Summary Of I Know Why The Caged Bird Cannot Read

In classrooms students are raised to become educated, to become good people, and to overall become a strong, integrated part of society. In our english classes more specifically, we are taught to be these people through the morals that are instilled in the pieces we study. In Francine Prose’s essay on education, I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read she inaccurately claims that the importance our teachers set upon those values squanders any appreciation built for the quality of an author’s diction and syntax.
In english, much more than any other class, students are given invaluable opportunities to not only go over an author’s word choice, but to actually use their work as a way to build on their own values. In my eighth grade english class
Prose refers to that system as “...a process intended to produce a product,” the product being the children. Products, not kids who need most of all to be taught how to act as decent people, but commodities moving down an assembly line of classrooms. If Prose thinks we should focus on diction then we should really focus on how she refers to kids as “it” when she says, “What sort of product is being produced by the current system? How does it change when certain factors are added to, or removed from, our literature curriculum?” Now at this point Prose is not focused on helping make lessons to build people, she’s pushing lesson plans that will insure we are stuffed with every single generic chemical that she claims should be written in on our nutrition facts label. That factory, assembly line mindset definitely gives more insight into how and why Prose is skeptical about using english to teach values. But if students are in fact going to be seen as products then we should be seen as some red bottom louboutins, our soles painted with the morals we’ve learned, every pair hand sewn by their teachers, independent works of art that do in fact require a good bit of emotion put into their assembly. Not generic factory made