Did anyone else read the New York Times article this past Sunday about the Jonesboro, Georgia teacher who is letting her students pick the books they read in class – within certain limits – instead of assigning the standardized classics?

It’s an article that gets to the heart of many recent conversations about the importance of writing and asks the question, “What is more important: instilling kids with a habit of reading or giving them a solid foundation of classic literature before sending them off into the world?”

An apt question on the eve of a festival o’ books.

I can imagine that there have been endless discussions and seminars by far-smarter educators tackling this very topics, so I do not pretend to be able to argue the educator’s point of view.  But I can craft the argument of a one-time student, who was always told he wasn’t “living up to his potential”.

I’m loving the classics.  And I say so in the clear-and-present-tense, since it’s only now that I’m exploring their true meaning and complexities.  As a student, I read and ignored countless classics dumped on my desk by a more-than-willing English teacher, hoping to relay his/her passion to a group of religiously uninterested students.  But in the past 5 years or so, without the threat of a test or book report just over the horizon, I am finally feel free to enjoy classic novels like Moby Dick, The Merchant of Venice, and All the King’s Men and take from them whatever I please.

These are books that I can only begin to understand at 30.  At 14, 16, 18 years-old, at most I could conceive the plot and, if I was lucky, some of the motivations of a character.  But goodness knows I couldn’t understand the lessons of  “the Boss” and his initial quest for fairness and ultimate corruption or the complexities of Ahab’s obsession with a whale.  Metaphors are so silly to a literal teenager.  So, perhaps letting students choose the Twilight series over Jane Eyre was the answer for me, right?

To employ my favorite word: Maybe.

But I have trouble casting aside the looming retort.  The one that makes the old argument that teaching the classics can instill both a love of them and provide a valuable foundation of life lessons early on.  And these arguments often emerge in the silence of a busy day after finding something entirely profound in the depths of a novel, like Penn Warren’s passing description of a parent’s “blood-lust” or Melville’s ethereal description of a pod of whales just below the water’s surface.  I feel eons behind my former fellow student who somehow could ignore the generational and ageless siren calls of our youth and take in and process these small miracles.

Perhaps it is such a tough question to answer because it’s basis goes well beyond classroom instruction.  Looking more broadly the true question seems to be “Should classic literature serve as a foundation for learning about the world or should our life’s foundation serve to instruct our reading of the classics?”

It’s a complex two-way street that defies resolution in the classroom and beyond.