On the idea of relevance and relatableness in the arts

Recently I saw an article in The Guardian which argued that instead of Shakespeare and Dickens, students in English classes should be taught the kind of literature that would be more relevant to their lives.
These arguments are nothing new. Complaints about the teaching of Shakespeare and classic literature always amount to the same word—“relevance”. Even in the book blog world, lots of times I’ve found people criticising a book because they couldn’t relate to the characters or the characters were not relatable—just look at the things people have said about Lolita, Wuthering Heights, Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, and so on and so forth.  
As someone who love 19th century Russian literature, 50s-70s cinema, jazz, etc. I don’t understand. If you look at it that way, in literature and the other arts, I was born and grew up in Vietnam, then moved to Norway at the age of 15, and now live in the UK, and I’m in my mid-20s, how do you think I relate to the experience of Anna Karenina or Marya Bolkonskaya or Natasha Rostova? How do I find whaling relevant? How do I relate to black people’s experience and feel the pain in “Black and Blue” or “Strange Fruit” or “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life”? 
But that is missing the point.  
The idea that readers have to find the story and themes relevant, and the characters relatable, is amusing. You’re facing a work of art, and if a classic, it’s a work of art that has stood the test of time and been recognised as part of the literary canon, why does it have to be about you? 
Don’t you care about history and its legacy?  
Don’t you care about the work of writers who have changed literature and influenced generations of readers and writers, perhaps including the modern writers you now like? 
Don’t you care about literary merit, and the power of literature?  
Don’t you care about the great achievements of the human mind? 
Don’t you care to learn about different lives, and different experiences you never (have to) go through?    
Don’t you have the imagination to see beyond your own lot, and seek to understand people who are very different from you? 
Don’t you care to expand your perspective? 
Why does reading have to be about you? 
I could go on and talk about empathy and some utilitarian values of literature, but it’s unnecessary. If as a reader you can only enjoy books that you personally find relevant and relatable, you’re limiting yourself, but I have no say in what you choose to read in your own spare time. It’s when people talk about the teaching of literature that the idea of relevance becomes a problem. 
One of the common arguments is that it puts you off reading. I don’t know where it comes from, I’ve heard people blame their dislike of reading on the books they read in high school, but how do they know that reading just isn’t their thing anyway, regardless of high school? I could say the same thing about physical education I had in school, but the fact is that I’ve never been athletic anyway. 
There are different kinds of students. There are students who, once they finish school, never touch a book again in their lives. And there are students who otherwise may not have opened these works of art themselves in their free time but appreciate being introduced to them, and would expand their reading beyond these works. Classes are the place for this. I’m lucky to come from a family of readers, but there would be students who don’t get that at home, and who are forced to read the literary works that they come to love. It’s similar to the way I was introduced to jazz—if not for that class at University of Oslo, I probably would never have got to jazz myself, and now I love it more than anything else. 
Another argument is that you don’t need Shakespeare to survive or get a job. Let’s be honest, just to survive or get a job, you don’t need most of the stuff you learn in school—when do you ever need those theorems in maths class or those physics equations or those chemical formulas, unless you choose to follow that particular field? But that’s not the point of education. 
All the talks about relevance and relatableness in literature and the arts are just stupid and nonsensical statements made by philistines. And if teachers think this way, they shouldn’t be teaching.




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Announcing a read-along: 
I’m organising a (re)read-along of Madame Bovary. At the moment it’s me, Himadri (Argumentative Old Git), and my friend Anne. 
Does anyone else want to join?