So much of our curriculums have been watered down, but we lose more than homework; we lose a part of our history that makes up humanity.
Hundreds of years ago an author sat down and wrote words that resonate so deeply that they still exist today. However, our school is removing books that have been teaching us about ourselves for a long time. That needs to stop.
In the past few years I have felt angry about our curriculums being “dumbed down” in a way. In the past, students would read the “Diary of Anne Frank,” “Of Mice and Men,” and additional stories. However, since the time when my older siblings graduated from our school and the time I started (which was only a few years ago), many books have disappeared from our curriculum.
I remember entering classrooms, excited to read classics and learn more about the reasons and history behind them, only to discover that books had vanished from the syllabus. As a self-proclaimed bookworm, this is a true tragedy to me.
Instead of lowering the standards for students to be able to meet our district’s requirements, we should be increasing our efforts to assist those students so all of us are able to meet the high standards that are placed on us in universities and jobs later on.
I often feel frustrated in English classes because I feel that I am not being challenged enough. Even in honors classes, which are supposed to be a higher level and faster paced, I feel like I could be learning more.
This has a lot to do with the books that we read. While I loved reading “The Crucible” and “The Great Gatsby” I wanted to read more classics and discuss more nuanced topics that we could really dive into, so I could reap the rewards that are laid hidden in the words.
Why do we care about these books? Or, even better, why do we still talk about them? What makes these seemingly insignificant letters inked on page after page one of the most important lenses on human history?
Literature is important for a reason. It’s more than sitting down and glancing at the words and understanding the basic story- it’s about understanding who we are as humans.
School’s don’t want us to read “Romeo and Juliet” just to fill our time until the bell rings, they want us to reflect on the themes of love, hate, and the consequences of impulsive decisions. Teachers are not paid to come and babysit a group of students who are almost adults, they are paid to teach us about the power of greed and corruption in “Animal Farm.”
Authors put into words emotions and situations that we sometimes cannot describe. They want us to hold a mirror to our society and learn about ourselves through their words.
These stories transport us to the past in ways nothing else can. They help us learn about history, prejudice, culture, the complexities of human life, and so many more things that make up today’s society and who we are as people.
When schools decide to remove these books from the curriculum, students lose an opportunity to learn and discuss these pieces of literature. Which, for some people, may be the only opportunity to read and learn about these books. For many students, when else will they have the unique opportunity to sit in a classroom with their peers to read, learn, and discuss?
Students can complain all they want about having to read “Julius Caesar” or struggling chapter to chapter reading “Wuthering Heights” but studying these books will help prepare them for their life ahead.
Thinking critically about these books and topics while in high school prepares us for when we have hours and hours of reading ahead of us about dense subjects in college. Reading these stories teaches us how to think and form our own opinions. In the end, reading these books helps make you a better student and overall, a better person.
Ultimately, these stories are not for us to gripe about, but for us to reflect on one of the only things that we have in common with people of the past: our emotions. Books are emotional, and when schools decide to stop teaching many of these books, we begin to lose some of the most important parts of humanity. Literature is the best record that we have of the past, and it helps us with our present and future lives.
If a book was written hundreds of years ago there must have been something special about it, otherwise nobody would care today. Our classes should be helping us discover what makes these books meaningful, instead of watering down our curriculums.
When schools remove influential books from our curriculum, it does more harm than good. Especially in the long run. We should not be letting this become normal, or else our students will fail to see the importance of these seemingly insignificant words, with hidden lessons about themselves. Even though these stories were written in the past, we still can learn about the present through their words.