In the article “Dark Themes in Books Get Students Reading”, Kathleen Kennedy Manzo reports that Chanelle Brown, and English student in a Chicago high school, is glad her teacher has started implementing YA texts that contain themes that students relate to more readily. But the switch has caused controversy with “traditionalists” who are concerned that “it will dumb down the curriculum”, and with parents, who sometimes object to the content of the books.
While these books contain some dark themes– “Many young-adult novels, for example, feature violent scenes, topics such as death and abuse, or protagonists who purposely hurt themselves.”– these themes exist in traditional literature as well, it’s just that in a more modernized context, the students can actually understand what’s going on.
I think it’s crazy that in a world where TV and cinema (with as much dark content as they contain) are so popular, parents would be so concerned with their kids finding out about these themes in an educational environment.
Despite this new explosion of availability of such YA literature, there is still no noticeable trend in shifting away from the traditional approach to literature in secondary education. “‘I would be very pleased if it was a trend, but I don’t see it,” said Jeffrey D. Wilhelm,…’The classical, canonical literature, which I personally love, in fact was written for very sophisticated adult readers, … but the attitude [among English teachers and traditionalists] is, ‘”Let’s kick their butts with something they can’t possibly understand.”’ ” Wilhelm goes on to say that he found the general consensus to be that school reading “sucks” and students “hate it.”
This, along with the effective pairing of traditional and YA fiction, and the fact that Arthur Applebee has found that “the trend toward incorporating more diverse and recent works has generally had a positive impact on the curriculum” seems like ample weight to throw the trend towards more accessible, useful, current YA lit (while keeping some figures of that canon, such as Shakespeare of course) but I think it’s going to take two or three hundred researchers to do studies that agree with these ideas before schools will even begin to change en mass.
