12 ms·

The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

90 points by makeitdouble 2y ago

ethbr1 2y ago
A more accurate title might be "Issues with The Atlantic's framing of student difficulty with lengthy assigned reading" Relevant gripes: >> These are all points I made in speaking to and emailing with Horowitch and her fact checkers throughout the summer. [...] Perhaps the most disappointing defeat I observed in the final article was that although I shared my observations of the tireless work of colleagues at the state and national level advocating for intellectual freedom, Horowitch does not acknowledge that culturally, we do not value reading. We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers. We pay lip service to the importance of literacy, requiring four years of English and regularly testing literacy skills, but when push comes to shove, we don’t make space for the curiosity and joy that are the foundations of lifelong literacy habits. In truth, we seem to be doggedly fighting against the best interest of a literate populace.
- airza 2y ago
  It sure would be a more accurate title, but it wouldn’t be a better one.
  - tolerance 2y ago
    The title is a let down. I was earnestly anticipating a sensationalist portrayal of the author's experience, irrespective of its nature. I have certain expectations when I hear about someone being "done dirty". Now I have to read what looks like a modest and respectable account...about reading...and stuff like that. Fine.
- maxverse 2y ago
  I think the title intentionally plays into the "we just skim summaries" stereotype
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fargle 2y ago
  indeed. somewhere the world's tiniest violin must be playing a very sad song for her perhaps, and maybe i'm just spitballing here, the author of the article didn't agree with her take on things does she really think that if you are interviewed by a journalist, that they are compelled to agree with you and take your side? and if they don't they "did you dirty"? ugh. this is the kind of self-important english teacher i'm very happy to despise. having eagerly digested all those great literary works and wisdom of the ages, and trendy modern ones too, i wonder how long it will be before she discovers the source of her feelings of "demoralization" (and it's not some hack journalist at the atlantic)
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    The title does a disservice to the content. If you scroll about halfway down, she gets to the meat of her contention with the article (and therefore the incorrectness of the popular take on how current literature education is failing students). Perhaps intentionally ironically that she would bury the lede of a piece about how people are incapable of reading at length...
cdaringe 2y ago
Id be upset too. I haven’t read Horowitch’s piece, but the section where the author realizes “I am the problem” appears compelling, where her experience as an educator no longer fits the mold of story in flight. I’ll be following this thread specifically for feedback from people who “value reading enough” to asses the Atlantic piece as well.
foobarqux 2y ago
[flagged]
drawkward 2y ago
From the article: >Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. This, in response to a story about Gen Z and Gen Alpha at elite universities. Why are they attending the elites, then, if not to become part of the power apparatus?
- ink_13 2y ago
  This observation could have been made about young people throughout the ages. Disrespect for authority is nothing new.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    > Disrespect for authority is nothing new. It is still a perfectly valid argument to analyze whether disrespect for authority has increased or decreased over the years; or whether the disrespect has reached the point it threatens their ability to become functioning adults.
    - 9dev 2y ago
      You can sure make that argument, but it's still only a rephrasing of the millenia-old meme of old people complaining about the lack of respect in young people. No, young people are not in danger of being unable to become functional adults, no more than any generation before them (of which the same has been said). Society changes, you're old, young people are doing things differently. The wheel keeps on turning.
      - gjsman-1000 2y ago
        This is actually a fairly ridiculous argument in my view - look at what happened to every country before ours. They failed. Why did they fail? Obviously, famine, wars, etc had a part; but as the saying goes: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.
trgn 2y ago
> a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system I'd enroll in that class
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Same. But then, my favorite part of Moby Dick is the boots-on-the-ground overview of whaling, a whole industry I'd have no concept of otherwise.
- giardini 2y ago
  Why?
  - trgn 2y ago
    Because I enjoy historical factoids, geography, history,... same reason people watch history channel. Also, when authors go on these tangents, it can inspire a passion, and it will move worlds. The hunchback of the notre dame saved the church from demolition and became a totem, and it was precisely because of Hugo waxing lyrically for hundreds of pages on end about the atmosphere and architecture of medieval paris. If he had stuck to just the plot, the novel would've been, maybe more readable sure, but nonetheless poorer for it. And lastly, because if you're in a class on western literature these long winded 19th century reads are a rite of passage. you have to do your part to carry forward a shared reference, one that transcends time and space. school is as good a time as any to make that effort, unwillingly even.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
> sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system I'm sorry, but if gen Z isn't interested in the Parisian sewer system from 1830, then I think there is little hope for them. I remember being told to read the abridged version of Les Miserables so you wouldn't need to hear Hugo ramble about Waterloo, sewers, and fertilizer, but I just thought "can I read just the parts taken out of the abridged version?"
- ghaff 2y ago
  On the other hand, I’d be very happy to take the side that assigning a 1500 page 19th century novel in high school is a really heavy lift. You might as well beg students to read the online equivalent of the Cliff Notes.
  - allturtles 2y ago
    Nowhere in the Atlantic article does it mention students being asked to read all of Les Miserables, either in high school or college. I think the OP brought it up as a strawman because it is notoriously digressive, and has few fans these days. The books actually mentioned in the Atlantic article include My Antonia, Great Expectations, The Illiad, the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I’m not sure Crime and Punishment or Moby Dick would be a lot better in that context.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      That's because I'm responding to her substack post, not the article. The substack post references Les Miserables and that professors are sounding the alarm for students not finishing it. Presumably, if professors are upset that students aren't finishing it, they are assigning it to be read.
- deleted 2y ago
aeturnum 2y ago
There's a thing with The Atlantic and some other high-prestige publications (The New York Times comes to mind) where, among really high quality journalism, they regularly publish articles that are trying to make a case for an understanding that isn't supported by basically any of their sources. The Times' work on trans issues comes to mind for this as well - they interview a bunch of people on both sides and end up making a case for an understanding that none of their sources agree with and basically everyone is mad about. It feels like a combination of the personal opinions of the journalists involved, but justified and presented in a way to fit as well as possible with expert interviews. This is super normal and human, but isn't what I would call journalism. It's too bad because I think these institutions do a lot of high quality work, but it seems to me that they pretty regularly do this kind of thing. Perhaps this is a universal flaw of all publications, but there have been efforts to criticize this in specific instances[1] which seem to have little impact and generate little reflection and it's a shame. [1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157181127/nyt-letter-trans https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157181127/nyt-letter-trans
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  I'd argue that my biggest criticism of journalism as it is practiced is that many practitioners aren't even trying to be scientific. The pressure of deadline for regular publication creates huge incentive to publish not discovered truth, but a pre-ordained thesis that then lends itself to cherry-picked fact-hunting to bolster that thesis (and discarding of counter-evidence that would cast doubt upon the thesis). I've been close enough on-the-ground to multiple reported stories to bear witness to this happening: quotes that I was present when they were given taken madly out of context because they one-fifth supported the reporter's idea and four-fifths refuted it. It's not a great way to find truth (not bad for concocting digestible stories though).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Aromasin 2y ago
  I think it's a case where modern journalists (and in many other parts of society) find a hypothesis they think will do well and hunt for leads/studies/data that fit the hypothesis. It's easier to do because you only need to do as much research as to prove the outcome demands, and does better with the readers because they're interested in the result less with how they got there. It's like going out as a hunter knowing your only goal is to hunt a buck. You know what you're hunting, so you can prep accordingly with the deer call horns and other paraphernalia. Good journalism - something I believe was done more by the journalists of the past - go out to interesting places and talk to interesting people to gather whatever they can, and find a good story within that. In terms of the hunter analogy, it's more like laying a whole bunch of traps, be it fish, bird, beaver or bear, and seeing what you end up with at the end of the day. You might not always get what your readers want, but it's also more fulfilling and often important when you land a prize catch.
james-bcn 2y ago
This is a well written criticism, but it should be noted that the author doesn't appear anywhere in the article she is criticizing.
Digory 2y ago
She doth protest too much. A major purpose of education is connecting the past and the present. There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024. And yet she seems resigned to students maintaining “dialects” that make it difficult to talk to grandparents, and impossible to read the “old white men,” while she cites the phone as a reason: > Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects.
- mrthrowaway999 2y ago
  It's almost as if there are beautiful, deep lessons being passed down by people who lived before us. I find the authors argument unpersuasive. I was one of those rebellious teenagers growing up and it was exactly in Dostoyevsky and Arthur Koestler and Umberto Eco that I found refuge and companionship. Maybe because they were so different than me and my peers, they offered me a glimpse into different ways of thinking and seeing.
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  that's not the case The Atlantic was making though, they were specifically pointing to technology's impact on attention span rather than language
- philwelch 2y ago
  > There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024. It’s this very connection that is at question, however. There is an explicit ideological agenda explicitly focused on severing this connection. The types of people who complain that classic literature was written by “old white men” have never been coy about it.
mrthrowaway999 2y ago
>> We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers. How true are these allegations? For example, book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands. I understand that removing books from a library is bad in principle. But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible. Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic. Parents have been thrown out of school board meetings for reading their content out loud.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    >Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic. Where are you getting the data that most books are pornographic? Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content. The definition of sexual content includes things like "informational books about puberty" (i.e. sexual content != pornographic).
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      > Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content Citation needed. That's a very narrow take on sexual content. https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-any-of-these-books https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-... As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for merely reading out loud (to adults!) their content, this is well documented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD1GdCb-gII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD1GdCb-gII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cyjjWuZoK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cyjjWuZoK8 https://youtu.be/Oe098d5iIW0 https://youtu.be/Oe098d5iIW0
scandox 2y ago
> books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom This is the change that has left a reader like me stranded on an alien shore. I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read. It never occurred to me that any book would be about someone like me and I never sought it out. Ironically this change means it is hard for me to relate to modern readers which is something I do sometimes hope to do.
- sickofparadox 2y ago
  It's just a line. There is very little truth to it but the line works, and it helps people with doing things like changing the curriculum away from longstanding classics to books that will be forgotten in a decade.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  >I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read If you pay attention to contemporary social dialogues, it makes total sense why the author would say that.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    I can't understand what you mean by this. This whole thread I feel like I'm another world, everyone is using all these euphemisms that I can't figure out the referent to. What is "prevailing orthodoxy" what is "contemporary social dialogues" what are y'all talking about. I'm serious I just cannot tell.
    - apsurd 2y ago
      The translation is: kids are self-obsessed and self-absorbed, inclusive of identity progressivism like pronouns and under-represented representation. The selfie generation(s). 2006 Time's Person of the Year: You. For my taste, that seems to well be true, but all generations have their thing and those that don't agree with the positions will of course conclude these "new things" are very very bad things. On the selfie obsession: social media is poison but that's hardly unique to the kids. The adults are doing all the damage.
pxc 2y ago
> Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables [...] Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. An unabridged translation of Les Miserables is 3-6x as long as any of those other books. I feel like that could explain a difference in being able/willing to finish those books by itself. At the same time, updated language and abridgment are extremely normal in translations and would be very appropriate here. I'd be surprised if those choices aren't already considered by professors assigning Les Mis in anything but a class on Les Mis for seniors or grad students. Presumably a competent abridgment would cut much of 'going on for chapters about the sewer system' or whatever. The OP talks about such translation techniques working for her class when she teaches The Odyssey! I don't see how Les Miserables is very different, but maybe the translation(s) she uses for the Odyssey are really exceptional. An unrelated point the OP kind of gets at but doesn't focus on, in favor of diversity and recency of authorship: the mere fact of assigning reading and setting a schedule for it often sucks the pleasure out of it, doesn't it? I read two authors of classics put down in the OP as 'vanilla' and 'dust-covered', Dostoevsky and Hugo, for pleasure in high school... and by my senior year of high school was skipping many (if not a majority) of assigned readings in favor of bullshitting my way through based on second-hand summaries. (The books I skipped included both titles by 'dead white men' and more contemporary titles by authors of other backgrounds.) If I hadn't the pleasure of choosing the classic texts I did read as referred to above, I probably would have given them a shallow and resentful treatment, too. Aside: after looking them up, the books the OP lists as examples sound way more interesting than the 'non-canonical' texts I was assigned in high school, and I'm envious of their students in that respect. The non-canonical texts in my school days were infrequent and also often felt like second-rate additions to curriculum: slim volumes, simple language, facile premises.
ecshafer 2y ago
> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey >Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts Yes, some literature is better than other literature. Some literature should be taught in schools. The fact that this teacher defends giving simpler less sophisticated works because it speaks to the children more (how is a power struggle in a palace speaking to the children more?). Difficult language is not an excuse to not read a book, this is literally lowering expectations. I am not saying those books are bad, but they are all written at a middle school level, and should not be taught in high school. Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.
- evklein 2y ago
  I'm not familiar with the other items, but "A Long Way Gone" is plenty sophisticated enough from a thematic point of view. Violent, gritty, complicated, it portrays an ugly piece of the world and has some serious perspective. Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.' I think the author's main point is that if we want to accommodate a new generation of learners we need to shift the canon. It doesn't mean that great classic works don't have their place in the world, it just means they don't have the value they once did for educational purpose at the level students traditionally explored them. Grounding this in the material world: a book really only helps teach you something if you actually read it.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.' No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose. And I agree with what the GP said: we need to be holding our kids to higher standards and expecting they rise to that level, not going "well that language is too hard for them so let's take it off".
    - evklein 2y ago
empath75 2y ago
"The novel" is a relatively recent invention and a large part of its popularity had to do with the economics of book printing. Most people do not consume text (or information in general) through printed books any more, and it makes no sense to cling to the form or to privilege it over other kinds of media consumption. Reading and literacy is important, but I don't think that tying it to reading novels makes sense.
Workaccount2 2y ago
I don't know about kids, but my sample size one is that as short-form dopamine-hit content has exploded in the last 10-15 years, and especially the last 5, my ability to read books has collapsed.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  It's not gone forever, you're just habituated to paying attention for shorter amounts of time. You can train it back up when you're ready.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    I have a fantasy of getting an airbnb in the woods for a month while leaving my phone and laptop at home. Not possible at all with my current life and job, but man I could do with an attention reset.
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      Why not try to practice tech minimalism? Personally I’ve found great success in even just limiting my smartphone to a feature phone.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        You really effectively need a smartphone for more and more things. A few days ago I had to pay for parking with an app. In a couple hours I’m going to a theater that only takes tickets in digital form.
        ethbr1 2y ago
        Okay, so a feature phone and a crowbar. :)
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I did an ocean crossing a few months back and I succumbed to the siren call of Starlink. Really should have just caught up on my Kindle.
ctoth 2y ago
> The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare is comparable to my own struggles through Chaucer in the original Middle English I guess I don't talk to enough high school kids but is this really actually true? There has been ~200 years of linguistic evolution between when this teacher went to school and now? English has changed as significantly as it did between "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote" and "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." Wasn't the theory that recorded media would decrease the rate of core linguistic evolution? There has always been slang, but I would call this a total false equivalence.
- si1entstill 2y ago
  Agreed. When I was younger, talking to older (40+ year age gap) people was a bit of a minor shift in vocab or syntax, but I wouldn't call it a "code switch." If we have hit a point where communicating with people speaking the same language in the same region who are only a generation removed (or 2 at most) requires a "code switch" carrying substantial cognitive overhead... we have a problem. I'm not claiming that it isn't happening, but it seems like a misstep to just accept it as inevitable. Communication with most of the rest of the same-dialect speaking population of a region should be an innate skill by the time someone is in middle/high school. (non native speakers or transplants are a whole different ballgame, but I don't think that is what the author is discussing here)
BitWiseVibe 2y ago
> So when I ask them to code switch further into the recesses of linguistic history to read Shakespeare, the struggle is real. Reading difficult texts is how you get better at reading?? If students are not struggling at all they are not learning. But the author seems more interested in validating students identities or whatever than actually helping them learn.
- ghaff 2y ago
  In the Shakespeare case I’m not even sure reading plays in their entirety is the best way to gain exposure. Plenty of good and reasonably faithful film versions out there.
- hnbad 2y ago
  But Shakespeare is not "difficult", it's just extremely dated. Shakespeare was not at all difficult at the time, most of the plays would have been considered very easily accessible. They have a ton of simple humor and even puns. Most of them are just lost in translation because language has evolved in such a way that much of it no longer works and the cultural references are lost to time.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
I'm not sure the author actually disagrees with the point of the Atlantic article. She just takes it for granted that her students struggle to read things outside their native vernacular, can't do a close reading of anything longer than a short story, and refuse to read things that they don't find relevant to their personal lives. I'm glad that she's found a way to get her students reading the Odyssey anyway, but that's a bad set of constraints to be working with and it's unsurprising if other teachers have been less successful.
tengbretson 2y ago
> Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. This is an absurd dismissal.
nonameiguess 2y ago
It feels inappropriate for a teacher of English literature to be dismissing the western canon as a bunch of old white men droning on about shit no one cares about. If that's her attitude, her students are either going to pick it up themselves, or worse, if they've been reading from a young age and happen to actually love and enjoy the classics, they'll feel dismissed themselves as if their tastes are invalid in the modern era. A curriculum should update over time, but there's plenty of value in having a canon. It's a shared point of reference to create a common culture. Fashions, music, television to streaming video or whatever, might all change rapidly, but at least give parents and children something they're both familiar with. Beyond that, it can in and of itself create the kind of urbane cosmopolitan widening of one's circle of appreciation and belonging she seems to want kids to experience. Reading old material teaches you that there actually are common elements to all human experience. Even old white guys from hundreds of years ago had the same hopes, fears, desires, and bodily experiences you have. We're not so different from each other, let alone fully defined by our skin color and century of origin to the point that alien cultures can never have any hope of appreciating and empathizing with each other. Les Miserables is about inequality, poverty, abuses of law enforcement, overcoming modest beginnings to achieve great things, giving back to the less fortunate. How the fuck are these not relevant modern topics you'd want children to read about? Let them know these are not new concerns and even old white men might be more progressive and empathetic than you assume based purely on their age and skin color.
- hnbad 2y ago
  > It's a shared point of reference to create a common culture. Sure but if we're talking about the US why does that canon have to almost exclusively consist of European and white American authors? Modern America has a diversity of family histories so I'd expect its schools to cover a diversity of literary sources that reflect this. If it were just American authors, you might have a point, but _Les Mis_ is neither integral to American culture as it exists today nor to anything it was before. Something also tells me the kids don't need _Les Mis_ to learn to embrace social justice and oppose abuses of power. Speaking as a (not quite but getting there) old white man: if the kids need books to understand we might be progressive and empathetic, we've failed at being progressive and empathetic and they're right to think otherwise.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. Yikes! Homer and Dostoevsky were both (presumably) white men so they obviously have the exact same experiences. Diversity is more than skin color or genitalia- what a shallow take.
- GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
  They were both people of relative privilege within their own societies (in Dostoevsky’s case, at least in his youth). I have a strong feeling the author isn’t arguing any sort of racial or gendered essentialism - there is merit in acknowledging that media produced by those of privileged classes may carry certain attitudes or opinions that don’t necessarily speak effectively to different audiences.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    No, this is just plain and simple racism and sexism on the author's part.
    - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
      This seems a gross misreading of the authors intent.
- scientator 2y ago
  We have no reliable information about the identity of Homer. All we have are a variety of legends. But there are some decent arguments for thinking that Homer might have been a woman. We just don't know.
AlbertCory 2y ago
> Rather, my experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they’re rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made. There's never been a time when kids didn't demand things that are "relevant" to them. Soul on Ice and The Teachings of Don Juan certainly seemed more relevant than Macbeth 50 years ago. The fact is, they're not capable of deciding that. That's why they're in school. The teacher's job, which this person refuses to do, is to make the classics relevant. If you're one of the people repeating the facile, shallow, and dumb cliche that "the older generation has always been critical of the younger generation" then you are, ironically, part of the problem. You have no insights that younger people value, so of course they're going to ignore you.
techtalsky 2y ago
The author clearly needed to write the article they pitched, even if that wasn't supported by this source.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
While I have definitely seen many instances of reporters coming with a preconceived narrative, and then just wanting quotes that further that narrative, I could barely get through reading this article. The author seems to want to dump on competing narratives for why kids seem to have trouble with long form reading, but then brings all her own biases and essentially lays them out as fact with 0 evidence. Take early on in the article: > She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones. The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days, and no amount of old, out-of-context quotes taken from earlier "technological panics" will change that. I think the works and research of Jonathan Haidt do an excellent job digging into the effects of cell phones on kids. And don't even get me started on the "Kids don't want to read the old classics because they're dense and hard to read, they're just challenging the white male patriarchy!" Spare me...
- someguydave 2y ago
  “ The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days” Then it would be easy to furnish a few links to source this claim
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - someguydave 2y ago
      Haidt’s evidence is weak https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evidence-that-social-media-is-causing-the-teen-mental-health-crisis/ https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...
      - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
        Haidt is not the only one with lots of evidence. This article got a lot of responses on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34993912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34993912 Edit: Also, Jonathan Haidt responded to the article you posted, and he also posted Aaron Brown's follow up to that: https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1664082247274713092 https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1664082247274713092
b800h 2y ago
I have to say that I'm delighted to see that so many readers on HN picked up on the dodgy argumentation and non-sequiturs in this blogpiece. Little by little it feels as though some sanity is creeping back into the world.
- mrthrowaway999 2y ago
  My very uncharitable take, but one that I have to entertain as potentially true, is that this is the exact skill some teachers want to deprive their students of.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    It can get tiresome—but, reading as an adult, may have been one of the more interesting parts of the book as I was familiar with the Ahab thread 100x over.
- crazydoggers 2y ago
  Unfortunately it also feels like our tiny bubble of sanity and reason is rapidly shrinking (witness the current conspiracy laden reaction to hurricane Helene)
crazydoggers 2y ago
> Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system This is entirely the reason to read them. Literature is partly about opening up and expanding your perspectives, and challenging the reader. If you simply surround yourself in what’s comfortable and familiar you’re not exploring the depth of the human experience. And Hugo’s whole theme is about injustice and inequality. What it means to live in a society without sanitation, something that still exists in large swathes of the world. These are themes that continue to resonate. Just because he was a “old white man” does not negate the value of his literature. Instead this article reads as racists and ageist. So thanks to the Atlantic for continuing to bring up difficult subjects that make certain groups unhappy because they need to be pried from their insulated and privileged perspectives. As Hugo so eloquently writes: As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century — man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness — are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.
photochemsyn 2y ago
The Atlantic is the mouthpiece of the imperial Borg, and the editor-in-chief got his position there by writing dishonest drivel in 2002 about Saddam's WMDs and Saddam's links to Al Qaeda in order to whip up popular support for the invasion of Iraq. Here's the damning evidence (note in particular the failure to discuss Saddam's deployment of chemical weapons against Iranian troops with the active support of Reagan and Thatcher): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terror https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terr... As far as the Atlantic's take on the limits of acceptable literature at the high school level, it's not hard to understand if one can accept that their ideological grandfather was Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). His idea that 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' leads to the conclustion that, in an authoritarian state, education would be a continuation of the state’s political ideology. and the fundamental rationale of education would be to serve the state’s objectives. Thus, the Atlantic supports teaching a version of history, politics, and culture that aims to create loyalty to the state and its leadership as the primary goal of high school level education. From this viewpoint, 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' by James Loewen is heretical blasphemy. The alternative to rigid indoctination of students is to present them with multiple works with differing viewpoints and have them debate them on the merits - e.g. have them read Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' as well as Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' and let them come to their own conclusions. Also, stop excluding fantasy and science fiction literature from the academic curriculum! The Three-Body Problem is highly suitable for a high school literature course, for example. The challenge in today's environment is convincing people in elite institutions that liberal authoritarian ideology and censorship - e.g. banning Conrad because they see him as an old white racist - is as much of a threat to a free and open society as conservative authoritarian ideology is.
tacitusarc 2y ago
“The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences.” Gazing into a mirror is not generally a recipe for the growth we want in students. Kids are strongly influenced by the people around them, especially authority figures. I wonder how much her own views about long books written by old white men shape the views of her students.
chlodwig 2y ago
The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences....Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Equally frustrating is that her article implies that I was forced into that decision in order to pacify floundering students or submit to the demands of standardized testing. I found two of these three books on Lexile Hub and it looks like they are written at the level of Nancy Drew (Zoboi) and Harry Potter (Beah). So maybe they do like them better because they are much easier. I'm a little skeptical of the claim these books "reflect their lives and experiences" because they are about three different demographics, so at most, only one of the books could be speaking to the experiences of any given student. And frankly, I hated these kinds of books in school. Dickens and Vonnegut was the fun stuff. But at any rate, the traditional point of an education was not exactly relevancy, it was 1) to seem the commonalities of human nature even in very different circumstances and 2) to teach the texts that create a common culture. In a move as cliché as blaming standardized testing, Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. It seems too easy of a target to take seriously in the context of a major American journal like The Atlantic, but here we are. But she then she admits it is true: Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. Creating space for the joy and curiosity of reading is important work that high school teachers step up to every day, designing lessons to teach what once came naturally. Previous generations turned to reading as a leisure activity, so they had an innate sense for how to read in school and how to read sneakily under the covers way past bedtime. To summarize: Students are no longer reading for fun, they are using more casual language on social media, so instead of teaching kids challenging texts in school they have to focus on simply being able to read anything. A lot of this comes down to this teacher not believing that traditional Anglo-American civilization, or more broadly the Latin Christendom civilization, is worth teaching and preserving: From a similarly stodgy perspective, Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. ... As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate students’ identities. It used to be the point of a public education was to "melt" all the immigrant communities into one American identity. That meant enforcing a standard dialect. (And the same thing happened in many other countries, such as France). It is notable that the teacher no longer thinks this is a good thing. This really is a basic difference in values. It has been said about public policy, "We all want the same thing, we just have different ideas about how to get there." But in this case, we simply do not want all the same thing and there is no getting around that.
josefritzishere 2y ago
I have to agree with one of the points here that reading curricula has become mired in the archaic past. I would prefer that school cultivate a love for reading in general. Only good can come from young people reading and developing better reading comprehension skills. Offering them more modern reading material that they can connect with seems like the way to go.
briandear 2y ago
> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. This is ridiculous. Is the book less important, less valuable, because of who wrote it? Did the Odyssey last so long because it has little value. It was a “very old” book even in the 1500s. This essay reads like someone who argues with the teacher about the value of algebra. And speaking of math, most mathematical concepts are “very old” as well — doesn’t make them less valuable. Who wrote something is less important than what it says. Sounds to me like this essay writer is still young enough to think they know everything.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  > Is the book less important, less valuable, because of who wrote it? That is the underlying thesis of their protest: old white man bad.
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
It's a submarine story pushing the "lack of diversity patriarchy is to blame" trope.

90 points by makeitdouble 2y ago

A more accurate title might be "Issues with The Atlantic's framing of student difficulty with lengthy assigned reading" Relevant gripes: >> These are all points I made in speaking to and emailing with Horowitch and her fact checkers throughout the summer. [...] Perhaps the most disappointing defeat I observed in the final article was that although I shared my observations of the tireless work of colleagues at the state and national level advocating for intellectual freedom, Horowitch does not acknowledge that culturally, we do not value reading. We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers. We pay lip service to the importance of literacy, requiring four years of English and regularly testing literacy skills, but when push comes to shove, we don’t make space for the curiosity and joy that are the foundations of lifelong literacy habits. In truth, we seem to be doggedly fighting against the best interest of a literate populace.

airza 2y ago
It sure would be a more accurate title, but it wouldn’t be a better one.
- tolerance 2y ago
  The title is a let down. I was earnestly anticipating a sensationalist portrayal of the author's experience, irrespective of its nature. I have certain expectations when I hear about someone being "done dirty". Now I have to read what looks like a modest and respectable account...about reading...and stuff like that. Fine.
maxverse 2y ago
I think the title intentionally plays into the "we just skim summaries" stereotype
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fargle 2y ago
indeed. somewhere the world's tiniest violin must be playing a very sad song for her perhaps, and maybe i'm just spitballing here, the author of the article didn't agree with her take on things does she really think that if you are interviewed by a journalist, that they are compelled to agree with you and take your side? and if they don't they "did you dirty"? ugh. this is the kind of self-important english teacher i'm very happy to despise. having eagerly digested all those great literary works and wisdom of the ages, and trendy modern ones too, i wonder how long it will be before she discovers the source of her feelings of "demoralization" (and it's not some hack journalist at the atlantic)
- ethbr1 2y ago
  The title does a disservice to the content. If you scroll about halfway down, she gets to the meat of her contention with the article (and therefore the incorrectness of the popular take on how current literature education is failing students). Perhaps intentionally ironically that she would bury the lede of a piece about how people are incapable of reading at length...

cdaringe 2y ago

Id be upset too. I haven’t read Horowitch’s piece, but the section where the author realizes “I am the problem” appears compelling, where her experience as an educator no longer fits the mold of story in flight. I’ll be following this thread specifically for feedback from people who “value reading enough” to asses the Atlantic piece as well.

foobarqux 2y ago

[flagged]

drawkward 2y ago

From the article: >Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. This, in response to a story about Gen Z and Gen Alpha at elite universities. Why are they attending the elites, then, if not to become part of the power apparatus?

ink_13 2y ago
This observation could have been made about young people throughout the ages. Disrespect for authority is nothing new.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > Disrespect for authority is nothing new. It is still a perfectly valid argument to analyze whether disrespect for authority has increased or decreased over the years; or whether the disrespect has reached the point it threatens their ability to become functioning adults.
  - 9dev 2y ago
    You can sure make that argument, but it's still only a rephrasing of the millenia-old meme of old people complaining about the lack of respect in young people. No, young people are not in danger of being unable to become functional adults, no more than any generation before them (of which the same has been said). Society changes, you're old, young people are doing things differently. The wheel keeps on turning.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      This is actually a fairly ridiculous argument in my view - look at what happened to every country before ours. They failed. Why did they fail? Obviously, famine, wars, etc had a part; but as the saying goes: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.

trgn 2y ago

> a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system I'd enroll in that class

shadowgovt 2y ago
Same. But then, my favorite part of Moby Dick is the boots-on-the-ground overview of whaling, a whole industry I'd have no concept of otherwise.
giardini 2y ago
Why?
- trgn 2y ago
  Because I enjoy historical factoids, geography, history,... same reason people watch history channel. Also, when authors go on these tangents, it can inspire a passion, and it will move worlds. The hunchback of the notre dame saved the church from demolition and became a totem, and it was precisely because of Hugo waxing lyrically for hundreds of pages on end about the atmosphere and architecture of medieval paris. If he had stuck to just the plot, the novel would've been, maybe more readable sure, but nonetheless poorer for it. And lastly, because if you're in a class on western literature these long winded 19th century reads are a rite of passage. you have to do your part to carry forward a shared reference, one that transcends time and space. school is as good a time as any to make that effort, unwillingly even.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

> sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system I'm sorry, but if gen Z isn't interested in the Parisian sewer system from 1830, then I think there is little hope for them. I remember being told to read the abridged version of Les Miserables so you wouldn't need to hear Hugo ramble about Waterloo, sewers, and fertilizer, but I just thought "can I read just the parts taken out of the abridged version?"

ghaff 2y ago
On the other hand, I’d be very happy to take the side that assigning a 1500 page 19th century novel in high school is a really heavy lift. You might as well beg students to read the online equivalent of the Cliff Notes.
- allturtles 2y ago
  Nowhere in the Atlantic article does it mention students being asked to read all of Les Miserables, either in high school or college. I think the OP brought it up as a strawman because it is notoriously digressive, and has few fans these days. The books actually mentioned in the Atlantic article include My Antonia, Great Expectations, The Illiad, the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I’m not sure Crime and Punishment or Moby Dick would be a lot better in that context.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    That's because I'm responding to her substack post, not the article. The substack post references Les Miserables and that professors are sounding the alarm for students not finishing it. Presumably, if professors are upset that students aren't finishing it, they are assigning it to be read.
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aeturnum 2y ago

There's a thing with The Atlantic and some other high-prestige publications (The New York Times comes to mind) where, among really high quality journalism, they regularly publish articles that are trying to make a case for an understanding that isn't supported by basically any of their sources. The Times' work on trans issues comes to mind for this as well - they interview a bunch of people on both sides and end up making a case for an understanding that none of their sources agree with and basically everyone is mad about. It feels like a combination of the personal opinions of the journalists involved, but justified and presented in a way to fit as well as possible with expert interviews. This is super normal and human, but isn't what I would call journalism. It's too bad because I think these institutions do a lot of high quality work, but it seems to me that they pretty regularly do this kind of thing. Perhaps this is a universal flaw of all publications, but there have been efforts to criticize this in specific instances[1] which seem to have little impact and generate little reflection and it's a shame. [1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157181127/nyt-letter-trans https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157181127/nyt-letter-trans

shadowgovt 2y ago
I'd argue that my biggest criticism of journalism as it is practiced is that many practitioners aren't even trying to be scientific. The pressure of deadline for regular publication creates huge incentive to publish not discovered truth, but a pre-ordained thesis that then lends itself to cherry-picked fact-hunting to bolster that thesis (and discarding of counter-evidence that would cast doubt upon the thesis). I've been close enough on-the-ground to multiple reported stories to bear witness to this happening: quotes that I was present when they were given taken madly out of context because they one-fifth supported the reporter's idea and four-fifths refuted it. It's not a great way to find truth (not bad for concocting digestible stories though).
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Aromasin 2y ago
I think it's a case where modern journalists (and in many other parts of society) find a hypothesis they think will do well and hunt for leads/studies/data that fit the hypothesis. It's easier to do because you only need to do as much research as to prove the outcome demands, and does better with the readers because they're interested in the result less with how they got there. It's like going out as a hunter knowing your only goal is to hunt a buck. You know what you're hunting, so you can prep accordingly with the deer call horns and other paraphernalia. Good journalism - something I believe was done more by the journalists of the past - go out to interesting places and talk to interesting people to gather whatever they can, and find a good story within that. In terms of the hunter analogy, it's more like laying a whole bunch of traps, be it fish, bird, beaver or bear, and seeing what you end up with at the end of the day. You might not always get what your readers want, but it's also more fulfilling and often important when you land a prize catch.

james-bcn 2y ago

This is a well written criticism, but it should be noted that the author doesn't appear anywhere in the article she is criticizing.

Digory 2y ago

She doth protest too much. A major purpose of education is connecting the past and the present. There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024. And yet she seems resigned to students maintaining “dialects” that make it difficult to talk to grandparents, and impossible to read the “old white men,” while she cites the phone as a reason: > Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects.

mrthrowaway999 2y ago
It's almost as if there are beautiful, deep lessons being passed down by people who lived before us. I find the authors argument unpersuasive. I was one of those rebellious teenagers growing up and it was exactly in Dostoyevsky and Arthur Koestler and Umberto Eco that I found refuge and companionship. Maybe because they were so different than me and my peers, they offered me a glimpse into different ways of thinking and seeing.
micromacrofoot 2y ago
that's not the case The Atlantic was making though, they were specifically pointing to technology's impact on attention span rather than language
philwelch 2y ago
> There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024. It’s this very connection that is at question, however. There is an explicit ideological agenda explicitly focused on severing this connection. The types of people who complain that classic literature was written by “old white men” have never been coy about it.

mrthrowaway999 2y ago

>> We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers. How true are these allegations? For example, book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands. I understand that removing books from a library is bad in principle. But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
> But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible. Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic. Parents have been thrown out of school board meetings for reading their content out loud.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic. Where are you getting the data that most books are pornographic? Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content. The definition of sexual content includes things like "informational books about puberty" (i.e. sexual content != pornographic).
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    > Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content Citation needed. That's a very narrow take on sexual content. https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-any-of-these-books https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-... As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for merely reading out loud (to adults!) their content, this is well documented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD1GdCb-gII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD1GdCb-gII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cyjjWuZoK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cyjjWuZoK8 https://youtu.be/Oe098d5iIW0 https://youtu.be/Oe098d5iIW0

scandox 2y ago

> books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom This is the change that has left a reader like me stranded on an alien shore. I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read. It never occurred to me that any book would be about someone like me and I never sought it out. Ironically this change means it is hard for me to relate to modern readers which is something I do sometimes hope to do.

sickofparadox 2y ago
It's just a line. There is very little truth to it but the line works, and it helps people with doing things like changing the curriculum away from longstanding classics to books that will be forgotten in a decade.
Workaccount2 2y ago
>I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read If you pay attention to contemporary social dialogues, it makes total sense why the author would say that.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  I can't understand what you mean by this. This whole thread I feel like I'm another world, everyone is using all these euphemisms that I can't figure out the referent to. What is "prevailing orthodoxy" what is "contemporary social dialogues" what are y'all talking about. I'm serious I just cannot tell.
  - apsurd 2y ago
    The translation is: kids are self-obsessed and self-absorbed, inclusive of identity progressivism like pronouns and under-represented representation. The selfie generation(s). 2006 Time's Person of the Year: You. For my taste, that seems to well be true, but all generations have their thing and those that don't agree with the positions will of course conclude these "new things" are very very bad things. On the selfie obsession: social media is poison but that's hardly unique to the kids. The adults are doing all the damage.

pxc 2y ago

> Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables [...] Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. An unabridged translation of Les Miserables is 3-6x as long as any of those other books. I feel like that could explain a difference in being able/willing to finish those books by itself. At the same time, updated language and abridgment are extremely normal in translations and would be very appropriate here. I'd be surprised if those choices aren't already considered by professors assigning Les Mis in anything but a class on Les Mis for seniors or grad students. Presumably a competent abridgment would cut much of 'going on for chapters about the sewer system' or whatever. The OP talks about such translation techniques working for her class when she teaches The Odyssey! I don't see how Les Miserables is very different, but maybe the translation(s) she uses for the Odyssey are really exceptional. An unrelated point the OP kind of gets at but doesn't focus on, in favor of diversity and recency of authorship: the mere fact of assigning reading and setting a schedule for it often sucks the pleasure out of it, doesn't it? I read two authors of classics put down in the OP as 'vanilla' and 'dust-covered', Dostoevsky and Hugo, for pleasure in high school... and by my senior year of high school was skipping many (if not a majority) of assigned readings in favor of bullshitting my way through based on second-hand summaries. (The books I skipped included both titles by 'dead white men' and more contemporary titles by authors of other backgrounds.) If I hadn't the pleasure of choosing the classic texts I did read as referred to above, I probably would have given them a shallow and resentful treatment, too. Aside: after looking them up, the books the OP lists as examples sound way more interesting than the 'non-canonical' texts I was assigned in high school, and I'm envious of their students in that respect. The non-canonical texts in my school days were infrequent and also often felt like second-rate additions to curriculum: slim volumes, simple language, facile premises.

ecshafer 2y ago

> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey >Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts Yes, some literature is better than other literature. Some literature should be taught in schools. The fact that this teacher defends giving simpler less sophisticated works because it speaks to the children more (how is a power struggle in a palace speaking to the children more?). Difficult language is not an excuse to not read a book, this is literally lowering expectations. I am not saying those books are bad, but they are all written at a middle school level, and should not be taught in high school. Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.

evklein 2y ago
I'm not familiar with the other items, but "A Long Way Gone" is plenty sophisticated enough from a thematic point of view. Violent, gritty, complicated, it portrays an ugly piece of the world and has some serious perspective. Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.' I think the author's main point is that if we want to accommodate a new generation of learners we need to shift the canon. It doesn't mean that great classic works don't have their place in the world, it just means they don't have the value they once did for educational purpose at the level students traditionally explored them. Grounding this in the material world: a book really only helps teach you something if you actually read it.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.' No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose. And I agree with what the GP said: we need to be holding our kids to higher standards and expecting they rise to that level, not going "well that language is too hard for them so let's take it off".
  - evklein 2y ago

empath75 2y ago

"The novel" is a relatively recent invention and a large part of its popularity had to do with the economics of book printing. Most people do not consume text (or information in general) through printed books any more, and it makes no sense to cling to the form or to privilege it over other kinds of media consumption. Reading and literacy is important, but I don't think that tying it to reading novels makes sense.

Workaccount2 2y ago

I don't know about kids, but my sample size one is that as short-form dopamine-hit content has exploded in the last 10-15 years, and especially the last 5, my ability to read books has collapsed.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago
It's not gone forever, you're just habituated to paying attention for shorter amounts of time. You can train it back up when you're ready.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I have a fantasy of getting an airbnb in the woods for a month while leaving my phone and laptop at home. Not possible at all with my current life and job, but man I could do with an attention reset.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Why not try to practice tech minimalism? Personally I’ve found great success in even just limiting my smartphone to a feature phone.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      You really effectively need a smartphone for more and more things. A few days ago I had to pay for parking with an app. In a couple hours I’m going to a theater that only takes tickets in digital form.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        Okay, so a feature phone and a crowbar. :)
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I did an ocean crossing a few months back and I succumbed to the siren call of Starlink. Really should have just caught up on my Kindle.

ctoth 2y ago

> The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare is comparable to my own struggles through Chaucer in the original Middle English I guess I don't talk to enough high school kids but is this really actually true? There has been ~200 years of linguistic evolution between when this teacher went to school and now? English has changed as significantly as it did between "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote" and "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." Wasn't the theory that recorded media would decrease the rate of core linguistic evolution? There has always been slang, but I would call this a total false equivalence.

si1entstill 2y ago
Agreed. When I was younger, talking to older (40+ year age gap) people was a bit of a minor shift in vocab or syntax, but I wouldn't call it a "code switch." If we have hit a point where communicating with people speaking the same language in the same region who are only a generation removed (or 2 at most) requires a "code switch" carrying substantial cognitive overhead... we have a problem. I'm not claiming that it isn't happening, but it seems like a misstep to just accept it as inevitable. Communication with most of the rest of the same-dialect speaking population of a region should be an innate skill by the time someone is in middle/high school. (non native speakers or transplants are a whole different ballgame, but I don't think that is what the author is discussing here)

BitWiseVibe 2y ago

> So when I ask them to code switch further into the recesses of linguistic history to read Shakespeare, the struggle is real. Reading difficult texts is how you get better at reading?? If students are not struggling at all they are not learning. But the author seems more interested in validating students identities or whatever than actually helping them learn.

ghaff 2y ago
In the Shakespeare case I’m not even sure reading plays in their entirety is the best way to gain exposure. Plenty of good and reasonably faithful film versions out there.
hnbad 2y ago
But Shakespeare is not "difficult", it's just extremely dated. Shakespeare was not at all difficult at the time, most of the plays would have been considered very easily accessible. They have a ton of simple humor and even puns. Most of them are just lost in translation because language has evolved in such a way that much of it no longer works and the cultural references are lost to time.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

I'm not sure the author actually disagrees with the point of the Atlantic article. She just takes it for granted that her students struggle to read things outside their native vernacular, can't do a close reading of anything longer than a short story, and refuse to read things that they don't find relevant to their personal lives. I'm glad that she's found a way to get her students reading the Odyssey anyway, but that's a bad set of constraints to be working with and it's unsurprising if other teachers have been less successful.

tengbretson 2y ago

> Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. This is an absurd dismissal.

nonameiguess 2y ago

It feels inappropriate for a teacher of English literature to be dismissing the western canon as a bunch of old white men droning on about shit no one cares about. If that's her attitude, her students are either going to pick it up themselves, or worse, if they've been reading from a young age and happen to actually love and enjoy the classics, they'll feel dismissed themselves as if their tastes are invalid in the modern era. A curriculum should update over time, but there's plenty of value in having a canon. It's a shared point of reference to create a common culture. Fashions, music, television to streaming video or whatever, might all change rapidly, but at least give parents and children something they're both familiar with. Beyond that, it can in and of itself create the kind of urbane cosmopolitan widening of one's circle of appreciation and belonging she seems to want kids to experience. Reading old material teaches you that there actually are common elements to all human experience. Even old white guys from hundreds of years ago had the same hopes, fears, desires, and bodily experiences you have. We're not so different from each other, let alone fully defined by our skin color and century of origin to the point that alien cultures can never have any hope of appreciating and empathizing with each other. Les Miserables is about inequality, poverty, abuses of law enforcement, overcoming modest beginnings to achieve great things, giving back to the less fortunate. How the fuck are these not relevant modern topics you'd want children to read about? Let them know these are not new concerns and even old white men might be more progressive and empathetic than you assume based purely on their age and skin color.

hnbad 2y ago
> It's a shared point of reference to create a common culture. Sure but if we're talking about the US why does that canon have to almost exclusively consist of European and white American authors? Modern America has a diversity of family histories so I'd expect its schools to cover a diversity of literary sources that reflect this. If it were just American authors, you might have a point, but _Les Mis_ is neither integral to American culture as it exists today nor to anything it was before. Something also tells me the kids don't need _Les Mis_ to learn to embrace social justice and oppose abuses of power. Speaking as a (not quite but getting there) old white man: if the kids need books to understand we might be progressive and empathetic, we've failed at being progressive and empathetic and they're right to think otherwise.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. Yikes! Homer and Dostoevsky were both (presumably) white men so they obviously have the exact same experiences. Diversity is more than skin color or genitalia- what a shallow take.

GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
They were both people of relative privilege within their own societies (in Dostoevsky’s case, at least in his youth). I have a strong feeling the author isn’t arguing any sort of racial or gendered essentialism - there is merit in acknowledging that media produced by those of privileged classes may carry certain attitudes or opinions that don’t necessarily speak effectively to different audiences.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  No, this is just plain and simple racism and sexism on the author's part.
  - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
    This seems a gross misreading of the authors intent.
scientator 2y ago
We have no reliable information about the identity of Homer. All we have are a variety of legends. But there are some decent arguments for thinking that Homer might have been a woman. We just don't know.

AlbertCory 2y ago

> Rather, my experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they’re rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made. There's never been a time when kids didn't demand things that are "relevant" to them. Soul on Ice and The Teachings of Don Juan certainly seemed more relevant than Macbeth 50 years ago. The fact is, they're not capable of deciding that. That's why they're in school. The teacher's job, which this person refuses to do, is to make the classics relevant. If you're one of the people repeating the facile, shallow, and dumb cliche that "the older generation has always been critical of the younger generation" then you are, ironically, part of the problem. You have no insights that younger people value, so of course they're going to ignore you.

techtalsky 2y ago

The author clearly needed to write the article they pitched, even if that wasn't supported by this source.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

While I have definitely seen many instances of reporters coming with a preconceived narrative, and then just wanting quotes that further that narrative, I could barely get through reading this article. The author seems to want to dump on competing narratives for why kids seem to have trouble with long form reading, but then brings all her own biases and essentially lays them out as fact with 0 evidence. Take early on in the article: > She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones. The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days, and no amount of old, out-of-context quotes taken from earlier "technological panics" will change that. I think the works and research of Jonathan Haidt do an excellent job digging into the effects of cell phones on kids. And don't even get me started on the "Kids don't want to read the old classics because they're dense and hard to read, they're just challenging the white male patriarchy!" Spare me...

someguydave 2y ago
“ The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days” Then it would be easy to furnish a few links to source this claim
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - someguydave 2y ago
    Haidt’s evidence is weak https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evidence-that-social-media-is-causing-the-teen-mental-health-crisis/ https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...
    - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      Haidt is not the only one with lots of evidence. This article got a lot of responses on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34993912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34993912 Edit: Also, Jonathan Haidt responded to the article you posted, and he also posted Aaron Brown's follow up to that: https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1664082247274713092 https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1664082247274713092

b800h 2y ago

I have to say that I'm delighted to see that so many readers on HN picked up on the dodgy argumentation and non-sequiturs in this blogpiece. Little by little it feels as though some sanity is creeping back into the world.

mrthrowaway999 2y ago
My very uncharitable take, but one that I have to entertain as potentially true, is that this is the exact skill some teachers want to deprive their students of.
- ghaff 2y ago
  It can get tiresome—but, reading as an adult, may have been one of the more interesting parts of the book as I was familiar with the Ahab thread 100x over.
crazydoggers 2y ago
Unfortunately it also feels like our tiny bubble of sanity and reason is rapidly shrinking (witness the current conspiracy laden reaction to hurricane Helene)

crazydoggers 2y ago

> Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system This is entirely the reason to read them. Literature is partly about opening up and expanding your perspectives, and challenging the reader. If you simply surround yourself in what’s comfortable and familiar you’re not exploring the depth of the human experience. And Hugo’s whole theme is about injustice and inequality. What it means to live in a society without sanitation, something that still exists in large swathes of the world. These are themes that continue to resonate. Just because he was a “old white man” does not negate the value of his literature. Instead this article reads as racists and ageist. So thanks to the Atlantic for continuing to bring up difficult subjects that make certain groups unhappy because they need to be pried from their insulated and privileged perspectives. As Hugo so eloquently writes: As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century — man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness — are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.

photochemsyn 2y ago

The Atlantic is the mouthpiece of the imperial Borg, and the editor-in-chief got his position there by writing dishonest drivel in 2002 about Saddam's WMDs and Saddam's links to Al Qaeda in order to whip up popular support for the invasion of Iraq. Here's the damning evidence (note in particular the failure to discuss Saddam's deployment of chemical weapons against Iranian troops with the active support of Reagan and Thatcher): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terror https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terr... As far as the Atlantic's take on the limits of acceptable literature at the high school level, it's not hard to understand if one can accept that their ideological grandfather was Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). His idea that 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' leads to the conclustion that, in an authoritarian state, education would be a continuation of the state’s political ideology. and the fundamental rationale of education would be to serve the state’s objectives. Thus, the Atlantic supports teaching a version of history, politics, and culture that aims to create loyalty to the state and its leadership as the primary goal of high school level education. From this viewpoint, 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' by James Loewen is heretical blasphemy. The alternative to rigid indoctination of students is to present them with multiple works with differing viewpoints and have them debate them on the merits - e.g. have them read Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' as well as Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' and let them come to their own conclusions. Also, stop excluding fantasy and science fiction literature from the academic curriculum! The Three-Body Problem is highly suitable for a high school literature course, for example. The challenge in today's environment is convincing people in elite institutions that liberal authoritarian ideology and censorship - e.g. banning Conrad because they see him as an old white racist - is as much of a threat to a free and open society as conservative authoritarian ideology is.

tacitusarc 2y ago

“The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences.” Gazing into a mirror is not generally a recipe for the growth we want in students. Kids are strongly influenced by the people around them, especially authority figures. I wonder how much her own views about long books written by old white men shape the views of her students.

chlodwig 2y ago

The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences....Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Equally frustrating is that her article implies that I was forced into that decision in order to pacify floundering students or submit to the demands of standardized testing. I found two of these three books on Lexile Hub and it looks like they are written at the level of Nancy Drew (Zoboi) and Harry Potter (Beah). So maybe they do like them better because they are much easier. I'm a little skeptical of the claim these books "reflect their lives and experiences" because they are about three different demographics, so at most, only one of the books could be speaking to the experiences of any given student. And frankly, I hated these kinds of books in school. Dickens and Vonnegut was the fun stuff. But at any rate, the traditional point of an education was not exactly relevancy, it was 1) to seem the commonalities of human nature even in very different circumstances and 2) to teach the texts that create a common culture. In a move as cliché as blaming standardized testing, Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. It seems too easy of a target to take seriously in the context of a major American journal like The Atlantic, but here we are. But she then she admits it is true: Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. Creating space for the joy and curiosity of reading is important work that high school teachers step up to every day, designing lessons to teach what once came naturally. Previous generations turned to reading as a leisure activity, so they had an innate sense for how to read in school and how to read sneakily under the covers way past bedtime. To summarize: Students are no longer reading for fun, they are using more casual language on social media, so instead of teaching kids challenging texts in school they have to focus on simply being able to read anything. A lot of this comes down to this teacher not believing that traditional Anglo-American civilization, or more broadly the Latin Christendom civilization, is worth teaching and preserving: From a similarly stodgy perspective, Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. ... As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate students’ identities. It used to be the point of a public education was to "melt" all the immigrant communities into one American identity. That meant enforcing a standard dialect. (And the same thing happened in many other countries, such as France). It is notable that the teacher no longer thinks this is a good thing. This really is a basic difference in values. It has been said about public policy, "We all want the same thing, we just have different ideas about how to get there." But in this case, we simply do not want all the same thing and there is no getting around that.

josefritzishere 2y ago

I have to agree with one of the points here that reading curricula has become mired in the archaic past. I would prefer that school cultivate a love for reading in general. Only good can come from young people reading and developing better reading comprehension skills. Offering them more modern reading material that they can connect with seems like the way to go.

briandear 2y ago

> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. This is ridiculous. Is the book less important, less valuable, because of who wrote it? Did the Odyssey last so long because it has little value. It was a “very old” book even in the 1500s. This essay reads like someone who argues with the teacher about the value of algebra. And speaking of math, most mathematical concepts are “very old” as well — doesn’t make them less valuable. Who wrote something is less important than what it says. Sounds to me like this essay writer is still young enough to think they know everything.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
> Is the book less important, less valuable, because of who wrote it? That is the underlying thesis of their protest: old white man bad.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

It's a submarine story pushing the "lack of diversity patriarchy is to blame" trope.