It’s eighth grade, and gym class is about to start. A group of girls are walking into the locker room, unprepared for what they will be confronted with upon turning the corner: a copy of Touching Spirit Bear, sitting harmlessly upon the bench, left behind by some poor, ignorant seventh grader. The response is one of immediate anarchy. One girl starts literally crying, another yelps as if burned. One, the bravest of them all, silently picks it up and drops it in the trash can. 

Touching Spirit Bear (unpopular opinion) is not that bad of a book. Sure, it’s graphic; but the themes are strong and the writing fairly good. Why, then, did it garner such a dramatic— dare I say— overreaction? 

There’s a certain kind of resentment brewed in the walls of an English classroom that cannot be produced anywhere else. Genuinely good literature— The Outsiders, The Great Gatsby, Born a Crime— is somehow reduced to little more than a tediously acquired inside joke between those who suffered together through the grating analysis of glaringly obvious thematic concepts. Reading, meant to be a joy and an engaging way to learn, is turned into a chore; an idea summarized quite nicely in the creation of the world’s most heinous assignment: the reading log. I sincerely doubt more than one or two people filled those out truthfully.

It’s true that much of the fault lies in the students themselves. We as a unit have a rather impressive commitment to doing as little work as is humanly possible for the highest grade, but of course we can’t really be blamed for human nature— it’s been that way since the dawn of modern schooling. However, before SparkNoting the next chapter of the assigned reading, it’s important to remember why we are studying literature in the first place— it is an incredibly valuable part of any well-rounded education, one which broadens our perspectives in a way little else can. Very seldom will you find someone who could tell you firsthand what it was like to grow up in apartheid South Africa, or be in the trenches of the western front during World War II; and certainly not in high school. It’s easy to dismiss as busywork, or to gripe that we’ll never realistically have to know how a yam crop can affect marital relations, but literature lends itself to a deeper, more contextualized understanding of life and a more sophisticated sense of empathy— what is a book, if not a unique human experience distilled into words and steeped in emotion? Reading is an opportunity to experience the world through the eyes of someone else— as George R. R. Martin famously put it, “a reader can live a thousand lives before he dies.”