All books are not created equal. Some have the power to transport us to unexplored worlds and allow usÖat least for as long as the book lastsÖto become other than who we are. Others only attempt to offer chicken soup for teenage or middle-age souls. While there is no question that it is easier to persuade students to pick up the second kind of novel, a critical reading of classical literature results in a deep literacy that I believe is an essential skill for anyone who wants to attempt to make sense of the world.

All over this country curriculum experts are recommending that teachers focus on what they are calling workplace documents, influenced no doubt by a business community fed up with employees who need intensive and therefore expensive training before they can be put to work. Business leaders want schools to guarantee that graduates have workplace literacy, and in fact most state standards recommend that students learn to read with comprehension instruction manuals, consumer documents, and business memos. Standardized assessment instruments increasingly reflect these standards, and as assessment increasingly drives instruction, I worry there will soon be little time left in the curriculum for literature.

The cost of such a shift would be catastrophic. Elite private and suburban schools are not likely to replace The Scarlet Letter with workplace documents. The sons and daughters of the privileged will continue to read The Odyssey, Beowulf, The Song of Roland and The Epic of Gilgamesh while urban public school kids are handed instruction manuals and consumer reports. Democracy isn‰t supposed to work this way.

I believe Odysseus‰ adventures offer all teenage readers a useful map for internal navigation. If informational texts come to replace the classics in our curriculum, high schools will graduate young people who have never seen Circe turn men into swine, who have never sailed past Scylla and Charybdis, and who have no knowledge of the dangers lurking in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. If they never read the classics, students will truly be at sea.

One of the worst mistakes a teacher can make when introducing a classic is to take the cod liver oil approach. "Drink this. It tastes bad, but it‰s good for you. You‰ll thank me later." Abandon all hope of instructional success if you pursue this course. First, the concept of suffering now for later pleasure is lost on most teenagers. And second, most kids I know are very good at just saying, "No."

I don‰t teach the classics to help kids get into good colleges and secure high-paying positions in business and industry. I teach classics like Toni Morrison‰s Beloved and Maxine Hong Kingston‰s Woman Warrior because I believe these enduring stories provide nourishment for growing minds. Long after they have forgotten the teenage romances and science fiction they gobbled up, Sethe and No Name Woman will still inhabit a place in their minds.

In his essay "The Ethics of Teaching Literature," Wayne Booth asserts that it is through stories that students learn to confront ethical dilemmas. "Our most powerful ethical influencesÖexcept perhaps for parental modelingÖare stories: it is in responding to, taking in, becoming transported by story that character is formed, for good or ill." Teaching the classics isn‰t easy, but it is most certainly important work.