If all books containing racist and sexist attitudes were eliminated from our reading lists, we would have very little left to read that was written before 1975. Homer? Nope. Dante? Nope. Shakespeare? Nope. Melville? Twain? Faulkner? Hemingway? Fitzgerald? All consigned to the rubbish bin.

Furthermore: the study of literature is NOT primarily an entertaining approach to history and sociology. Imagination and storytelling are essential to human culture. Students need to learn the stories that have shaped human civilization; they need to learn how stories work, so that they become adept at analyzing narratives of all sorts. They need to learn how language and imagination combine in poetry to raise questions that would be difficult to raise in a narrative. They need to learn the value, and the delights, of literary art.

A flawed narrative like ‘Lord of the Flies’, well taught, can be an outstanding way to learn many of these things. It can also help students become more sensitive to the way that racism, sexism, and other prejudices and assumptions can be embedded in a story—any story, including the ones told by politicians and advertisers, for instance.

Eric

It’s a testament to the pervasiveness of racist stereotypes in today’s society that this novel wasn’t yanked long ago from high school book rooms. It expresses contempt for indigenous cultures, and embraces a cultural hierarchy, with Western empire on top.

Much more can be said about the book. The absence of girls is both convenient and thought-provoking (there are not only racial prejudices at work in the novel’s assumptions, but gender prejudices as well). The absence of girls, and the youth of the boys, means an absence of sex, and this is also a point worth discussing (and one of the reasons schools are so happy to use it as a text for class study). Etc.

However, your reading of the novel’s ending seems quite mistaken to me. The boys are on the island in the first place because a new war has broken out, presumably involving the use of nuclear weapons. The adults, that is, have broken down into exactly the murderous savagery that the boys devolve into on the island. The British naval captain therefore is hardly a straightforward representative of order and civilization, and your reading of the book’s “message”—”How easy it would be to fall into barbarism, without …. well, without the guns and uniforms and commanding presence of empire”—makes no sense at all when you consider the frame tale of the novel: a world that has already fallen into barbarism; the world represented by the naval officer.

Eric

This is a complete misreading of the text. Any sigh of relief at the end is pervaded by a deep sense of irony that the adult world is off committing the same atrocities for more complex, yet basically the same reasons as the kids on the island. This conclusion may be pessimistic, but I think it would be hard to argue that it’s not realistic. How many wars throughout modern and ancient history have been the result of petty greed and unwillingness to cooperate?

To deny or sugarcoat the violence and aggression throughout human history across all cultures and civilizations would be a horrendous disservice to our students. This novel profoundly explores a deep problem at the core of the human condition. A problem that has run through the most primitive tribes to the most complex civilizations. This is a critique of man, not a critique of “savages”. An important theme of the novel is that all our societies have this savage element somewhere deep inside of it.

I agree that we need to teach optimism and cooperation in the classroom, but we also can’t shield the ugly sides of the human condition in the process. As a young student, I hated being spoken down to, as if I couldn’t handle the truth. Avoiding this novel for its pessimism feels a lot like assuming that our students can’t handle interpreting this novel for themselves. Even if you do believe this novel to be pessimistic with racial overtones, it’s an excellent work of literature worthy of study. You teach it, share your opinions, and allow your students to form their own opinions on the work.

All in all, excluding this book from the curriculum seems very misguided to me.