When walking into most English classrooms, one can always find the class’s mandatory readings in a row positioned on the dry-erase board. The English department carefully curates these texts, each serving a different educational purpose.
But feelings towards these works differ significantly amongst the student body. Works such as Eleanor Burgess’s The Niceties and Ta-Nehesi Coates’s Between the World and Me result in mixed emotions from Sixth Form students due to their polarizing cultural and political commentary.
“We know that some texts are tricky, that they’re sort of problematic in one aspect or another, and often [an English colleague] defends it and says ‘Yes, it is problematic, but it’s so great at doing this, this, and this,’” English Department Chair Mr. Thomas Stambaugh said.
The diverse cast of voices displayed in the English Department’s core texts aligns with the school’s mission statement, “The Haverford School community prepares boys for life by developing men of character, intellect, and compassion.”
“The English department has been tasked with trying to teach critical thinking to boys at a very late stage in their lives when they’ve already formed their own opinions that are reinforced by media echo chambers.”
Chase Nelson ’24
Sixth Former Chase Nelson feels the diversity featured among the selection is due to other objectives.
“The English department has been tasked with trying to teach critical thinking to boys at a very late stage in their lives when they’ve already formed their own opinions that are reinforced by media echo chambers that are easily accessible and that oftentimes misinform,” Nelson said.
“There are a lot of factors involved [in text selection],” Mr. Stambaugh said. “We want students to read from lots of different kinds of genres—some novels, some plays, some graphic novels, some poetry, some short stories. We want students to read some old things and some classic things, but we also want them to read very contemporary things and then things in between.”
The school’s principles of community state, ”[Our boys] Respect and value people of different genders, backgrounds, and opinions.”
It is no surprise that students also have feelings regarding books featuring voices the curriculum excludes.
Fifth Form Head of the Gender and Sexuality Alliance Aaron Bonaparte said, “We have a pretty diverse curriculum, except gay people. There’s talk about masculinity, but when you talk about masculinity and the topic of being perceived as gay comes up, you can brush over that in class discussions. We need to have a book about gay people.”
“Negative realistic topics make for good conversation, but I don’t want to feel sad all the time when I’m reading a book.”
Cameron Ward ’25
Critiques of the curriculum are not just aimed at a lack of diversity.
“I want to add a fictional book,” Fifth Former Cameron Ward said, “a book about someone fighting a dragon. This may be me because I’m tired of reading these sad, horrible life experiences venting about the black struggle, not that it’s bad. I love a good black struggle. I just need a palette cleanser. I need to feel happy about a book. These books often just make me say, ‘yikes.’ Yes, negative realistic topics make for good conversation, but I don’t want to feel sad all the time when I’m reading a book.”
“There’s no way we can please four-hundred-fifty students, let alone nine English teachers in the upper school. You just can’t make everybody happy all the time,” Mr. Stambaugh said. “You just try to do the best you can, and we feel the texts that we have right now are meeting our goals, but we will continue to change things—a little bit here, a little bit there—along the way.”
