What Is Your Own Position on the Purposes of Teaching Literature?

“Teaching literature is important, even in today’s modern world.”

Most people agree that schools should focus on teaching their students skills that would be beneficial in the future when they are already working. Yes, skills are important because it is what will help you make a living. You will not be earning big bucks by knowing the story of Romeo and Juliet (of course, unless you are an English instructor) or will you get promoted by reciting several haikus and poems. And in today’s modern technology, it is more likely that you watch the story when it comes on film instead of reading it on a book (well, almost all stories nowadays gets adapted to television or film in a short while). These reasons, as well as others that I may not have mentioned, are the reasons that many would say that teaching of literature is useless nowadays.

Back in the old days, people who write literature are revered as great people; people who contribute a lot to their society and generation. People who write poems, plays, proses, etc. are looked up by the common people. Their works are treasured up to this very moment.

Things change, though. Compared to a very skilled, for example, engineer or doctor, a poet is nothing these days. What good are your poems if it could not save a life or build houses? This is not a comparison of professions or a written work to degrade a line of work or another, but most people would agree to this. And because of this reasoning, people often neglect the importance of teaching literature.

Literature is any written work; which includes but not limited to poems, prose, plays, novels, haikus, ballad, and biography. Literature is an art, which uses letters and symbols instead of pictures and colors. And for me, I think that literature is a more beautiful form of art compared to a painting, because it is your imagination that is working with literature. Literature is also a way of communication; a communication between the writer and the reader....