High school students are studying the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift in English class, writes Liza Libes on the Hechinger Report. Students should read literature -- the English literary canon they might otherwise never discover -- to wrestle with complex ideas and develop their communication skills, she argues.
As a college consultant, Libes teaches writing to high school students. "Many of my students, who will soon be sending in applications to America’s elite educational institutions, can no longer string a coherent sentence together without using AI tools such as ChatGPT or Grammarly," she writes.
Libes urges students "to challenge themselves intellectually," she writes. She recommends Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment instead of Taylor Swift Tik-Toks. Some thank her for it -- later.
We discussed Beatles' lyrics in Literary Club in high school, but that was just for fun. And we compared E.A. Robinson's poem, Richard Cory, to Simon & Garfunkel's Richard Cory.
We didn't read easy books in class. What would be the point of that?
High school teachers are using audiobooks to expose students to literature, reports Elizabeth Heubeck in Education Week. "Reading Homer’s The Odyssey has long been a mainstay of high school English literature curricula. And yet it’s hard to imagine today’s typical high school student independently reading all 24 books (akin to chapters) of the ancient Greek epic poem, given that 15- to 19-year-olds read on average less than 15 minutes a day, according to recent statistics."
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