Toward the beginning of May, I enrolled in the online master’s program for English at Ohio University. Like my classmates, I made the choice to go back to graduate school because I want to increase my depth of knowledge about English literary history and theories of composition. But the first week focused on neither of these topics. Instead, our professor posed the following questions: What is the value of humanities? How do you communicate that value to students?
These are important questions given that we live in world that simultaneously places heavy emphasis on STEM while also moving at warp TikTok speed. How can we justify a literature class when science and math dominate our academic and professional landscapes? How can we communicate the value of a novel to students who don’t want to slow down to read it? Teachers of English and language arts need to have answers to these questions before they walk into the classroom and start lecturing about Odysseus’s hubris or Penelope’s loyalty; otherwise, students won’t understand why it’s important to read The Odyssey at all.
Obviously, one way in which I’ve tried to tackle this question is through the creation of this website. It’s a kind of meet-them-halfway strategy: try to make the ideas fun or silly, and students will cotton to them. However, that doesn’t do much to communicate why reading Shakespeare’s plays or Jane Austen’s novels is important. To fill this ostensible gap in the Super ELA! oeuvre, I’ve compiled three compelling reasons we can give students in the inevitable moment when they ask, “Why do we have to read this?”
1. Travel from the comfort of your couch
Like to travel? The costs of plane tickets, hotel rooms, and dining out can add up quickly, and you may not have enough money to see all the places you dream about. Enter books! As Steven Lynn writes in Texts and Contexts, “Literary works are, in a way, like places we can visit” (1). Books are like passports to different cities, countries, and eras. Want to visit parts of Africa? Stamp your passport with Things Fall Apart, Roots, and The Poisonwood Bible. Have a hankering to visit Latin countries? Book a three-country vacation to Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil with Like Water for Chocolate, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Slum.
With books, there are countless routes to travel wherever you please. Plus, if you get them from the library, it’s free! How often are you going to get that kind of deal from your travel agent?
2. Build better relationships
Empathy, or the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings, is crucial for developing relationships, (and unfortunately, it’s also on the decline in the U.S.). Without empathy, we cannot develop compassion for other people; if we don’t have compassion for others, we will not be able to provide emotional support, let alone support of any kind because we just won’t care. That’s a recipe for ending up friendless.
So how do books help with empathy? They do so by allowing us to “transcend the boundaries of our lives” (Lynn 4) and see the world through another person’s eyes. The Diary of a Young Girl does this by providing a portrait of Anne’s fears, irritations, and intermittent joys while hiding from the Nazis. Their Eyes Were Watching God does this by following Janie as she navigates relationships, gender roles, and racial politics in Florida in the early part of the 20th century. The Outsiders does this by showing Ponyboy’s dangerous, class-stratified, and rough-and-tumble world. Without such portraits, it would be hard to access the diversity of experience that exists on our planet; with these portraits, accessible via literature, we can walk a mile in another person’s shoes, so to speak, and cultivate empathy for people whose lives are very different from our own.
3. Cultivate creativity and critical thinking
The professional world often points to the “Big 5” personality traits to predict a person’s success at work. One of those traits is openness, or the willingness to embrace or entertain new ideas. Studies have found that if you are able to entertain ideas that differ from your own, you are more likely to increase your capacity for creativity and find innovative solutions to problems. So how do we cultivate openness? You know what I’m going to say: The answer is books.
Mark Edmundson captures this idea in Why Teach?: “For a student to be educated, she has to face brilliant antagonists: She has to encounter thinkers who see the world in different terms than she does” (45). Students (and people in general) need to be able to understand and confront ideas that differ from their own. For example, I don’t agree with Ayn Rand’s hyper-individualistic philosophy of “objectivism,” but I can still read and consider the ideas in Anthem. The ability to entertain ideas that differ from your own—in addition to holding your own beliefs—expands your thinking, making more room for the development and growth of new ideas and perspectives.
For me, this is the most important skill and justification we can give to our students. As the world grows increasingly polarized, spurred by righteous indignation on social media and the collective atrophying of our ability to talk to one another, we can use literature as a kind of life preserver to rescue us from the wreckage. Science and math don’t have much to say about helping us talk to each other, but literature can speak volumes.
Teacher Talkback
How do you communicate the value of literature to your students? I would love to hear your thoughts! Let me know in the comments, or email me at maskedmotif@super-ela.com.