English Teacher: Old Classics Are Out of Tune

RIDGEFIELD, Wash. -- John Foley figures he has pretty much maxed out on explaining to black mothers why it's OK to call a black man the N-word, as long as it's in a novel that is considered a classic.

For years, English teachers have been explaining away the obvious racism in Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." And, for years, the book that perhaps best explains Americans' genetic predilection for hitting the road, only to find themselves, stays near the top of many high school reading lists.

However, with a black man about to be inaugurated as president, Foley wonders if Huck Finn ought to be sent back down the river. Why not replace it with a more modern, less discomfiting, novel documenting the epic journey of discovery?

"The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms," said Foley, who teaches at a largely white suburban high school near Portland, Ore. "Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States, and novels that use the N-word repeatedly need to go," Foley wrote in a guest column this month for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Year after year, he said, he patiently explains to his students that Jim, a black man, is actually the hero of Huck Finn, and that Huck comes to see the error of his ways and commits to helping Jim escape slavery. But a growing number of students find the book dull and plodding, and many never get past the demeaning word Huck uses to refer to his friend.

"This is particularly true, of course, of African-American students," Foley wrote. "With few exceptions, all the black students in my classes over the years have appeared very uncomfortable when I've discussed these matters at the beginning of the unit. And I never want to rationalize Huck Finn to an angry African-American mom again as long as I breathe."

The 48-year-old instructor also thinks "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee's classic about racial inequity in the Deep South, and John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" should be removed from the curriculum for similar reasons.

Foley had wanted to talk to the staff at Ridgefield High School about his proposal, but after the column appeared, it was as if a stink bomb had landed in a crowded room.

"Obama would be horrified if he knew this censorship was done in his name," Trudy Sundberg, a retired teacher of American literature from Oak Harbor, wrote in the barrage of letters and e-mails the newspaper received in response.

"What an amazingly stupid teacher this is," another reader said. "There is nothing in American literature that more succinctly and directly attacks racial prejudice than Mark Twain's `The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' This is another teacher anxious to pursue political correctness more than seek to understand what is involved in truly `reading' a book."

Foley said he was most bemused by critics who insisted he was being satirical, that he couldn't have seriously been attacking three novels that say more against human intolerance than almost any you could think of.

"Whenever you take a couple of shots at sacred cows, people assume it's satire," he said in an interview one recent afternoon at a local Starbucks as students streamed in for lattes and tea.

"It's just my experience teaching, especially Huck Finn. Every year, it seems to be a tougher sell to the kids. I have a lot of passion for Huck Finn, and my enthusiasm usually carries the book. But I have kids come up to me, very smart kids, who say: `Mr. Foley, I hate this book.'" They hate not only the difficult dialogue, he said, but what students -- usually white ones -- object to as "demeaning stereotypes."

"Our new president is this very intelligent, highly articulate guy, and the literature we're foisting on our children typically depicts black men as ignorant, inarticulate, uneducated. And the contrast just jumped out at me," he said.

"Right now," Foley said, "we're reading `To Kill a Mockingbird.' A very sophisticated book. The character Tom Robinson is very noble, but again he's uneducated, inarticulate. I was just thinking, for students here in Washington anyway, wouldn't (David Guterson's) `Snow Falling on Cedars' be just as valuable?"

That book documents the internment of Japanese-American residents of the San Juan Islands during World War II, and the efforts of a few islanders to defend their neighbors against an onslaught of bigotry, jealousy and false accusations.

Likewise, Foley would replace Huck Finn with that epic tale of two old cowboys' last great cattle drive, Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove." And "Of Mice and Men" could be replaced, he said, by Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novel "Going After Cacciato."

"Like George and Lennie in Steinbeck's novel, Cacciato dreams of peace and a better world. And the Vietnam War is a more recent -- and arguably more painful -- era in American history than the Depression, and one of more interest to teens," Foley argued in his column.

Foley's objections are hardly new. All three books he would like to replace have been targets for criticism over the years. Some schools have gone so far as to take them off reading lists and library shelves.

The anti-censorship forces have countered that books such as these contain so many civilized values in direct opposition to racism that they deserve to be read and taught as the classics they are.

That seems to be the prevailing view in Ridgefield.

"I have a 14-year-old son, and he's read `To Kill a Mockingbird,'" said Julie Olson, the school board chairwoman. "He clearly understands the concepts involved, and it wasn't really a stretch for him to get it."

Foley said he doesn't want to ban the books. He wants kids to read them in the hope they'll learn to love them as much as he does.

They just shouldn't be the backbone of the American literature curriculum in 2009, he said, at a time when getting kids to read anything at all is a struggle.

"You have to remember, it's hard to sell kids these days on books. I write young adult novels, and sometimes I wonder, why bother?

"You're writing for three girls who like to read."