Comic Books as mandatory reading for school

C

CrackDSkye

Legacy Member
Do you agree with this? Recently, one of the issues of a popular comic book series here in the Philippines has been included in the reading materials of our schools. The title of the comic book is Trese. It's about an occult detective solving mysteries related to Philippine folklore. I think that it has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that students not only appreciate the literature but the art as well. The disadvantage is that it's going to be a short read. What do you think?
 
I think when people hear the term "comic book" they think of a single issue of Spider-Man or something. There are a lot of graphic novels and otherwise long-form comic books that certainly count as literature. I've never read Trese, but it sounds like there's plenty there to derive lessons from. I think comic books as a whole are undervalued as literature since the quality of writing is often overlooked due to the format.
 
What? Sorry, but since when did comic books become literature? I wouldn't mind my kid reading a comic, but for a school to actually require students to read them, is to me nothing more but an attempt to get parents to spend on something they will profit from. Of course, I could be wrong, but there are plenty of books to choose from if they want their students to learn to appreciate literature or even the art! Honestly, schools these days can be so ridiculous!
 
I don't know a lot about the comic book in question, but I think it can be very appropriate at to introduce elements of pop culture into the curriculum of an English class. Education shouldn't be in the business of training children to 'appreciate the high brow.' Rather, the system should be promoting complex thought and understanding of the world around us. So, no, we shouldn't be throwing junk at these kids, but I imagine there can be a lot of important academic questions and discussions pertaining to many aspects of pop culture.

Again, I don't know the details about the comic book mentioned in the original post, but we can take something else that might seem questionable as an example. If an English teach or professor were to add Twilight to their 10th grade class curriculum, we would automatically be inclined to ask how they could possible justify this. Suppose though, that the teacher explains that the discussion points for the book will be centered around the implications of how idealized romance is in American culture, or the notion of imperfections being perfectly engineered, or even the contrast between contemporary American fiction and what are considered 'classics' (i.e. does less attention to craft hinder or liberate creativity? Can we attribute the success Stephanie Meyer's work to her laziness, the gullibility of the American general public, or a new-found sense of egalitarianism provided by mass media?), or ultimately, do mass media and marketing accurately portray reality? Do they portray an idealized reality? Do they portray sentiments of the general public via a cultural dollar vote, or the sentiments of a select view via underhanded persuasion? Also, as far as these characters; is Bella an anti-feminist archetype? Do Edward or Jacob put the same kind of pressure on men that sports illustrated girls put on women in our society? Is there really a dichotomy between Edward and Jacob, or is this struggle engineered to provide Bella with two equally appealing/unappealing versions of the same ideal?

So depending on how we are interpreting the material, there can be a lot of value in it. I think it's extremely important the kids learn to dissect even the things that seem normative and trivial so that they can better understand why they and the people around them believe what they believe. Reading Plato's Republic can only take you so far as you are willing to apply it critically to the world you live in.
 
Well, there are certainly comic books and graphic novels of a 'literary' nature, and that could I imagine, more than exhaust the bounds of an English class in their analysis. It is also true that given the kinds of tastes kids have these days, such a work might be more easily accessible to them, and they might take to it more keenly than some traditional literature. However, I don't like the idea of 'mandatory'. For me, whether or not this would work would depend a lot more on the teacher than the text, and I doubt every school will have a person capable of teaching this in the appropriate manner
 
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