been tasked with writing essays extolling its virtues. Give me three steps down the palate over Lochinvar's hackneyed gallop any day of the week.

  Cheers,

  Bill

• At April 22, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Lorne,

  I've read Oedipus in countless translations, written a 20-page analysis of it to "prove" my one-eyed professor read it squint-wise, and I've read the other Oedipus plays as well.

  What I wonder, from your dismissal of Lolita as a "trash[y] dime-store sex thriller," is if you've read that book. I can only assume you haven't.

  A couple of reviews to set the record straight on the lack of "prurience" and the abundance of artistry - and yes, food for moral thought of the most sublime, but decidedly modern and non-Victorian manner - in Nabokov's acknowledged masterpiece:

  What is one to make of Lolita? In a prickly postscript to the novel, Mr. Nabokov dismisses this question as a problem dreamed up by "Teachers of Literature": he rejects the satiric interpretations which critics have put upon Lolita and asserts, in effect, that it is simply a story he had to get off his chest. That all of this is too ingenuous by half is evident from the parodic style in which Lolita is written: a combination of pastiches of well-known styles, spoofing pedantry, analysis of passion � la fran�ais, Joycean word games, puns, and all kinds of verbal play. Wild, fantastic, wonderfully imaginative, it is a style which parodies everything it touches. It surely justifies, at least in part, those critics who have seen in Lolita a satire of the romantic novel, of "Old Europe" in contact with "Young America," or of "chronic American adolescence and shabby materialism." But above all Lolita seems to me an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy.

  --Charles Rolo, The Atlantic Monthly, 1958

  and for something a little more contemporary, this 2006 review by Bret Anthony Johnston, author and creative writing professor at Harvard, on NPR's All Things Considered

  Readers always read, I think, out of a tremendous curiosity about other human beings, we're looking for another soul on the page, and that's what Nabokov has so fearlessly, so complexly, so gorgeously given us. In a lesser writer's hands, we could easily dismiss Mr. Humbert as a monster, but Nabokov denies us that all-too comfortable option. Even if we would never condone his vain and deadly infatuation, we understand it. We're complicit in his sins, and our complicity is seductive and terrifying. "Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury... look at this tangle of thorns."

  To be sure, this novel isn't for the faint of heart, but neither should prospective readers retreat to any kind of moral high ground. Nabokov, in fact, threads an unexpected and affirming emotional serenity through his portrait of obsession. His enigmatic narrator leaves us in spellbound rapture. Because for all of its linguistic pyrotechnics -- as Humbert confesses, "you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" -- and for all its controversial subject matter, Lolita is one of the most beautiful love stories you'll ever read. It may be one of the only love stories you'll ever read. This is the most thrilling and beautiful and most deeply disturbing aspect of the novel -- and it's what most persuasively recommends the book -- that in addition to finding Humbert's soul on the page, we also find, like it or not, a little of our own.

  Wilde's Miss Prism would dismiss this novel based on its content (which again, deals with taboos like Sophocles and Shakespeare so often do, just uncomfortably close ones); but lovers of literature would not regret reading it.

  Again, though, the thrust of my post is this: literary merit aside, in this age of vanishing privacy and uncheckable exposure to the world via the web, our young need to be taught not only what a Lolita is - that allusion has all-too-successfully become iconic in our culture in ways we grown-ups know all to well, if we lay the cant aside - but also two more things: how not to be one, first of all, and more importantly, what a "Humbert Humbert" is.

  And how to recognize his trademarks if ever they crop up on a blog comment, a tweet, a Facebook, and the avalanche of future avenues being prepared for him by our wonderful web 2.0 developers.

  When "Humbert Humbert" becomes as iconic as "Lolita," I'd wager we'd see wiser online behavior by our young. Maybe I'm wrong. But if I am, reading Lolita still rewards. It's a great novel. It's enthralling. It's not one our young adults in upper secondary will skirt with a copy of Cliff's Notes; it might be one that sets them a little more firmly on the course of life-long reading of real, uncensored literature.

• At April 23, 2008, To Ban or Not to Ban? Students Respond to Nabokov's Lolita | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] is the third in the Why We Should Teach Lolita in High School series. See Number One here, Number Two here, with many interesting comments. If you want to comment, please read those posts - especially the [...]

• At July 22, 2008, Carmen wrote:

  FYI Clay in case you didn't already see this, the Modern Languages Association has just published a new volume in its Approaches to Teaching series, this one on Lolita:

  http://www.mla.org/store/CID39/PID344

  Thought you might find it helpful if you do ever end up teaching this text or if you need an argument for reticent administrators: Clearly someone in America thinks its worthy of canonizing...

  All best,

  C

• At July 22, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Carmen, Nice contribution, thanks for that :)

• At September 18, 2008, Why Lolita Should Be Taught To All High Schoolers : reddit.com wrote:

  [...] or dislike and help decide what's popular, or submit your own!0vl['t3_6frox'] = ['0', '0', '1' ];Why Lolita Should Be Taught To All High Schoolers (beyond-school.org)submitted 5 months ago by [deleted] [...]

• At October 18, 2008, VL wrote:

  I personally think this is a bunch of rubbish. Teenagers need to be exposed to a lot of different subject matter to become well-rounded adults. These "dark" and "mature" novels are a great getaway from the normal boring and awfully written books most teachers have you read.

  And BTW--most people who commit crimes are uneducated.

• At October 31, 2008, Iwan James Berry wrote:

  I'm all one for expanding the amount of literature to which young people are exposed, and would have nothing against Lolita being taught in schools - however, I would contend with some comments that works by Shakespeare, Sophocles etc. have somehow become irrelevant and are far removed from our modern experiences. Indeed, the fact that we are culturally indebted to the ages portrayed by such dramatists and writers should compel us to look deeper into them, rather than be repulsed by them due to their apparent stuffiness or irrelevance.

  Also, let us not forget that while it is certainly important to allow the darker side of literature to have its exposure, we should also be teachings kids about really good, FUN literature - the danger is that "book-learnin'" might end up as a ghastly, indecipherable and (most dangerous of all where young adults are concerned) boring place. Let's show them Joyce as well as Nabokov; put the tragedies and the comedies on the same shelf; encourage equal interest in "Hamlet", "The Oddyssey" and "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

• At November 1, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Iwan,

  Oof, if you read any deprecation of Shakespeare, the Greeks, or "fun" and humor in my post, I pitched it really badly.

  I agree with you, in other words. (Search the site for David Sedaris and Gilgamesh and you may see proof of that ;-) ).

  Thanks for stopping by.

• At November 7, 2008, brigs wrote:

  dude, are you aware you country sounds like a state controlled socialist entity where people are not allowed to think or choose for themselves? No wonder kids are board and doing silly things. teach Lolita it'd be a better education than they are apparently receiving in school in from their peers.

• At July 7, 2009, Melissa wrote:

  I just finished freshman year of high school. English was terrible with horrific "classic" pieces of horrid literature once again pushed down a generation's throats. The two books I actually liked were the two I got to pick for an individual novel project. For the first book I chose Lolita.

  I would not strike anyone as being the type to voluntarily read such a bizarre tale - especially with its colorful history. I chose to read it after spending three hours digging through online lists of classic literature. I love to read, but I'd have taken an English/Spanish dictionary two times over over most all of the books on the list. I finally stumbled upon Lolita on one of the lists. I had heard of the book and I, curious, pulled it up. It actually looked good. I bought a copy of the Annotated Lolita the next day.

  Of course, I stil had to convince my English teacher to approve it - and I figured that that would be easier siad than done. I mean, considering the book's reputation, what young English teacher would possibly allow a freshman to present a project on such a novel? That's when I found your page here. (I was looking for validation and evidence to use when making my case.) Luckily, she had apparently never heard of it and trusted me to pick a good book. She said she was fine with it.

  So I read it. And it took forever reading it at lunch with all of the notes. I read it all day some days after a week of only having time for reading during my half-hour lunch. Here's the shocker: I absolutely loved it! The book was amazing and the project was a huge success. During my research, I also became a huge Nakokov fan (a man practically nobody my age has ever heard of). Anyway, the book was clean, funny, and well-written.

  And that comes from a 14 year old.

• At October 20, 2009, ashleyemma wrote:

  sure, teach Lolita in high school. I read it then and i certainly found it more valuable than the feminist suicide classics I had to read. But don't call it a love story. I would even contest that the girl in the story is per-se "over sexed." Children of both sexes at that age are often trying to figure out how to understand their own sexuality, and their clumsy attempts are often confusing and awkward for witnessing adults. Also, this is Humbert Humbert's perspective and he is the ultimate unreliable narrorator.

  Actually its funny mentioned the adolescent adult phenomonon. It a sense I would say that delayed adult development is major theme in Lolita. You have a character who, despite all of his intelligence, has never learned to opporate in way that isn't essentially selfish impulse. He uses the girl to recreate his lost childhood love.

  Anyways, in general yes, teach Lolita in schools. While we are at it, read Anais Nin and Story of the Eye.

• At November 27, 2009, Toolbit wrote:

  Melissa,

  You have an English teacher who hadn't even heard of Lolita? I hope that's not true.

  Clay,

  Thanks to this blog post I think I will pick up Lolita again after putting it down when only 1/4 the way through. I am not opposed to teaching the subject matter to students in high school, but I would disagree it should required. I actually don't know if any book should be required if the teacher feels unfit to teach the material, but I especially feel this way about Lolita. I'm more comfortable with having it be on a "project basis" the way Melissa explains it, unless the teacher feels especially familiar with the material and ready to tackle that kind of subject.

  While not too demanding for a bright student, I believe it would be a heavy dose of heavy prose and weighty content. I also may be underestimating high school students, a sentiment far too prevalent in our society. I'm thinking The Perks of Being a Wallflower might be more accessible while still addressing sexual mores -- for the record, it was probably my favorite book in high school.

  I would say that Lolita should probably be reserved for AP, honors, and college classes. If I were an English teacher, with all the great books in the world to teach, and too little time to teach them all, I would probably not subject all students to Lolita, or at least what I read of it. That said, 2 pages in I knew Nabakov to be a master wordsmith and all students should be exposed to near-perfect prose writing (my opinion) like his at some point.

  In general though, I think I'm mostly on board with you.

  Toolbit out.

  .-= Toolbit´s last blog ..Expanding Waistlines and Standards =-.

Related posts:

1. A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with...
2. On Using Technology Without Understanding It This editorial from our high school student newspaper is...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

]]>