A while back I got inspired to start uploading some videos to Odysee, which I've been using as a great ad-free censorship-free YouTube replacement. A lot of people upload their videos there, and it has my preferred interface for the decentralized streaming sites. Add in the LBRY backbone that includes other content on the same system and it makes for a neat infrastructure to post on.

On Twitter, I saw a bunch of people complaining about the way that *The Great Gatsby* comes up in English class all the time and how it is a nigh-universal experience even though it's a book people rarely speak fondly of.

Some of this is, of course, malaise brought on by assigned reading, but there are also many considerations that lead to a book being included and merit is not necessarily the highest on the list.

Here's a link to the video:

https://odysee.com/@kwilleywrites:b/why-do-we-teach-the-great-gatsby:6

One thing I left out from the video and the script is on one of the early slides when I talk about how there's a shortage of other American literature to be used.

I don't really go into that, and it's clear that there's lots of great books written by Americans that could occupy that portion of an American literature curriculum.

But some considerations:

1. Curricula are looking for four years worth of books, and at least until recently there was a strong focus on reading several books every year.
2. Selection considerations are very esoteric.
3. A lot of good literature can't make its way into the classroom.

One consideration is that almost all of the educational literature you're going to see used has to go through a fairly lengthy approval process, and that's something that happens at a district/state level in the US. You might conceivably have small private schools or charter schools with more agency, but these can be more rigid in their curriculum due to social or legal pressures.

Many times the school board isn't interested in the educational needs at a classroom level but rather whatever hot-button issue is prevalent, meaning that a book that is fashionable worms its way into the classroom or a board member's pet favorite will jump to the front of the line. I remember reading *What Color is Your Parachute* in an English class in high school. While I'm sure it's a fine book on its own merits (I remember literally nothing from it other than some visual design elements) and the standards have shifted toward including non-fiction books in English classes, these books are a lot easier to get through than fiction because they typically lack any sort of naughty words or other risk factors that might lead to parent outcry.

Not that districts care about parents and students over their own agendas. Though districts make the news more when they ban a book for stupid reasons than when they add a book for stupid reasons, I'm sure you can do a quick search of the internet and find lots of parents scratching their heads over books included in their local curriculum.

In fiction, though, there's a few major issues that come up. Genre fiction in particular (e.g. sci-fi and fantasy) has a certain stigma, so even a noteworthy work that has real literary value can be difficult to integrate. There is often a focus on classics, but the definition of "classic" for the school board and parents pushing books is often down to nostalgia rather than any discerning taste in books.

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# The Script

*I figured I'd post the script here because why not?*

One of the classic parts of American high school literature class is The Great Gatsby. But what makes Gatsby so great, and why is the book taught so frequently?

I don’t think the novel itself is the best focus for this. Although I have experience teaching English, the only time I’ve encountered The Great Gatsby from the teacher’s side was as an intern in my undergrad program, and I can speak from experience that it’s not as universally taught as it’s made out to be.

Rather, I’d like to focus on what gets books into the classroom more generally. While there’s probably a history behind how Fitzgerald’s work made its way into the educational canon, I don’t trust any account of how it got there–nor can I find one in particular that gives any detail.

History

For those curious, Fitzgerald’s work became popular in the 40s and early 50s, following his death in 1940. From what I can see, it sounds like The Great Gatsby first entered the classroom around this time, and it’s probably there.

The Most Ludicrous Argument

One argument that gets made in favor of The Great Gatsby is that it has a compelling title that lures people in. While that may be true, it’s worth noting that this doesn’t seem to be a selection criteria for any book in schools (*cough Jude the Obscure cough*). Just because the name might seem particularly interesting to some young readers and several versions of the cover are fantastic examples of design, we shouldn’t presume that anything done in an English classroom is done to appeal to young learners.

That’s not to say that there’s no effort made here, but the stereotype that teachers choose something to teach regardless of students’ interests and then market it after the fact holds true.

The marketing to get something into the classroom always starts with educators and administrators, and parents and students are rarely going to be the people who push to get something into a classroom and have that succeed. From a cursory glance at the history of The Great Gatsby making its way into the classroom, it seems critics discussing it as a candidate for the Great American Novel title really made that happen rather than popular acclaim.

The Conventional Take

The conventional take is that The Great Gatsby is the great American novel or one of the great American novels and therefore has earned its place in the classroom, especially American Lit classrooms.

This is an assertion that goes unquestioned, and I’d argue that The Great Gatsby probably isn’t at the top of the canon of American literature even though I have a softness for it myself.

With that said, one defense for this is that it is certainly in the top echelon of American novels from a certain academic literature perspective for qualities that I’ll talk about shortly, but I believe that the Great American Novel label is pure consensus and not really a deeply held belief.

The Conventional Takes

The arguments for The Great Gatsby, when it needs to be defended, come across in three forms:

1. The Great Gatsby is broadly accessible to modern audiences.
2. The Great Gatsby features loads and loads of literary devices that are ripe for study.
3. The Great Gatsby showcases the American Dream.

I’ll break each of these down alone.

Accessibility

One of the arguments often made in favor of the novel is that it sits at an appropriate reading level for early high-school students, which means that you can use it with basically any high-school class.

It’s also written in colloquial English accessible to modern audiences, which puts it in a distinct category from some earlier American literature which has more regional and antiquated use.

Counter-Points to Accessibility

One thing about accessibility is that it’s something that you can put on paper to make guesstimates, but the actual likelihood that accessibility improves an assigned text’s chance of being read is low if the text itself is dry.

The Great Gatsby is essentially a “wistful pining” novel, which means it’s dry and flavorless. Fitzgerald spices it up with an air of mystique and a couple salacious love affairs, but the narrator is at some remove from the protagonist which makes it even more painful to sit and watch people mope about trying to figure out how to get in each others’ pants.

Also, the argument of “oh, we chose this book because it’s accessible to our students” is almost certainly an justification after the fact. Not only was that not something considered as much back when the novel first made its way into classrooms, but it’s not much of a limiting factor. There are thousands of top-tier novels that are accessible to high-school students, and a lot of them are actually more accessible and engaging than The Great Gatsby.

Literary Devices

Another argument is that The Great Gatsby is a tremendous book to teach literary devices with, especially its use of symbolism, and that there’s value to be had in it as an analytical stepping stone to greater works.

One thing to remember is that Fitzgerald’s work got popular with critics before it made its way into the classroom. Scholarly critics love this sort of thing, and they’re very good at finding it.

Of all the arguments commonly made in defense of The Great Gatsby, this would be one that I would accept most readily. It’s sort of a weak defense because this is another area where any sufficiently high-quality novel would do, but I think it’s actually on to something because I would rank the novel very high on the list of novels to use when making an assessment like that.

Some of this might be my own bias, because The Great Gatsby was probably the book that put me on the path to teach English, so even though I don’t consider it a highly enjoyable book I’m very glad I read it.

The American Dream

One of the central arguments made in favor of the novel in the classroom is that it showcases the American Dream, since Gatsby’s a climber and achieves great success despite his humble beginnings.

Now, I think it’s worth noting that most people who make this argument also readily admit that Gatsby doesn’t quite make it to the point of getting everything he wants, but there are elements in the text that suggest that he is supposed to be seen as admirable because of this quality.

In fact, they argue, the book is more of an indictment of the sort of elitist “old money” philosophy that you’d see coming over from European culture and an acceptance of the populist American ideal where people make themselves into what they want to be.

This is probably the central debate surrounding the novel in many ways, and it’s also one of the arguments made for applying the Great American Novel label to the text.

Countering The American Dream

I’ll get into more detail about the arguments that say that Gatsby isn’t an example of the American Dream being lived out later, since they tie into some of the cynical reasons to believe that The Great Gatsby is in the classroom, but my central argument would be this:

The number of schools that really want to have a conversation about the American Dream is pretty slim. While that may be one of the reasons that the novel made it into the classroom decades ago, I don’t think that in an era where Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is the preeminent text in the history classrooms of America that argument still exists.

Now, that’s not to say that this is never the case, but it’s certainly not something that I’d expect to see used as an honest justification for including the book in mainstream classrooms.

How the Sausage is Made

One of the major factors in the adoption of any book comes down to curriculum and marketing. While I can’t say for sure that this is how The Great Gatsby came to be in classrooms because it happened decades ago, what you’d expect to see is this:

A lot of people got interested in it all at once.
A few districts adopt it and put it into circulation.
We have the books and we don’t want to buy new ones.

This may sound cynical, but I prefer the designation as a realist. Bearing in mind that movements like Common Core were pushes toward centralization, schools only really change curriculum when a teacher gets permission to experiment–which is rare in some places–or when the district needs to adapt.

Since The Great Gatsby is such a staple, there are loads of standards-compliant canned lessons available, and I’m sure some of them are even freely available. In addition to having the liability coverage of pointing to scripted content when parents complain about student outcomes, this means that The Great Gatsby and many other staple books in the classroom are the cheapest option for schools.

The Cynic’s Argument

A cynic’s argument is that The Great Gatsby has made its way into educational canon because many or most educators are left-wing subversives. There’s a case for this, especially with the state of teacher’s colleges, and I’ll air some of those arguments here even though I don’t find them convincing myself.

The Great Gatsby certainly does not paint the American Dream as something that is obtainable and maybe not even something that’s desirable. Nick’s value-free and aspiration-free life leaves him unscathed, while climbers like Gatsby are prone to being metaphorically struck by lightning for trying to escape their sphere. 

The rationale behind this argument is that there’s an attempt to instil complacency by bringing the book into classrooms, which seems at odds with every way I’ve ever seen it taught–Gatsby, for his flaws, almost always winds up presented as a good guy. Other failings lead to his demise than his belief in moving up to the top.

One take could be that since Nick claims to be a value-free observer there’s a deliberate attempt to attack the underpinnings of American society by dismantling values. Don’t forget that Gatsby is ultimately attempting to seduce someone else’s wife! Some of this is contradicted by the framing of events and descriptions and the fact that Nick probably makes some judgments against people during the course of the novel.

However, the best argument against this is that it seems like The Great Gatsby has been in the education system longer than the postmodern idea of attacking value judgments has been. It’s also a thoroughly modernist work, and while there’s some cynicism at its core it still has clear protagonist and antagonist figures with idealism presented as a virtue that carries risk.

A concession I must make if I’m being honest is that I have seen The Great Gatsby brought up in postmodern contexts to make basically the case that the cynics try to make here, though not in the classroom environment. I suspect that it was something that the people presenting Gatsby as a postmodern figure made up during angsty undergrad years, but many of those angsty undergrads enter the system as teachers so it’s a hypothesis that seems rather valid.

Lesser Made Arguments

Sometimes The Great Gatsby is taught in conjunction with American history of the 1920s, though the chances of that happening in any given classroom are rare. This is in line with the modern doctrine that interdisciplinary links should be made as often as possible, but shouldn’t be presumed to be a major factor unless it is presented in an argument.

One thing that I think would be a valid reason to put The Great Gatsby in a classroom is that it is a rare example of a tragic novel, with Gatsby ultimately coming to a humble end and nobody really winding up better off than they were when the story started.

Now, the problem is that while I’m sure you can find people discussing Gatsby as a tragic hero on the internet, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this argument made within an academic context.

Some of the things that often accompany tragic figures are absent. First, Gatsby is essentially mysterious and morally questionable as a figure. This means that unlike the traditional tragic hero, we don’t really see him go from noble to low, though there’s a good case to be made if you ignore his humble upbringings and just focus on the span of events depicted in the novel.

Also, in a traditional tragedy–think Shakespeare–audiences typically get a clear lesson about what went wrong and where we’re going. With a protagonist who expresses a hesitancy to judge–despite being unreliable about this–there’s no presentation of a life lesson akin to what we’d get in a Shakespearean epilogue with Marc Antony eulogizing Brutus.

So Why is the Great Gatsby in Classrooms?

I don’t know for sure, and I’ve given you basically all the nuanced takes I have.

If I had to go with my gut feeling, it’s this rather cynical take.

The Great Gatsby is just about difficult enough to serve as a filter. If you can read it and get something from it, you can take some degree of pretentious intellectualism from it. If you don’t, it will put you off the path of literary studies and push you toward a more practical career, essentially disabusing you of the notion that there’s anything transcendental in literature and turning your future education into the sort of ego-killing drivel that’s intended to put you on the path to a nine-to-five. It’s good literature, but not great literature, so the chance that people get dangerous ideas from it is practically nil, in the same way that we read The Catcher in the Rye with students to give an entry-level dose of postmodern nihilism.

I don’t think this has always been the case, but as a work in which American modernism is assessed through a critical light the contemporary postmodern agenda in education synergizes very well with the novel.

Combine that with institutional inertia and the fact that The Great Gatsby has been in the curriculum for a long time and it’s cheap to have in the classroom. Nobody challenges the novel’s use because it’s relatively well-remembered in a vague nostalgic fashion along with its chops as a contender for the Great American Novel title.

Some of that is because of a stigma against genre literature and the difficulty in selecting contemporary texts for curricula because of potential objections to content. Add those together and you have a recipe for books to be taught long after their initial role in the curriculum has been replaced by other goals or other books.

And I’m not even against the teaching of The Great Gatsby. I’d never say I love it, but it’s certainly a worthy subject of study. It’s just not being used to its full potential, probably never has been, and likely never will be.

But it is one of those situations that calls the modern educational system into question.