Op-Ed Columns

No more lessons, no more books, No more teacher's dirty looks

At least that is the way it used to be.

Not now.

Want clear evidence that education today is more rigorous than it was back in that rose-tinted time that we with failing memories call the "good-old days"?

"Summer Reading Lists."

Right.

I never had one.

I don't know anyone above the age of 30 who had one.

And yet today, at a time when pundits and politicians are decrying the decline of American education, my teenage son has one.

For the third year.

When my boy left elementary school, he was told that before he entered the sacred halls of Jacksonville High School in the fall he had to put away the childish things of summer and read The Giver.

Believing I might still be in the running for Father of the Year, I resolved to read it with him.

I did.

Dang good book. (Not exactly what he wanted to do on his summer "vacation," but I could tell it didn't hurt much.)

So when he entered JHS he was prepared, book-wise, and could concentrate instead on how to open his locker.

He made it through 7th grade, and as he and his friends gleefully prepared for summer, the English teachers crushed their hopes and dreams with the news that in the weeks to come they had to read Rumble Fish.

Another dandy.

(Now let me pause and say that it is unlikely that my son will ever tell his children stories of how he used to love to curl up with a good book — this summer, he's into "Guitar Hero." I gotta admit that if I had video games back when I was a boy, I likely would have done the same. But since electricity hadn't been invented yet ...)

So when he finished the 8th grade, we waited to find out what book we would read the next summer.

Book?

Books! With an "S". Plural!

Yessir, home he came with a list that included The Contender (another new one to me), Fahrenheit 451 (a longtime favorite of mine) and Dr. Faustus.

Faustus!

I was in college before I took that on.

But if he could do it, I could do it. We got them read.

So you can understand that as this summer approached and as family plans materialized, it was with some trepidation that I waited for him to come home with "the list."

Home he came.

It is the best yet.

And most demanding.

The Scarlet Letter. If you want a 10th grader to know something about love and loss and betrayal and the consequences of your actions — not to mention what can happen when people forget to remember that only he who is without sin should step up and cast the first stone — this is a good place to start.

Animal Farm. Satire and irony are hard concepts for the young to grasp, but he needs to get them grasped. "Major," the Middle White boar and the other beasts of barn and barnyard will show the way. He had also better get ready for his father's lecture on totalitarianism and why this book was banned in the Soviet Union.

And why banned books are often the best books.

Such as the third on the list — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Banned on publication by the Concord, Mass., library as "the veriest trash . . . more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people," my boy needs to read it to realize that folks who think they know the difference between "the veriest trash" and good literature usually don't. He also needs to read Huck so he can see that banning the book because it used a word that is demeaning today but was common then denied young readers the opportunity to see someone their own age struggle with a great moral dilemma and left them never knowing Jim, one of our culture's noblest creations.

There are a lot of laughs in it, too.

Ernest Hemingway (whom I hope is on a future reading list) once said that "all modern American literature comes from ... Huckleberry Finn," and who am I to disagree? H.L. Mencken, another far smarter than I, predicted that "it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it, over and over again."

So here we are, father and son, reading Huck first. He out of "solemn duty." Me for "the honest love of it."

But likely as not, I wouldn't have read it the first time if some teacher hadn't assigned it.

Though not in the summer.

Because like I said, when I was stuck between 9th and 10th grade, we didn't have reading lists.

Now I wish we had.

And one day, he will be glad he did.

I betcha.

I hope.