School life

Daily Mail has writer Patricia Nicol recommend books featuring school life.

The literary education establishment I would least like to send my children to is the purportedly Christian Lowood School in Jane Eyre, presided over by the miserly Mr Brocklehurst.

There, Jane undergoes real hardship. But she also makes her first friend, the tragically consumptive Helen Burns, and finds her kindly mentor, Maria Temple.

Yorkshire Live shares 'Eight things you'll only know if you're from Bradford' such as

5. The basics of a Salts Mill school trip

You could probably lead a bang average school trip to Salts Mill blindfolded; this is what they wore, that's a dangerous machine (you'd be sent crawling underneath it), packed lunch, Titus Salt bought these houses, gift shop, coach.

Other places with which you'll have an uncultured familiarity include the Brontë Parsonage and Malham Cove. (Ben Abbiss)

The Stanford Daily wonders whether 'we still need to read and teach the classics'.

In a Google search for “classic literature,” however, most books listed are written by white, male authors such as Herman Melville, Charles Dickens and William Faulkner. These names are familiar to almost anyone who has taken a high school English course in which the “classics” are often staples. A couple white, female authors are among them — Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, for example —  and very few BIPOC authors. This lack of diversity brings up the question: In today’s society, what should the place and value of the classics be? 

From Wang’s and Gao’s perspectives, the classics still need to be taught and read because of their content, even though their authors are not a very diverse group. 

“Texts like ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Jane Eyre’ have enduring value and contain deep insights into the human experience,” Wang said. 

“Some literature that falls into the ‘classics’ category is, simply put, good literature that students can learn from,” Gao said. (Joelle Chien)

Mini Bhati posts about Jane Eyre. AnneBrontë.org looks into the possible influence of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley on Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.