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Deal Simultaneously with Literary Forms. with the Chronological .1\ * 4 411, 1, 1, 44' .041. 1 t i s 4 I .4 . DOCUMBN.T RESti.01E ED 033 114 . I. f g , .to O . 604 4 0,4 re 44 4. I 'to TE 001 533 By Sauer, Edwin H. I to *. t et°. Sequence and Uniformity in the High School Literature Program. o Metropolitan Detroit Bureau of School Studies. Inc.. Mich. ' Pub Date 28 Mar' 63 .., . 4 Y. 1* Note-16p.; Address before the 13th Annual English Conferenceof the Metropolitan Detroit Bureau of School Studies. Detroit. Michigan. EDRS Price MF -$025 HC -$0.90 Descriptors -Classic& Literature. Comedy. Curriculum. *Curriculum Design.Drama. *English. English Instruction. Literary Genres. Literary History. *Literature. Mythology. Novels.Poetry. Satire. *Secondary Education. *Sequential Programs. Thematic Approach. Tragedy A good. sequential literatureprogram for secondary school students should deal simultaneously with literary forms. with thechronological development of literature, and with broad themes of humanexperience. By employing the abundance of teaching aids.texts. and improved foreign translations available today.an imaginatively planned program can help studentsdiscover themselves as wellas become aware of their cultural heritage and rapidlychanging world. In grades 7-9. such a program should include mythology from all periodsand cultures. the literature of the great heroes from Agamemnonto Robert E. Lee. and the mysteryor cycle plays of the English Middle Ages. In grades 10-12.the lyric poem. satire and irony. the comic and tragic hero. the comedy ofmanners. the 'problem drama. the historical romance. the social novel, the novel of sensibility, the theme ofmovement, and such non-literary components as current eventsmay be covered. (JB) REPRODUCED EXACTLY-AS-RECEIVED FROMIHE U.S, WARMER! OF HEWN, EDUCAIION WILIA11,1HIS MINN, HAS111N- POINIS Of VIEW OR OPINIONS PERSON OR ORGANI1A11011 ORIGINATING IT. as. OFFICE Of EDUCAIION ;STATED DO N01 NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICEOf MAIN 1011110N OR POLICY. SEQUENCE AND UNIFORMITY IN THE HIGH SCHOOL LITERATUREPROGRAM Address before the English Conference of the Metropolitan Detroit Bureauof School Studies, Detroit, Michigan. March 28, 1963 By Edwin H. Sauer Oxford, Ohio. Some years ago I taught freshman English at Miami University at During the first semester the concentration waslargely on composition, and stu- dents were expected to write a rather substantialnumber of themes. Miami University is a state and land grant college; consequently young menand women whose parents are tax payers in Ohio mustbe admitted on a first-come, first-serve basis aslong as there is roomfor them. Sometimes, then, they are not so well preparedfor college as they might be. I was dismayed to find several When I received my first batch of papers, which were just a few steps beyond illiteracy. I thoughtI had better take a look at the authors, if only out ofcuriosity, so I called them in. In the interview He said, with one young man I asked how much writing he had done in high school. "We didn't do any writing. In the last two years of high school wedidn't have anything but literature." This seemed unfortunate to me, but I could not help wondering why the encounter with literature had not had someeffect on his prose style "Well, what did you do with the literature?" I asked. "We appreciated it," was his immediate answer. The lad was not being in the least flippant. He was simply repeating what I suppose we might call thefolklore of the high school English class. He had probably never heard the word "literature"without the accompanying words "appreciate" or "appreciation." Both the story and the condition of the lad aresignificant. So many peda- gogical sins have been committed in the name of "the appreciationof literature" that one sometimes wonders how the literature, to saynothing of the students, has survived. The diffuse, amorphous, aimless generalizing about ideas; themechanical, unimaginative, day-to-day chronicling of dates and titles; theeffusive, deliques- cent, and epicene rhapsodizing), the neo-Puritan,humorless, self-satisfied searching for social significance -- each and all of these energies havebeen defended as' NI 1 NI art. Art, gestures in thedirection of gettingyoungster's to appreciate literary guiding esthetic indeed! Curiously missing from allof these stirrings about is the principle that art exists firstfor the purposes of enjoyment,and that, though enjoyment is a various thing -- you canenjoy Dante and you can enjoyJonathan Swift and you can enjoy Odgen Nash -- the reasonfor the existence of art is thatit calls forth in us and forever reaffirms and re-constructsour joy in oneanother's per- ception and virtuosity. In a prefatory note to hisCollected Poems Dylan Thomas wrote, "These poems, withall their crudities, doubts, andconfusions, are written for the love of Man and in praiseof God, and I'd be a damn fool ifthey weren't." That is the way a poet and a manought to talk. Robert Frost used to say that poetry "begins in delightand ends in wisdom," but far too manyof our teachers have wanted their students to start atthe end. B. Conant at Newton High I remember how a number of us met with Dr. James School in Newtonville, Massachusetts,just after he had finished his visits tofifty comprehensive high schools -- thefifty visits which were to result in hiswriting THE AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL TODAY. Dr. Conant told us that, invisiting English classes, he had been regularlydistressed to see the immense amount oftime wasted on the discussionof novels. Dr. Conant was not opposed tothe reading of novels and certainly not opposed to discussion,but it seemed to him that thediscussion was without objective;it was not in any sense planned; itstarted from no specific position and ended at none. Dr. Conant said that studentsleaving these classrooms could not have had any exact senseof accomplishment.Obviously they had read the books, and certainly they were willing totalk about them, but the talk waswithout of the point. Dr. Conant pleaded with us to dosomething about this serious waste students' time. The proponents of sequence anduniformity in literature start with the deter- mination that we must do precisely that -- stopwasting students' time. Their amount of time for anythinghas been drastically reduced bythe terrible history of our time, and they have got toattend to a few other matters just inorder to make sure that the treasures of artwill be around in the future. Those who suggest that we bring order and design intothe high school literature program might not say - 2 - position is the notion that the so, in somany words, butsurely implicit in their and awareness of a commoncultural heritage, not narrowand stultifying, but broad creative, can be one of thefirmest props to support oursurvival. Of course, vie already have akind of uniformity in our literature program. In regularly ask my students my classes in theteaching of secondary school English I The to name the literarywork or works which they rememberbest from high school. when they come, muteness is often appalling. But the similarity of the responses, OF is enervating. There they go again -- SILAS MARNER,A TALE OF TWO CITIES, IDYLLS uniformity to the THE KING, MACBETH, JULIUSCAESAR. It would seem that we have point of being in a straitjacket. As Professor Edward Gordonof Yale is fond of saying, there is one pieceof information which you can be surethat every American high school student knows --where Silas buried the money. A few weeks ao when I asked my students what worksthey remembered best from theirhigh school literature program, one girlsaid," SISTER CARRIE by TheodoreDreiser and SONS AND LOVERS by She may never be D. H. Lawrence."The other students looked ather very queerly. one of them again. Yes, uniformity doesalready exist, if we mean by it asterile reliance on a few titles which seem safe andinnocuous and respectable. But this sterility is not what the proponentsof a new sequence and uniformityhave in mind. They care less about titles than they doabout broad categories of humanexperience; themes affairs; ideas and conflicts endlessly recurrentin the literary record of man's high and subjects which man isforever restless about. It is less important that a school student should know JULIUSCAESAR, let us say, than thathe should know that there is a whole body of Westernliterature on the subject of the waysin which a man's integrity can be tested. Does a man help to assassinatehis best friend because he suspects that thatfriend will take away the individualman's freedom? A whole shelf of books awaitsthe student's investigationof the predicament of Brutus, including someof the good old stand-bys. A TALE OF TWO CITIES will do very nicely here,but there will have to be roomalso for ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren and BILLY BUODby Herman Melville and THE WILD DUCKby Henrik Ibsen. Generally speaking, there are three approaches to the teaching of literature in the high school -- the chronological, the generic, and the thematic. Each has its advantages and each has its limitations.Certainly every student needs some sense of chronology, particularly if it is likely that he will do further literary study. He needs to know that Shakespeare comes after Chaucer, Milton after Shakes- peare, and Wordsworth after Milton, to mention only one sequence.He needs to understand why a novel like WUTHERING HEIGHTS or THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE would have been unthin;:able in the eighteenth century and how a play like MAN AND SUPER- MAN results from certain kinds of dramatic production which preceded it.But there are grave dangers in the exclusively chronological approach, the principal one being that the course often loses sight of literature altogether and concentrates instead On literary history. Suddenly all kinds of a-literary and sub-literary considerations take over. The study of Milton becomes less a study of his poetry than of the English Civil War; the reading of Dickens becomes less an investigation of a novel than of the reform movements of the 19th century.
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