The Outsiders Impact On Society

We’ve all had family at some point or another, whether you believe that to be true or not is completely subjective, but family is not just bound by blood or genetics, race or creed. Sometimes family is a matter of acceptance and chemistry or the duality or culmination of many different things. Humans have always wanted to feel wanted, to feel as though they belong, like their existence means something to someone and that they matter, a perennial philosophy. To show us who we are as people, to make us feel as though we are normal and acceptable, to imbue us with values and teach us of the human condition in a real setting, a believable time with similarities to draw between ourselves and the characters. Que the reason I believe that The Outsiders,
Pages and pages emerged to become a keystone movement that would affect much more than her status as an author, but also how school systems taught their students. For too long there were stagnant waters that students were forced to swim in order to be taught literature. The books were hundreds of years old, and the ones that weren’t, completely not relatable to the younger and even most of the older generations. For what did books written have hundreds of years ago have to really captivate younger minds? To them it was nothing but meandering around complex ideas that had no correlation to their daily grind. “The Outsiders helped change the way school’s taught literature, the emergence of an authentic, relatable novel helped teachers reach students who had grown bored with the use of traditional textbooks in English classes.” (Parr, 2015) The text had shaped a new scene, a new way to teach and new source material to draw attention in, while teaching writing styles, techniques and actually holding the attention of readers. Molding non-readers, or those thought to be, to avid readers. The same knowledge was being endowed into the students, but enjoyment and readability had been restored and it was an invigorating
There have always been regimes, countries, gangs, groups, parties and there always will be. This novel allows you to see yourself and to really relate to the characters in that format, to feel the way the characters feel, to understand the reasons they do the things they do. What makes that important is the insight into the human condition and the psychological understandings of why gangs and these groups come to be. This novel nails the relatable experiences to the placard of reality and the hardships we go through every day. Whether you were brought up in public schools or private, or even as long as you were not born yesterday, there were always cliques and groups, and most of us were not always a part of the ones we wanted to be in. In this way, the novel sheds light on the social statuses and the feeling of being ostracized as well as a periscope to the giving end as well. At one point the protagonist meets a girl, which is considered an upper class and wealthy lady. She is a cheerleader and the girlfriend of a member of the “Socs”, a quote that reverberates an important moral of this point is “It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.” (Hinton, 1967, p 40).