Victoria’s High School Senior English Curriculum Is The Best Curriculum
Even the dumb kids will wanna start reading.
Maus is about as harrowing as you could expect from a tale featuring cute cartoon creatures. Written by holocaust survivor Art Spiegelman, the graphic novel tells the story of that particularly grisly period in history, using mice as a stand in for Jews and cats for Nazis.
As of next year, high school students in Victoria will be able to study Maus as part of their senior English curriculum. It’s a significant choice, in that it’s the first graphic novel to be included as a VCE text.
Following the announcement, academic Catherine Beavis published an in-depth piece about the teaching of graphic novels as literature, talking about the rich and complex narratives of Maus, and the uniqueness of the graphic novel form.
The comments section of the piece inspired a civilised debate about the relative literary merits of graphic novels. Kidding! The comments section is your basic internet shit-show, with each side loudly shouting opinions at the-other.
Based on reactions to the piece, the two sides of the case can be summed up as follows…
THE CASE AGAINST GRAPHIC NOVELS:
– Graphic novels are just glorified comic books, you guys.
– Books with pictures in them are dumb, and only dumb babies like them.
– Kids these days lack the imagination and attention span for books.
– Education standards are declining.
– We’re all going to hell in a hand-basket!
THE CASE FOR GRAPHIC NOVELS:
– Graphic novels can be just as literary as your precious ‘literature’.
– The themes and issues they deal with are way hefty.
– Graphic novels can have just as much to say as Shakespeare.
– They can be big and thick — sometimes up to 400 pages! Suck on that!
– I bet you haven’t even read one, anyway, you big dumb snob.
If you leave the bickering aside, the inclusion of a text like Maus on a high school curriculum represents a fundamental shift in the way that graphic novels are perceived. It used to be that graphic novels were the kinds of texts you discovered for yourself, at bookstores after school, or in the collection of a cool friend. They had an air of the forbidden, precisely because they weren’t a part of the accepted and established literary canon.
GTA IV: It’ll happen one day.
For all its deep and heavy themes, it’s hard to imagine a teacher forcing a lurid and violent text like Alan Moore’s Watchmen on an unsuspecting class. That would be like ordering kids to play Grand Theft Auto IV for extra credit — it just feels bizarre and a bit wrong. Of course, one generation’s dangerous, transgressive art form is the next generation’s safe, established order.
Who knows? Now that graphic novels have come to represent that established order, future generations of high school students can start to resent them like they already do musty old books.