I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read

Karl Nozadze

AP Language

Francine Prose published an essay for Harper’s in September 1999, discussing the way literature is taught today. In “I know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” she critiques the quality of required reading in American high schools. By listing the books read in these schools and analyzing how and why they are taught, Prose proves that students are often presented with either the wrong literature, or tougher works that are predigested and provide banal, simple-minded moral equations that do not develop an appreciation of literature, and instead produce masses of people who never read closely or ask questions and are easily swayed by today’s political and economic movement to sell products and ideas.

Students today either read things that require little thought, or when reading something more complicated, are told what to believe; this is often a simple-minded and banal moral message that ignores the true value of the literature at hand. “The question is no longer what the writer has written but rather who the writer is - specifically, what ethnic group or gender identity an author represents.” The forced attempt to reflect a diversity in culture or race through literature ignores what truly matters when picking books to be taught to high school students whose minds will be shaped by what they read. It ignores the “aesthetic beauty” of literature, declaring it to be too “frivolous” and “elitist” to mention. Prose talks of several specific examples where masterpieces are taught to high school students for the wrong reasons. One of them is the reasoning behind teaching Of Mice and Men: “‘to show how progress has been made in the treatment of the mentally disadvantaged, and that more better roles in society are being devised for them, and to establish that mentally retarded people are human beings with the same needs and feelings that everyone else experiences.’” This is far from why any educated adult would sit down to read this book. Prose mentions some disturbingly wrong activities that students are told to go through while reading books that pose a mucher deeper image than the one presented to them. The most surprising example is when the young readers of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl are told to fill a grocery bag with all the items they would take with them if they were to go into hiding. “A class attempting to interpret an Emily Dickinson poem can be divided into three groups, each group interpreting the poem based on one of Freud’s levels of consciousness.” As humorously as all of this can be, the subjects of these disastrous activities are young men and women whose adolescent minds are being shaped into what they will be for the rest of eternity. In order for the teachers to not have to chew any semi-difficult piece of writing and spit it down their students’ throats, the teachers would have to make “fresh choices, selections uncontaminated by trends, cliches, and received ideas.” Most seem to be either unwilling or incapable to do so. It could be interpreted from Prose’s article that these students would be better off reading on their own, and not having a misinformed adult explain to them some banal moral message that strips what they are reading of any true value.

They way literature is taught today produces masses of people who are incapable