Literature is no place for sex and violence: Dual Credit and the questionable future of literature.

"Literature is no place for sex and violence."

So I was told by a dual credit high-school student taking an English course at my institution. The student was outraged by the presence of foul language, sexual content, and violence in our common text, John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War.

My first response to the student was tongue in cheek: "Shakespeare much?"

My internal response was much more serious.

At my institution, as is the case at hundreds of community colleges across the country, many high school students are enrolling in college classes while they're still in high school. Ostensibly, dual credit is a win-win situation. High-school students get some college credits on the cheap. The community college gets increased enrollment and an increased funding line.

This is all good stuff.

However, there are some issues with dual credit and literature. These students are high school students. Many of them range between 15 and 17. They're minors attending classes designed for young adults.

The college English classroom is very different from the high school English class. At least I hope it is. It should be. The college English classroom is about ideas, some of which might be disturbing to students and the parents of the students.

What is literature? One working definition is what Northrup Frye said, "It's equipment for living." It's often about the way people think and what they do.

My student, who cited Pride and Prejudice and Ben Hur as shining examples  of "proper literature," has a pretty old-fashioned view of what literature is. Literature is about the human condition. And the human condition in the last 200 years has been anything but simple. We've lived through a period that has seen the creation of human rights, but also genocide. We've seen the development of both the nation state and the weakening of it through globalization. We've seen sexuality morph into all sorts of things:  LGBT, BDSM, transgender, female liberation, MGTOW, MRAS, and polyamory. We've seen corporations take on the power of gods. It's been a wild two centuries.

And literature has been on a wild ride as well: Dickens, Thackery, Pynchon, Orwell, Atwood, Burgess. These people all have held up mirrors to the culture. Sometimes what they show us isn't very flattering.

The problem with dual credit is the problem with freshmen, squared. These dual credit students (and, often, their parents) think that literature is like a nice table cloth. It decorates the table and makes one feel sophisticated.

Literature is nothing of the sort. I went into literature because I like new ideas. I like writers who show us how we really are.

The problem with dual credit is that there's pushback, a kind of Victorianism at work.  Don't offend us. Don't challenge our world views. Don't say bad things.

Eek, get my smelling salts out.

Dual credit can help both students and institutions. But it can also push to make college more like high school. And that's a mistake, especially in the state I live in, New Mexico. The high schools here are god awful. That's not just an opinion. That's a numerical reality. New Mexico ranked last in the nation in terms of k-12 education. I think I know why. But that's a subject for another post.