William Gets a New Hairdo

Shakespeare is changing with the times

I can remember many nights spent at the desk in my room staring blankly at text from the Odyssey. Apparently, I hoped that eventually I would find some sort of hidden clue as to what the heck was going on. By the time I was finished with the novel, excuse me, epic poem, I felt like I could pretty much read Greek. But, to be honest, at first I felt like I really didn't get too much from that ancient poem besides a migraine headache. I certainly was not the only one though, my peers constantly complained about reading books that were far too old to be interesting. So, why is it that schools across the country have been having high schoolers read the Odyssey, the Catcher in the Rye, and Romeo and Juliet for at least the past half century?

I would not say that I dislike the above mentioned books, not at all. But, I find it interesting that it is so consistent across the country for people to read the same thing. I would argue that our country has changed immensely over the past fifty years or so, yet we continue to read the same books in school as students did in the Stone Age (no exaggeration).

My feeling is that though the language we use nowadays is way different from the time of Romeo and Juliet. We can still understand the feeling of what it would be like to be in love, but never be able to be together because of family rivalries. Or in the case of the Catcher in the Rye, to be a teenager who feels lost and alone with no one to console him, but his younger sister Pheobe.

I occasionally even look back and reread passages from my freshman and sophomore English classes that I find moving: "The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you" (Salinger). I think that high school students can often relate to Holden in his moments of despair or even Odysseus feeling like you have to steer away from the entrancing call of the Sirens. I really do not think it is so crazy that we keep reading the same books in school because they are really NOT the same and they never will be.