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In defense of the classics

Posted Aug 11, 2009 by Christie Gold

Updated Aug 12, 2009 at 05:57 AM

My friend Jane is an aspiring novelist, but her background is in science, not English or journalism.  She has big gaps in her understanding of grammar and syntax, and, by her own admission, she skirted her way around most of her high school reading assignments.

As an English teacher, I am often asked to proofread college application essays, letters to authority figures or any number of other pieces of prose.  Until Jane, though, I’d never been asked to read a friend’s novel. I agreed, and one page in, I regretted offering my help.

Jane’s premise was intriguing, and the storyline held my interest.  The writing, however, was nothing short of painful.  At times, the narrative was so clumsy, I would lose the ability to follow the story, and my red pen almost ran dry as I corrected comma splices, pronoun/antecedent agreement and other errors.

I sheepishly returned the edited copy a month after receiving it along with a dozen books about writing, including one of my favorites, Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.  I feared hurting my friend’s feelings, and I hoped that she wouldn’t be discouraged.  After all, she had the gumption to write a 300-page book, a feat I have never tackled.

Jane was not deterred, though, and she took my criticism and used it to improve her work.  She dug into the texts I’d sent her and immediately started revising.  She also started listening to books on tape whenever she was in the car for any extended amount of time, giving all the authors she had shoved aside in high school another chance:  Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Austen, and Steinbeck, a reading list that would make most major professors in any college’s English department happy.

Last week, my friend sent me a new project—a personal narrative that she’d penned about an experience she had as a camp counselor almost three decades ago.  She asked me to read it, and out of a mixture of guilt, obligation and friendship, I agreed, thinking, “Oh, good.  It’s short.”

The first sentence astonished me.  Jane’s words flowed together forming enchanting images that immediately transported me to the day when, as a teenager, she joined the counseling staff at a local camp for mentally challenged youth.  In it, I could feel the influence of the literary giants who had become her travel companions in recent months.

Reading and writing are closely linked—this is not a shocking revelation, and there is ample research to support this fact. 

My most recent proof arrives just as I am about to return to school. Like most schools in Hillsborough County, our FCAT grade fell this past year, and our writing scores were lackluster.

I have been hesitant to blame any one factor for this, but the school system’s decreasing emphasis on the classics cannot be discounted.  Proponents of the College Board’s SpringBoard program, which Hillsborough county mandated in language arts classrooms last year, praise the program where “rigor and relevance” are the buzzwords of a curriculum that includes film and rap lyrics but few classics.

Advocates of the program argue that reading Beowulf or A Tale of Two Cities or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby is not relevant to this generation of students.  They say that we can equally engage students using movie clips and song lyrics better than we can with crusty dusty classic novel. 

I could write volumes on the cultural literacy that we need as literate members of an advanced society. I will debate anyone over the necessity of examining the timeless themes that literature provides us, and how those ideas link people across all social, cultural and racial barriers.  I will cite evidence of the link between challenging works of literature and the development of higher order thinking skills, and I will insist that successful people need to know about art, literature, architecture, and music in order to remain upwardly mobile. 

Students often do not understand allusions in contemporary culture because they have no literary background. 

For example, one line of the group Coldplay’s popular song “Viva la Vida,” states, “…revolutionaries pray for my head on a silver tray…” Few students understand the reference to Salome’s demand for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. 

Even in other classes, the lack of literary study limits them as well.  In psychology, it is necessary to understand how the Oedipus Complex got its name. In criminology classes, it’s helpful to know why so many societal misfits are obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye.

Beyond an enriched understanding that familiarity with the classics brings is the fact that studying them fosters good writing.  Every great writer was inspired by one who came before him.  Writers study writers in the way that scientists and mathematicians study the work of their peers and predecessors.

For me, writing is a mixture of art and therapy.  It is a joy to put words on paper, but it is also excruciatingly difficult to get them right. It is the agony and ecstasy of my life.

For the masses, composition is the cornerstone of communication.  Be it an FCAT response, a cover letter for a resume, a debut novel, a blog, a text or a tweet, writing is a skill we cannot escape, and the only way to create masterful prose is to study the masters.