Summary Of I Know Why The Caged Bird Cannot Read

In classrooms students are raised to become educated, to become good people, and to overall become a strong, integrated part of society. In our english classes more specifically, we are taught to be these people through the morals that are instilled in the pieces we study. In Francine Prose’s essay on education, I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read she inaccurately claims that the importance our teachers set upon those values squanders any appreciation built for the quality of an author’s diction and syntax.
In english, much more than any other class, students are given invaluable opportunities to not only go over an author’s word choice, but to actually use their work as a way to build on their own values. In my eighth grade english class
we read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, a short novel about a man named Charlie with a dangerously low IQ who through surgery becomes a genius before slipping back down to his initial mental capacity. I personally became substantially invested in that book, and the lessons that went along with it were just as- if not more- interesting. During that week the topic of conversation was mainly focused on whether ignorance is or is not really bliss. We ended up coming to the conclusion that ignorance could be considered bliss based on how much happier Charlie was when he wasn’t aware of all his struggles, but people should still aim for higher because it might not be as serine but Charlie was finally living in the real world and forming relationships that he never had before. Now Prose would presume that this type of teaching knocked out our respect for the setup of the novel and the real beauty in its syntax, but we still just as easily caught a healthy balance between the two building a well rounded understanding of the novel. In most all of my english classes both strategies for going over text have been recognized for their respective importances. Neither one, diction nor the values the author presents behind it can stand without the other, both work in an intermingling partnership to help better build the understanding of the other. If you kick out one in favor of the next then you lose a huge chunk of its support. There is no room for skepticality when it comes to such amalgamated strategies.
To really think it is wrong to teach kids values every chance you get, a person has to have a certain more factual view on the entire school system as a whole.
Prose refers to that system as “...a process intended to produce a product,” the product being the children. Products, not kids who need most of all to be taught how to act as decent people, but commodities moving down an assembly line of classrooms. If Prose thinks we should focus on diction then we should really focus on how she refers to kids as “it” when she says, “What sort of product is being produced by the current system? How does it change when certain factors are added to, or removed from, our literature curriculum?” Now at this point Prose is not focused on helping make lessons to build people, she’s pushing lesson plans that will insure we are stuffed with every single generic chemical that she claims should be written in on our nutrition facts label. That factory, assembly line mindset definitely gives more insight into how and why Prose is skeptical about using english to teach values. But if students are in fact going to be seen as products then we should be seen as some red bottom louboutins, our soles painted with the morals we’ve learned, every pair hand sewn by their teachers, independent works of art that do in fact require a good bit of emotion put into their assembly. Not generic factory made
crocs.
Prose’s hesitation with value based lessons on literature is a dreadful attempt at forming an excuse for why kids don’t like to read, possibly even her attempt to set blame for her own two sons lack of interest in literature. The morals obtained from english lessons are far from the weak point in a student’s education, they are the moments that continuously catch attention giving kids the push needed to slice through the language and structure provided in order to appreciate the diction and syntax that was so strategically used to build the values that we come across in the text.