Books discussed: 1984, Brave New World, A Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games trilogy, A Separate Peace. Spoiler-free
I don’t actually think we are living in a dystopian future. At least, not completely. But if I’m honest, analyzing that is neither the point of this article nor this blog. Dystopian literature has seen a boom in popularity in recent years, particularly in the YA genre. Books like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, released in 2008, the same year as the biggest economic downturn in contemporary teens’ memory, that feature teenaged protagonists who are seemingly the only ones able to see through the indoctrination of a dystopic future are popular among adolescents for… well, obvious reasons. In a post-truth world, it is not only adults that feel the brunt of the political climate. Children, and teenagers especially, are also affected, also warrent their own reactions. While I do think that The Hunger Games is a worthwhile book to be read in school perhaps at a younger age (it is on the docket of my local elementary school) I don’t think it is best suited to high school.
The pros of The Hunger Games is that it is enjoyable; the cons are that I don’t think there is as much to analyze in the writing as might be appropriate for a high school English literature class. I don’t think it quite confronts the dystopic future enough, nor portrays enough nuance to be of real sustenance for close and careful analysis.
If you think about the dystopian literature you read in high school, the first book that comes to mind is likely George Orwell’s 1984. 2017 saw Penguin Random House reporting a 9,500% increase in sales of the novel, so its relevance in the modern age remains, if not indisputable, tangible. I do think 1984 is an important book to read because it does prepare you to grapple with a political climate that is scarily similar to the content of the book. But like I said above, I don’t think we’re living in Airstrip One, completely; we still do have freedom of speech, and surveillance is… not as extreme. I think the problem with only reading 1984 in high school is that it provides students with only one path to relate modern day nuggets of dystopia to the literature. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, if all you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. I personally think the modern political climate is much too complex and nuanced to simply come at it with a hammer and call it a day. I think if we want to equip high schoolers with methods of analyzing contemporary politics through the lens of literature we need to provide an alternative.
Enter Brave New World. To be fair, it is a book that does make it onto the high school curriculum often enough, but nowhere near as often as 1984 (an anecdotal fact; I tried to find data on this but couldn’t; please do correct me if I’m wrong). However, I don’t think many students will have gone through the experience of reading the two back to back. There is a very good reason for this: reading two dystopian future novels in a row can get a bit “same-y”. However, I was a massive nerd in high school (which I guess is not surprising considering I’m running a blog about the high school reading curriculum) and I got the chance to do this because while I was reading 1984 in class, my book club was reading Brave New World. (On a side note: I cannot recommend book clubs enough, especially for high school students. They help you gain important critical skills while having a really good time discussing books you get to pick with your friends. Granted, as stated above, big nerd talking.)
I think literature needs to be more interactive for high school students. Often times, when we’re in younger stages of schooling, there is a bigger push for creative interaction with the books we’re reading. From my personal experience we have:
- We read the Flat Stanley series in second grade and the teacher then made a life-size version of Flat Stanley, which we all got to color in.
- My sixth grade teacher had us do book projects rather than book reports, meaning you had to make a presentation of the book in any format you chose. I made a miniature replica of the Chocolate Room from Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with real candy once and a Wonderland tourist guidebook after reading both Lewis Carroll’s Alice books another time.
I think the element of enjoyment when interacting with the books we are instructed to read in our teens is lost. Literature becomes serious, something to be read quietly, discussed in an orderly fashion, and dissected thouroughly through written pieces. Why do you think I liked book club so much? Because I could make interesting (or what I thought was interesting when I was a pretentious sixteen-year-old) commentary that got to the core themes of a novel or I could make a complaint like “this chapter was really boring” or I could say “I would totally date Finny from A Separate Peace“. Projects like fan fiction are a fantastic extension of reader engagement.
So how do these points all go together and why am I getting teens to read not one but two dystopian novels within the same month?
Because I think that would be a fantastic way of engaging teens in a classroom setting. 1984 and Brave New World are essentially opposite takes on dystopia: is it a hell that we pretend we’re happy with or are we coerced into so much superficial happiness that we don’t notice the hell? Is it a world of our computers spying on us or our avoiding the emotional impact of a tragedy by scrolling through memes? Which reality most closely resembles our own? Is it both?
While I think an adolescent might feel patronized in being told to make a miniature candy replica out of a scene from a children’s book, my experience from high school is that teens like to debate. Even the shyer kids, the quieter ones, if you got the right topic in class, would pipe up with a point. I think having access to two antithetical analyses of what defines dystopia gives them more tools to unravel their understanding of their own surroundings. (Note: I think that The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is also a brilliant, and equally relevant, piece of dystopian literature and there is no reason it shouldn’t also be on the high school curriculum. I simply don’t go into depth with it because I think it the other two novels mentioned are on opposite ends of a spectrum while The Handmaid’s Tale is,
as proclaimed by Atwood herself, inspired by Orwell and his writing, meaning it falls clearly on the 1984 side of analysis rather than being an opposite opinion to anything. It should still be read, possibly in the final year of high school, if anything as an analysis on the relationship between gender and dystopia. See: both books I mention are written by men and would provide an interesting contrast. Anyway this is a really long digression, but I wanted to make sure I gave Margaret Atwood justice.) It means an opportunity to teach trans-media concept-building with assignments like “bring in one news story that relates to either book and explain why.” It means many people can have different opinions and still show they are correct through textual and research-based backing.
More importantly, taking this approach relates the literature read in class to the real world, to a tangible truth. Generations today have access to information like none before them. Teens today can’t scroll through Facebook without getting at least a snippet of information about a current political event. As people who share literature with the generations that come after us, we have a choice. We can either simply proclaim that the themes universal and relevant, or we can give them the tools to prove that they are.
Books I Read in High School 