What's gained, and lost, with a new, balanced curriculum?
I've been feeling a little sorry for my favorite dead white males these days. A few weeks ago, I was walking along in New York's Central Park next to two young college students. One said to the other, ''I have to stay home and write a paper on Nathaniel Hawthorne."
The other said, ''Who's Nathaniel Hawthorne?"
Go into any high school today and you might, if you ask, also hear, ''Who's William Faulkner?" ''Who's Vladimir Nabokov?" ''Who's Joseph Conrad?" And maybe even, ''Who's Ernest Hemingway?"
My feelings about this radical change in the canon since my days as a high school student in the 1970s are decidedly mixed. I have taught in my local high schools for three years now, and so I have some basis for suggesting that students today forgo a profound education into the great writers in exchange for a healthier self-identity.
And that may not be such a terrible thing.
In 1969, my seventh-grade English teacher, Mr. Higgins, made us read James Joyce's ''Araby" and ''The Dead." We read D. H. Lawrence's ''The Rocking-Horse Winner" and Faulkner's ''A Rose for Emily." Eighth grade brought Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New World," George Orwell's ''1984," and nightmares. By junior year, I had read Nabokov's ''Lolita," Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness," ''The Waste Land," by T. S. Eliot, Albert Camus's ''The Stranger" and ''The Plague," and Faulkner's ''The Sound and the Fury."
By senior year, I had read stories that brought me to the core of who we were as human beings and as disenfranchised individuals of the 20th century. I had caught the disease, too; I wanted to be a writer. There was just one problem, though: I thought that in order to be a writer, I had to be a man.
For years afterward, not only would I write like a man, but I would also believe that women writers were -- well, inferior. The fact that I was one myself left me undaunted. When Virginia Woolf said, ''Great minds are androgynous," I had taken that to mean that if I had a truly great mind, my mind would be male.
Indeed, so fully did I identify with male writers that it was only at the age of 30, finding myself at Harvard University, surrounded by talented women writers, that I realized: I had grown up twisted, like a tree that leans toward Saturn instead of the sun.
One hundred years ago, black intellectual and Massachusetts native W. E. B. Du Bois spoke about the ''double consciousness" that plagued black men in America: ''It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness," he writes in ''The Souls of Black Folks," ''this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
But Du Bois could just as easily have been speaking of any psychic suffering -- black, Jewish, female, Hispanic -- that becomes chronic when a marginalized individual cannot fully identify with his or her native background, especially if he (or she) is to succeed in the forum of public culture.
It is precisely to avoid rearing a new crop of such divided selves that we in today's high school English departments spend time creating a balanced curriculum. The ''must read" list now includes Sandra Cisneros's ''The House on Mango Street," Zora Neale Hurston's ''Their Eyes Were Watching God," Toni Morrison's ''Beloved," Richard Wright's ''Black Boy," and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s ''Letter From Birmingham Jail," alongside such dead white opuses as Charles Dickens's ''A Tale of Two Cities" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''The Great Gatsby."
Through these and other works, our students pass through an open door into the world, filled with the sense that who they are can take them anywhere. They know they don't have to be white, male, or Christian to have something valid to contribute. Their world is filled with the happy understanding that they can have an authentic and valid life no matter what their background. And that's fabulous.
But in my heart I grieve, and I worry: Never are these students' minds brought down into the suffering depths of Kafka's Joseph K., or Hesse's tortured Steppenwolf. They rarely think about death. Or the meaning of life. Or the tragic, existential relation between the two. (They do not know the definition of ''existential.")
What's more, the exposure of my students (most of whom are white) to the suffering of marginalized cultures has had, at least to some extent, the opposite effect of the one intended: When they see suffering, it's black suffering. It's Mexican-American suffering. It has little to do with them.
My students' minds are in the here and now. They celebrate life. They are far kinder to each other than we were. They have good will toward their fellow races. They can't fathom why anyone rejected desegregation. They think the white clergymen who opposed King's presence in Birmingham in the spring of 1963 were simply ''ridiculous."
Somehow, I can't help but feel that with all of this healthy self-identity, my students are missing a critical dimension of their education: the understanding of our universal struggle and despair, an understanding that should form a part of every generation's consciousness. To think that the human condition is hunky-dory is just, well -- wrongheaded. And dangerous.
But maybe that's just a crabby relic from the 20th century speaking.
Who's Hawthorne? Who's Faulkner? Who's Conrad? Three of the most important writers in the English language. So, if you're a parent reading this, go get the great books for your teenagers. Get the Brontë sisters. Henry James. Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Conrad. Faulkner. Camus. Jean-Paul Sartre. Woolf. James Baldwin. Toni Morrison. Nabokov.
Unplug your teenagers' computers. Show them a world they've never seen, a condition for which they may need inoculating: the human condition. As for those divided selves -- our children no longer need to become them. But they should learn to admire them -- those geniuses who, even today, can take us to the heart of darkness.
Jodi Daynard teaches high school English and creative writing at Emerson College. 
