Reply to The Hobbit

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "The Hobbit"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I wonder if your kid is in school with mine.  He is also an 8th grader reading the hobbit.   They did animal farm either last semester or last spring.  I think they did a sci fi type disaster story too.  I think you are hyper focusing on what your impression is of McPS.  It’s called confirmation bias.

With that said, I wish they would read more books and more classical literature.  I read the red badge of courage n middle school.  They are old enough for Shakespeare.  [/quote]

I have never understood why of all books in the world, The Red Badge of Courage and Of Mice and Men were required reading in middle school.

However, I was super pleased when my kid was reading Lord of the Flies at school and came home and said that there was a discussion in class where the teacher said that the book is about the universal human experience and somebody raised their hand and asked how it could be about the universal human experience when there are only boys and men in it. Which is true about The Hobbit too.[/quote]
Good for the young man who pointed that out; I don’t think my boys would be that perceptive yet. That said, women/girls can also be a part of the universal human experience that happens to focus on males in this particular story. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that a boy cannot connect to a book with all or primarily female characters, nor is the reverse true.[/quote]

I'm the PP. It was a young woman who pointed that out. Yes, women and girls are part of the universal human experience. A book with only boys/men in it does not portray the universal human experience, any more than a book with only girls/women in it (except that nobody has ever claimed that a book with only girls/women in it does).[/quote]

Both of you are wrong, as is the girl who raised her hand. The teacher is correct because Lord of the Flies is an [i]allegory[/i] about how civilization organizes itself not to restrain violence and coercion, but to [i]direct[/i] it. It is a reflection on the human condition.

The idea that a girl can’t be expected to appreciate Lord of the Flies unless she sees a couple of girls  worshipping a severed pig’s head is both insulting to girls, and emblematic of the kind of brain dead literalism that can only be found on the internet. [/quote]

Well, you raise a really interesting point about whether the lessons of LOTF are really universal or whether they reflect an unstated male bias.  Would a group of girls stranded on the island behave similarly?  Many people would suggest no.  I’m not saying that a book has to have women in it.  But to say that a book that is written entirely around a very male worldview is “universal” displays a strong unconscious bias.  Fwiw, I wrote a 9th grade essay in the 80s complaining about being assigned The Iliad because I felt it was overly focused on a male worldview with no real female characters or female viewpoints.  I also remember lengthy debates in college about whether War and Peace had too much of a male bias (on that one, I disagreed—I love Tolstoy and think he has some surprisingly complex female characters—given what a famous mysogynist he was, I now wonder whether his wife, who transcribed all his novels, did some heavy editing there.)[/quote]

Again with the ridiculous literalism. Lord of the Flies is not a thought experiment. If a group of girls got stranded on an island and failed to paint their faces, murder each other, and hallucinate conversations with dead pigs, that would no more invalidate Golding’s message than if a group of boys got stranded on an island and failed to do all those things. It is a [u]metaphor[/u], not a prediction.. This is like complaining that Animal Farm can’t convey a message about people because all of the main characters are animals. [/quote]

You’re missing my point. Your point (or another PP’s) was that it was a metaphor or allegory for a universal human experience about power dynamics.  There is perhaps an argument that female groups have the same power dynamics, albeit expressed in different ways (see, e.g., mean girls; real housewives of anywhere).  Others would argue that seeing this as a universal tendency reflects an unconscious male bias.  I don’t have a problem with mixed sex classes being assigned to read LOTF anymore than I have a problem with them reading Emma or Beloved.  No book is really going to be universal in its themes because the human experience has too much variety.  Acknowledging that diversity is valuable, as is using literature as a vehicle to walk a mile in someone els shoes.  The only thing that objectionable is acting like an experience or viewpoint is necessarily universal, when it is not.  Even the things we commonly say are universal like “a parent’s love for their child” really are not universal, and have varied a lot over different cultures and times.[/quote]

You’ve clearly missed the point of the Lord of the Flies if you think it’s a commentary on the nature of boys. It’s not an attempt to represent their viewpoint. It’s not an attempt at realism. Emma is a book that is actually about men and women and romance, and a good one at that. Saying Lord of the Flies is about boys specifically is like saying Animal Farm is about animal behavior, or that Veggie Tales is about the food pyramid. All your gibberish about “universal” viewpoints is just an attempt to motte and Bailey your initial position by just defining “universal” so narrowly that literally no book could ever claim to be about a universal theme, because, like, people are different, y’know?[/quote]

Loved the Veggie Tales reference![/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics