I’m sure that high school teachers all over Western Civilization are happy, happy, so happy that Beowulf is cool all of a sudden.  The animated feature film version of this first great Christian-slash-medieval epic opens in theaters tonight, and I’ll bet some students will be taking field trips to see it.  This is largely unfortunate, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the film.  What’s unfortunate is that there are so many high school literature teachers who show their students film versions of Great Stories in the hopes that students will like them more.  Sometimes the students do like them more, usually they don’t.  Here’s what I mean:

Beowulf the movie vs. Beowulf the poem = the movie wins. 

Beowulf the movie vs. Live Free or Die Hard = Bruce Willis wins.

Which is to say….a great new film version of Beowulf might enliven classroom discussion, but a field trip to see it will never cultivate in students the literary experience of the imagination.  And teaching that experience, I think, is the point of literary education.  Not movie watching. 

This post has drawn some of your ire.  I feel it.  I hope not to rain on the parades of a thousand eager high school English teachers.  I hope the film is terrific.  But education in the West (namely the U.S.) likely won’t get any better until English teachers stop getting excited over film versions of Good Stories and teach students to love and to read those stories themselves.  Only then will they really enjoy the film.  I think.