Literature shouldn’t be taught

It should be enjoyed

Children must learn how to read. They need to understand how words are constructed, know the meaning of words, and know how words ought to be ordered in sentences to accurately convey their thoughts. Children also should be able to comprehend what they’ve read to the point where they can describe the text and make meaning out of it.

If for no other reason, children need to learn to read to acquire knowledge.

A role of schools, perhaps the most important, is to teach children to read in the ways that I have described. Once children know how to read, schools go a step further and teach them how to classify and critique works of fiction. Teachers ask questions, like: What was the overall theme of the story? What was the main idea? Who were the characters? What roles did the characters play, and why are they behaving in the ways that they are? 

And then teachers often go on to discuss the work of fiction’s place in history, especially when discussing classic literature, and how the story comments on cultural or social norms—either adhering to them or pushing back against them.

Students are asked to dissect what they have read. They are told to pick apart the text. 

If a child or adolescent is learning how to be a good writer, this sort of dissection might be necessary. If a teenager loves a story and wishes to write their own story, one that others will love in the way that they do, then the young writer understandably wants to figure out how to construct a compelling story that her hopeful readers will fall in love with. She also may want to understand what repels people, what makes them put a book down half way through reading and never pick it up again. In this context, dissection makes sense.

Knowing how to read is a means to joy, and in a literature class, for example, dissection doesn’t make all that much sense. Novels, poems, short stories, and fairy tales should be the objects of enjoyment, not objects of study. Adults, whether teachers or parents, can use them to teach children how to read, as well as develop a love of reading, but they need not take the process a step further by asking them to critique—or analyze—what they have read, especially not following an external rubric outlining what the child ought to get out of each line or chapter of the work.

When a young person picks up a work of imaginative literature they are beginning a relationship with the author of the work, thus with the characters described in the piece of fiction. The relationship blossoms from what the author describes, the story they tell. As a teenager becomes acquainted with a story, they will do their own analysis of it. They will piece together what’s going on within the story, figure out who’s who among the characters and what their relation is to each other, and absorb every detail to fully understand how the world the author has created operates. They will imagine themselves within the world and come to their own conclusions about what’s important or unique about the story. The reader does not need external influence to do this; they don’t need the guidance of a teacher.

When imaginative literature becomes an object of study guided by someone else external to the process, someone other than the young person reading the work of fiction, the conclusions the child arrives at might not be their own. The questioning of a story after each chapter or major event and the subsequent analysis of the work at the conclusion by an adult interjects into the mind of the reader thoughts and interpretations that are not their own. Any epiphanies on the part of the teenager are crowded out, or, perhaps worse, they begin to second guess their opinions of the work and what they loved about it.

Fiction is fiction. Poems, plays, and stories are made up. They may mirror events taking place in real life and have characters with traits that the reader finds familiar, and they may even impart knowledge, but ultimately they are products of the imagination of the writer. Even if the author hopes that readers will feel a certain way after reading their story or poem, there is no correct interpretation of fiction. There are no facts that need to be stored in a child’s memory nor a right or wrong answer regarding what a teenager should get from the work.

The worst thing that could happen from the requirement to analyze a work according to the rubric of a third person: the child’s love of reading is crushed, it disappears. Imaginative literature is meant to be enjoyed and that enjoyment diminishes if a reader is told how to interpret and feel about the work.

Certainly, for a story or play to be enjoyed, the reader must understand what they are reading. And there are ways to ensure that a young person is reading deeply and getting the most out of the work without the imposition of analysis guided by a third person—whether teacher, parent, tutor. 

First of all, the parent ought to wait until the child has finished reading to probe for understanding. Joy is zapped, and coherence may be interrupted, when questions are inserted throughout the reading process. Once the young person has come to the conclusion of the work of fiction and has had time to ruminate over what they have read, the teacher can ask non-intrusive questions—those that don’t impose a particular view—to ensure the child has read deeply. 

They may ask: Did you like the story? Why or why not? How did it conclude? What were the main incidents that led to the conclusion? Did the author provide you with enough detail so that you could live in the world they created? Do you want to live there? Would you read the story again?

These questions leave room for the young person to tell their teacher all about the story through their own lens. The questions guide the child to passionately recount what they loved about the story or why they hated it and would never read it again. They don’t have a correct answer, but rather act as a probe to assess how deeply a child has read and how much they understood. They are not meant to zap joy, they are meant to draw it out.