One year, back when he was still teaching, John Gatto decided to teach Moby Dick to his 8th grade students. Since the purchase of the books had to go through administrative channels, naturally he got a "school edition" of the novel. He writes:
Melville’s book is too vast to say just what the
right way to teach it really is. It speaks to every reader privately.... Indeed, it offered so many choices of purpose—some
aesthetic, some historical, some social, some philosophical, some
theological, some dramatic, some economic—that compelling the attention
of a room full of young people to any one aspect seemed willful and
arbitrary.
Soon after I began teaching Moby Dick
I realized the school edition wasn’t a real book but a kind of
disguised indoctrination providing all the questions.... If you even read those questions (let alone answered
them) there would be no chance ever again for a private exchange
between you and Melville; the invisible editor would have preempted it.
The
editors of the school edition provided a package of prefabricated
questions and more than a hundred chapter-by-chapter abstracts and
interpretations of their own.... The school text of Moby Dick
had been subtly denatured; worse than useless, it was actually
dangerous. So I pitched it out and bought a set of undoctored books
with my own money. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all
the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don’t do
that. Real books demand people actively participate by asking their own
questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren’t just
stupid, they hurt the mind under the guise of helping it....
I've been thinking back to works I read during high school. I was actually able to take tests on Great Expectations and The Odyssey in 9th grade and ace them, as well as write papers pertaining to each of them (which I also got A's on), without having read more than 10% of either of them. If you are good at school, then by the time you are in 9th grade you know exactly what you are supposed to notice, supposed to ponder, supposed to conclude about a work of literature. If you're good at gaming the system, like I was, you can easily discern everything you need to about a work of literature, namely: what is going to be on the test. You know how to glean that information from your teacher's lectures and the hints they drop (intentionally or unintentionally); you know how to reverse-engineer the "Points of Discussion" and comprehension questions; you know the tricks, like reading the first and last paragraphs of each chapter. I never truly read the books or plays I was assigned, except for Tess of the D'Urbervilles which I absolutely loved (but in the case of Tess I spent all my class time seething with rage and hating most of my fellow classmates, so it was hardly conducive to mental growth).
I am currently reading Gatto's A Different Kind of Teacher, and in this book he also addresses the effects of schooled reading:
School books lend themselves to testing in very cash-profitable ways, but these are ways which ultimately destroy the ability to read in many, and the educational possibilities of reading in most. Let me give you a way to prove that to yourself.
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the great books of this century, available in just about every library in the land, and in school editions, too. As fine a work of art as it is, it's an easy book to read as far as diction and syntax are concerned, being cast in the idiom of German teenagers and young men and translated into the idiom of our own young. Try this simple test on a room full of the best readers you can find: ask them to read the first twenty pages closely and to take notes on anything they think is important. Now have them close the book and using their notes answer this question: "What is the name of the soldier telling the story?" Let me guarantee you that less than ten percent of your subjects will be able to give the name even though the narrator clearly identifies himself. I said ten percent, but I'll be surprised if anyone is able to make the identification. Why is that?
Standardized reading tests never ask such questions.... So the reading drills teachers impose seldom ask for names either. It doesn't take long before a trained reader can't even see information that doesn't fall into the few categories of "valuable" skills which reading tests wallow in.
Not convinced? Here's a bolder scene from the same book, same twenty pages. The second scene of All Quiet takes place on the toilet -- that ought to be pretty memorable, right? Soldiers have moved their individual potties out of the latrine building so they can watch the battles on land and air above them and in the next field. That's as striking a visual image as you can imagine, isn't it?
Now ask your readers who customarily star on reading exams about the second scene. No matter how you put the question you will discover that only a few, if any, have the vaguest idea the men have taken their toilets outdoors. Not one of my students in fifteen years of asking figured that out -- in the face of the well-known teenage appetite for vulgarity. They don't visualize when they read -- a century of pseudo-scientific reading instruction which fragments reading into sentences and paragraphs and multiple choice questions and all the rest has destroyed the common ability to bring verbal abstractions down to mental images.... [M]ost trained readers can't understand what they read very well. It might be worth your while to reflect on the mechanisms that make this so. Skill with complex reading material was almost universal in colonial days, but it became much less so after reading was systematically taught.
I will add another argument for the damage schooled reading can do to one's ability to read and love of reading. In a classroom setting, particularly in middle or high school when the only fashionable demeanor is bored, when you are supposed to be universally indifferent unless there is an opportunity to express disgust-- in that setting, you cannot afford to exhibit an emotional reaction to the written word. When we read Tess of the D'Urbervilles and the jock morons in my class misinterpreted her rape as consensual sex, there was no socially acceptable way to express my anger, no safe way to argue with them without the risk of revealing how much I cared about this character. I had to tune out as best I could, detach, not listen... imitate a statue. Even though I loved the book I did not participate in its discussion.
In that same class we read Hamlet, which I did not particularly like at the time, and did not fully read. Well, no wonder-- it's full of drama and tragedy and existential angst and creepiness and anger and pathos and unfulfilled love-- and I'm supposed to get involved in that while being essentially forbidden to reveal emotion? No way! It's too much of a risk. What happens instead is that you don't even try to immerse yourself. It's much safer to detach, be a teenager, be bored, be disdainful... and calculate what will be on the test.
My brother once got seriously upset during English class when a main character in the book Bridge to Terabithia died. I won't go into the details, but his sadistic teacher made the whole situation intensely miserable for him. He was in either 7th or 8th grade at the time. The next time he took the risk of reading fiction, he was in his 20's. Sure, he faked his way through assigned readings, but he sure as hell didn't allow himself to get interested.
For almost a decade, if you attend the average public school, you read literature within an environment where it is socially imperative that you not become emotionally involved with said literature. What is the accumulated effect of this imposed apathy toward the written word? Doesn't it become a habit? Don't you conclude, after this unfair trial with compulsory readings and enforced emotional distancing, that you just don't really like literature?
And I have a second argument to add. School material is generally so sanitized and staid, so whitewashed, that when you are presented with men on toilets as in Gatto's example, or a Hamlet who is borderline insane if not completely nuts, you don't really believe it. Hamlet is supposed to be a hero, right? Surely he isn't calling his girlfriend a whore, then, right? Surely not. Similarly I don't think Gatto's students fail to understand the second scene of All Quiet solely because they don't visualize, although I'm sure that's part of it; but if they did get the idea that these men were sitting on the pot, it would promptly exit their brains as an impossibility within the stark, white-walled, whitewashed, sterile rat cage that is the modern classroom. How can anyone properly teach literature which illustrates that real life is messy, when they're sitting in an environment bent on destroying that messiness, bent on making people into homogeneous, passive, obedient workers devoid of behavioral problems? How do you teach Huck Finn with any earnestness while telling your class to sit down, be quiet, be polite, follow rules, stop fidgeting and do as they're told?
In the end, "reading assessment" is a means of controlling reading, school editions are a means of controlling reading, questions at the end of a chapter keep you in a subordinate mental position, summaries and abstracts straight out tell you what to think. Are we teaching kids to read, or are we training them not to?
