The text from the young teacher comes in on Saturday. They want to start reading Lord of the Flies or maybe Hatchet with their intermediate ESL class. They’ve looked into purchasing copies, but it’s expensive. Maybe they could just print the pdf of the book, chapter by chapter? How do I buy books for kids?

I am quietly stunned. I sit with this for a few minutes, trying to decide where to begin my response. Finally, I point out that printing the entire book for 20 students is still expensive – we just transfer the expense to the school. Then, I suggest that the school has books – in both the ESL and the English departments. Then I pause.

In my next series of messages, I say that I find LOTF and Hatchet to be at very different levels. I casually note that neither of them has any female characters. (To be fair, in Hatchet Brian at least has a mother; no women exist in LOTF – just British schoolboys as far as the mind can fathom.) I wait again before adding that LOTF makes some “weird” arguments about the importance of British schooling for a civilized society.

I do not say that LOTF has a peculiarly western view of humans as inherently selfish and vaguely awful. I do not say that when a group of school boys were actually marooned on an island, they did not descend into chaos or madness. Instead, they worked together, supporting one another through hardships. I do not say that perhaps students from around the world will not be intrigued by stories in which western boys fight to dominate nature. Instead, I offer to brainstorm some other options and take the teacher on a tour of our tiny book room. They say yes.

Later that day, I read an article in the New York Times about The Great Gatsby turning 100. I love Gatsby and I love teaching it, though I haven’t taught it in a while. I have my reasons – its casual racism, its core critique of the American Dream in an era when that is all too easy – though I would probably teach it again if I could shoehorn it in somewhere. Still, I’m struck when the article reminds me that, upon the novel’s publication, “Reviewers shrugged. Sales were sluggish. The novel and its author slid toward obscurity.” I disagree with the early reviewers, but I find it interesting that the novel was not immediately seen as “classic” or even very good.

LOTF was similarly poorly received at first, and I can reel off a list of other books English teachers love that had rough starts – from Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights to Animal Farm and The Handmaid’s Tale with plenty of others in between. I’d love to point this out to those who wander through English offices saying things like, “there’s a reason they’re classics.” 

In fact, someone said exactly that in our English office not too long ago. My most effective approach to these platitudes is a lot of listening seasoned with a well-timed word or two, so I let the teacher talk. Eventually, they pointed out that part of the reason that it’s hard to find new “classics” is because books need to be “just right” to work in a classroom – not too long, not too spicy, not too hard, not too dull. They need approachable literary devices and characters that are relatable. 

By this metric, Gatsby, LOTF and even To Kill a Mockingbird are classics in no small part because of their length and lack of curse words. They have a plot and characters we can remember, so, assuming we ignore the racism and sexism and similarity in their world views, we can’t really go wrong.

I point out that “not too hard and not too long” means that our list has to keep changing. When I started teaching, The Scarlet Letter was on every high school bookshelf; now, the language makes it extremely challenging, so it is taught much less frequently. When I was in high school, everyone read Dickens. Now, his work is just too long and wordy. What has replaced these “classics”? I toy with the idea that The Outsiders is on the list; in the 70s and early 80s, it was just a good book to read. What about The Handmaid’s Tale? Atwood is Canadian, but we don’t teach her novel too often – too political or too long? I don’t know. Why has Their Eyes Were Watching God not made it into rotation in Canada? I have no idea.

I love to say that when we read everything, we can read anything, but many of our students are not reading everything or even very much at all. As a result, the books schools choose to offer take on outsized importance; each book is expected to do the work of ten: catch student interest, teach something worthwhile, be a paragon of “good” writing, reflect what our society can/ should be and more. Sadly – or maybe happily – no one book can be everything we want because good stories are, by design, problematic. To really use literature as a teaching tool, we need lots of it. 

I don’t know how to make that happen, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t start by teaching students who are learning English in Canada in 2025 about shipwrecked British schoolboys in the 1940s. I’m going to suggest we start somewhere else.