Off Blog Post: the Green Light and the New York Times
21st February 2008
This Sunday the NYT ran an interesting and unintentionally revealling story about the role of literature in the education of high school students, particularly the “brights” at Boston Latin. Teachers at that prestige Boston high school have their students read, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald in their English classes. The teachers there have an unusual take on that classic novel and encourage their students to see the novel through this perspective. Let me quote key paragraphs.
Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated two years ago from China, has never seen anything like the huge mansions that loomed over Long Island Sound in glamorous 1920s New York. But F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to her.
She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said.
“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”
Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.
“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love — or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.”
I love American novels and have read and reread “The Great Gatsby” several times across my life. It in no way can be read an inspirational tale of aspiration for clever kids. It describes the failure of 1920s brights - Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan - and details exactly how aspiration is the source of their failure as people and as partners. And, if these characters had any insight into themselves, they would have seen their futility and its source making the novel a great tragedy in the classic sense of the term. Instead Gatsby and the rest lack any self understanding or awareness, learn nothing from their own lives, and fail in ignorance and pain.
Yet, the writer for the Times, Sara Rimer, and the instructors at Boston Latin see Gatsby as an educational exemplar for striving young talent and recommend it as a light by which they can plan their own achievements. Gatsby is an inspiration for aspiration for these misreaders. It astonishes me that the New York Times can publish this perspective on the cultural wonder that is “The Great Gatsby.” Both the Times writer and her editors appear to me to be in that embarassing position of holding yourself in great public esteem while behaving in the most provincial way all without any self awareness. It’s rather like preaching to the congregation on modesty with an unzipped fly.