It’s interesting that they have Their Eyes Were Watching God as a core book (which it deserves to be). That has as many or more uses of the n-word as Huckleberry Finn.
I had a very Anglo-heavy reading list in high school. American authors I read: Arthur Miller - The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, Edith Wharton - Age of Innocence, Moby Dick (that was an elective I chose) and a fair amount of mostly 20th c American poetry. I felt so uneducated that I read the entire two volume Norton Anthology of Amercian Literature the year I drove across the country. And I think that’s also when I read Huckleberry Finn.
I like one my kids’ school did which was to devote junior year reading American Lit more or less in tandem with APUSH.
@TomSrOfBoston my daughter read “Merchant of Venice” in her freshman seminar (Shakespeare’s Characters) at Middlebury this fall. Also read Midsummer’s Night Dream, Othello, and other “contextual readings”.
Well, I wonder if part of it is that high school students, even ones at high-end prep schools, are just not very good readers. Everything has to be written in easily accessible modern idiom (“No Fear Shakespeare”). Anything written prior to 1945 is too hard because of impoverished vocabularies and no understanding of idiom or allusion. Students don’t read or understand the 1611 KJV Bible, which used to be the foundation of English-language literature (one big joke in Huckleberry Finn is about the Doxology. How many high schoolers would “get” that now?).
@NJSue : What you say may be true, but it clearly isn’t the case at this particular school, based on the course description quoted above. A majority of the class is spent on 19th Century writers, some of them fairly difficult. (And the dialect in which Their Eyes Were Watching God is written isn’t a whole lot easier to understand than Shakespeare.)
Not really. By the virtue of being non-profit, they benefit from tax payers.
American expository writers I might put on the list: Ta-Nehisi Coates (I am sure he is going on lots of lists), Mark Twain himself (his dissection of James Fenimore Cooper’s style may be the best piece of literary criticism ever), Atul Gawande, Betty Friedan, James Mitchell, James Fallows, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson, Edmund Wilson.
Just now on ABC’s The View they discussed this HF issue. Whoopie Goldberg gave a good opposing view to this removal of HF by this school. The other panelists agreed with her. While The View is not a great arbiter of social mores it was interesting to watch.
My Quaker HS (not this one, different city) junior year English class began with Beowulf, meandered through Canterbury Tales, into Shakespeare and on into postwar English lit. And yes, we had to read in the original text (albeit with translation available in the case of Beowulf). Slow going 
My kids in public HS English, recently graduated, read those also.
Incidentally, my first exposure to Shakespeare in school was reading Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet in 7th grade. Found the former to be very difficult to understand while the latter was more understandable, but not fully appreciated due to being 11 at the time.
Students not reading or understanding the 1611 KJV Bible may also be a reflection of the far greater allowance for religious plurality within the last few decades compared with before when Christianity, especially the Protestant varieties were widely assumed in mainstream US society to be the “default” creed in many areas. It was a reason why there were still lawsuits being filed against public schools for this in the early '60s:
Back in high school I wrote a term paper on black poets like Leroi Jones and I grew up in the sticks.
Literature classes can’t cover everything and of course they are Anglo (meaning English) centric since we are an English speaking country (at least for now). We didn’t read Don Quixote, for example, which is acknowledged as one of the greats of literature. And we didn’t read Goethe or Dumas or Tolstoy. Usually the classes are called “English Literature” and/or “American literature”.
@cobrat, I believe that there is such a thing as an English-language literature that transcends borders, based of course on England but expanding to the Anglophone countries including the USA, India, Ireland, Canada, Nigeria,Jamaica etc. Colonialism is of course a very mixed “blessing” but it has led to a really wonderful deep repository of English-language literature based on 16th/17th/18th century British models. There is a field now, “Translatlantic literature,” which basically argues that there is no such thing as a distinctly different "American’ or “British” literature, but a tradition of Anglophone lit that spans many continents. I think it it is a mistake to cut our students off from this legacy. If it requires students to study icky retrograde stuff like the KJV Bible or dead white males like Milton, it’s a small price to pay for what you get.
I adored HF, thought it was laugh out loud funny. I don’t remember it being taught explicitly in a historical context, from some analytical perspective, but as an opportunity to learn from a ‘moment in time’ and enjoy it. Same with Shakespeare, which we also began in 7th (and I adored that, too.) We were allowed to appreciate these works and other classics for the stories they told.
My kids (also at a Quaker ms/hs) had tons of reading, classics and plenty of more diverse modern works. No apologies were delivered for the choices. (They read HF and the school performed Big River.) They were allowed to appreciate and adore. But kids today are exposed differently than we were. Yes, they’ve missed the legacy we were offered. But I understand why. And I’m not sure there is only one “right.” It takes a lifetime to put a dent in all the great works.
Yes it’s wrong to “ban.” But, at least for mine, they got a varied perspective, some depth, some breadth, and that glimpse into other times and worlds than their own. On my own, I put some of my own favorites in front of them.
For most students and K-12 English lit teachers, it isn’t so much a deliberate attempt to “cut off” students from KJV Bible or dead White males* as there being so many more well-regarded literary choices within the American/British/Anglophone literary world…even among the dead White males compared with what was well-regarded and/or approved by the academy decades ago.
And yes, more accessible in some ways though not always considering there seems to be more freshman undergrad and HS level English lit courses covering Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Beowulf in the original text judging by what I saw as an academic tutor during undergrad and post-college.
My impression is more the students and/or their instructors are overwhelmed with a much wider variety of choices in recent years than was the case 40 or more years ago.
- Still plenty of them being covered and read not only in English lit classes in K-12 and college, but also comparative lit and Area/Ethnic Studies courses in HS and college for comparison and coverage of literary, historical, and other themes. For instance, a classmate's undergrad East Asian lit course allowed him the option of comparing a piece of 18th Century Japanese literature with a Shakespearean Play(47 Ronin and Henry V) in order to explore themes related to loyalty, courage in standing up for one's cause even in the face of exceedingly long odds, etc.
I had this conversation with my kids’ hs librarian (a woman with highly impressive credentials of her own and a grand knowledge of kids.) Why weren’t they reading what we did, what I loved and was inspired by, at their ages? Basically, that was then and this is now, in the good sense. In retrospect, my kids were exposed to so very much more than I was, in breadth and depth. We can bemoan some books now missing from the curriculum, but this librarian made cobrat’s point: so many well-regarded literary choices, now that we expanded the horizons.
Makes sense to me.
Indeed.
I can imagine somebody making a rational decision that Huckleberry Finn doesn’t fit in some particular curriculum. But the presence of the n-word in the book shouldn’t have anything to do with such a decision.
HF has been called the first truly American novel. Mark Twain has had more impact on American culture than any of the contemporary authors mentioned. It’s not just the literature but the history of our literary tradition being taught. HF is fundamental to that understanding.
Twain was a racist, most clearly around Native Americans. See Injun Joe. He may be historically revealing, but is really not necessary for a literary education. There are many 19th C, US writers who are more interesting. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/indians/twain3.html