Students want to read books relevant to their lives
“I think the big issue is that literature lessons are failing to reach out to young people and young people are not interested in the way that we are teaching literature in schools,” says 18-year-old Quentin Gärtner.
He has just graduated from high school in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg and is finishing up his term as general secretary of the Federal Student Conference, a body of school student representatives from across the country.
Gärtner has made headlines recently with calls for reform of Germany's education system, saying schools “need less Faust and witch burning, more AI skills and education about democracy.”
The philistine supremacy strikes again. Students don't know what books are “relevant to their lives.” They are students. That is the whole point. If you encourage this sort of weak-minded amateurism you cannot be surprised when your profession starts dying. One of the major problems “culture” has right now is that the establishment is full of barbarians. Had these people paid attention to Faust they might better understand the implications of making such pacts in order to remain “relevant”.
I was just at the bank. The lady who opened my account told me she has read Pride and Prejudice a hundred times in both English and Farsi. (She has an MA in International Relations, loves Farsi poetry, and also admires Lord of the Rings. Good taste all round.) To paraphrase William F. Buckley, I would sooner that the literary establishment were run by people like her than the ghouls who want to politicize the curriculum and remove Goethe. Goethe! By all means, include some modern works, but don’t pretend that taking Goethe off the syllabus is anything other than downright stupid.
Meanwhile, I continue to struggle with my English translation. These kids don’t know how lucky they are…
We faced a similar issue at the NEA twenty years ago when we launched our national Shakespeare program. Many states were dropping Shakespeare from the high school curriculum--citing how difficult and irrelevant the plays were.
We proceeded any way. We eventually brought several million teenagers into live performances, often the first professional "spoken" play they had ever seen. Kids from every sort of background loved the experience. Teachers wrote to us that the best classes of their careers were in the days following the performance.
In the meantime we gave thousands of actors and crew well-paid work, and we helped support regional theaters in their work.
God I hate relevance.