Chapter 18: Addressing Social Issues in the English Classroom

The English classroom is an ideal venue for teaching students how to ponder, analyze, discuss, debate, and read and write about social issues. This is true for numerous reasons. First, at the core of any Language Arts classroom is reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and thus any content that moves students to think, read, discuss, wrestle with and debate ideas is ideal. Second, an abundance of literature (short stories, novels, essays, and, in certain cases, poetry) deals with, in one way or another, a host of social issues. Here one need only think of some of the most impressive fictional works of the 19th and 20th centuries: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (racism); Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (war); Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (war); John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (disenfranchisement, poverty, the Depression); George Orwell’s 1984 (totalitarianism); Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (racism); Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (racial prejudice); Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (war); and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (slavery). Not to be overlooked are such remarkable essays as Henry David Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience”; Frederick Douglass’ “A Narrative on the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave”; and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Finally, there are numerous books of nonfiction that are thought-provoking and germane to the study of social issues: Richard Wright’s Black Boy (racism, prejudice, and discrimination); John Hersey’s Hiroshima (atomic bombings and war); Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (prejudice, racism, segregation, discrimination); James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (racism, prejudice, and discrimination); Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (degradation of the environment); Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth” (the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear war); and Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary (ethnic conflict, war). Ultimately, a large body of powerful literary works (fiction and nonfiction) is readily available for students and teachers to plumb a wide array of social issues, from prejudice, discrimination and racism to war and genocide and from capital punishment to nuclear power.