The biggest encounter of high/low culture that I can think of was in my AP Literature course that I took in high school. Our teacher had us read sonnets by Shakespeare and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. We were then required to write our own poetry in conjunction with the poems that we read in class. He praised students who made reference to classical figures from Greek and Roman Mythology and related back to what we had read in The Iliad & The Odyssey. He disparaged songwriting as a form of poetry and discouraged students from writing in a style that was more similar or freeform to songwriting (despite the fact that his classroom was decorated with posters from U2 and the Beatles.) We were also required to do rhetorical analysis on a novel for this course and were provided with a list of 8 books that we could work from. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac were three that I can remember from this list. Our teacher refused to allow students to select novels that might have been of more personal interest to them, because he felt that we needed to understand the “classics” and to read important works of literature. I ended up reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf for the project, but felt disinterested, as did many of the students, because of my lack of agency in bringing in my own media and interests into the course. I think this is a good example, because we could have done rhetorical analysis on any novel theoretically, but we were restricted by what our teacher and AP Language standards had identified as important literature from the canon.
In my primary education years, I remember feeling more annoyed by literature restrictions than robbed of a chance to expand on my own ideas, but your point illustrates just how much ennui many students feel towards required reading.
Dyson seems to insinuate that for sound pedagogy, it’s necessary to create boundaries and standards to reign in what might otherwise be a chaotic learning environment. Part of me understands that school serves a purpose to educate to a specific curriculum, but there’s a part of me that wonders if it’s just because teaching Shakespeare and Woolf has just become the thing to do. Does no one feel like reinventing the wheel where literature standards are concerned?