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A passing discussion of the Lord of the Flies discourse (such as it is) is reminding me that a lot of people's feelings about it are highly influenced by how it was taught to them when they had to read it:
Because it reads very differently if it was taught as "Look at how this very specific subgroup of people act" vs. "Behold! The inherent inhumanity of Man!"
And I think a lot of mandatory reading in my pre-college education would've been more interesting if it had been taught as "Look at what's going on with these people dealing with their specific cultural influences, in these situations."
...but then maybe we kids would have noticed that it was a constant parade of "white boy struggles with ingrained toxic masculinity" stories, instead of wondering why "Behold! The inhumanity of Man to Man!" was always so annoying.
Like... "To Start A Fire" is a /brilliant/ Jack London story, but it makes more sense when you realize it's about one dude's arrogance instead of reading it as An Example Of Man Vs. Nature.
"The Red Badge of Courage" was /baffling/ to me in high school, but now I can think about it in terms of the valorization of specific forms of violence as proof of being a man in that culture. Not a /human/, but a /man/.
"The Yearling" infuriates me to this day, but if I'd been able to read it while thinking about class issues and economic pressures and gendered parenting & planning approaches--!
Hell, a good class-and-gender-aware reading of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" would've done a lot to help me enjoy that book.
Anyway, in conclusion, teach basic theory to students in high school and don't teach the mandatory All Sad White Dudes All The Time canon as being about Universal Human Experiences, if you must stick to the canon for budget reasons, thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
(Postscript: the one mandatory novel from high school that I remember liking was "The Outsiders", which was /also/ about white boys grappling with ingrained toxic masculinity. Why it read so differently from the others, I leave as an exercise for the reader.)
(Second postscript: I realize that teachers are /highly/ constrained by "What books do we have forty copies of already?" and "These 14-year-olds are not going to listen to me explain feminist theory" issues. But they can /probably/ at least reframe a little.)
