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> 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 D

> 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
    What good is flowery prose or outdated, verbose subject matter like Parisian sewer systems, if it actively discourages kids from reading it? Horses to water.
    - mrthrowaway999 2y ago
      But is it the matter or the teacher--their own approach or lack of ability--that discourages kids from reading? It's not clear which is the case here.
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      The point of reading education isn't just to get text in front of students' eyeballs. We're trying to develop the ability to read well, to effectively comprehend any text which you might encounter. There's quite a lot of things people might like to do in their lives that involve reading overly flowery or obnoxiously verbose text. Just yesterday I had to read a super dense and frankly poorly written document for work. If nobody had ever made me slog through something I didn't want to read in school, I suspect I would have been unable to comprehend it and might very well have not made it to the end at all.
      - soco 2y ago
        A problem might be the (missing) gradual approach, like hitting the kids with Les Miserables without getting them hooked on reading already with easier stuff. I'm also pretty sure there's enough good material speaking a more contemporary language and addressing more contemporary issues - it's not like the literary trove of the world is made of 5 good books only (or so I hope).
    - NeutralCrane 2y ago
      The goal isn’t just to get kids to look at a book. It’s to get them to stretch themselves and get better at something that is hard. The idea that you should have the kids read what is interesting to foster a love of reading and then they will be able to grow into mature reading habits as they grow has been around for a while now. As someone with a child in the 4/5th grader range, the effects are not pretty. When I was that age, the most popular books were shorter novels like Goosebumps and Animorphs, or longer novels like Redwall and Harry Potter. At my daughter’s school book fair a few weeks ago, it is almost exclusively graphic novels, be it childish slop like Dav Pilkey puts out, or simplified graphic novel versions of books like Goosebumps. Let’s be clear, stuff like Captain Underpants existed 30 years ago, but today it’s almost exclusively that. We haven’t created a generation of children who love to read, we’ve created a generation of children who largely, by middle school, haven’t graduated past picture books. Prescribing challenging reads is also to get kids used to the idea of doing something that might not be their choice of what they want to do, which is an important life skill to have as an adult. Education isn’t simply about learning math and phonics. It’s about learning how to be a human being who can function in society. Ask your educator friends about how the recent generation is doing, especially since the pandemic. It’s a dumpster fire, with kids never having been less equipped to do things like following instructions, interacting appropriately with classmates, or holding their focus for even small amounts of time. Simultaneously we are seeing employers increasingly wary of Gen Z employees due to their inability to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace. We are creating a curriculum based on the idea that kids should minimize having to do things they don’t want to do or might be difficult, and are now seeing a generation of children who are incapable of doing anything they don’t want to do or anything difficult, and it’s impacting their ability to function in society.
- jerf 2y ago
  "The canon" as most people would recite... Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, etc.... is now at least 60 years old, if not 100. It's a fuzzy thing, but it's certainly old. Merely being old is not a problem. Great literature is perhaps not literally "timeless", but it can survive being pulled out of its original context, and to the extent that students have to engage with a foreign context, that can be part of the point. However, that's 60-100 years of language shift since the canon was canonized, and that is a problem. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it's one that needs to be taken into account. I don't see anyone taking it into account, because if anyone questions the canon, they are obviously just a drooling arm-dragging uncultured buffoon who should be evicted from sophisticated society. But, you know, I'm in my mid-40s, and I've seen real, bona-fide language shifts in American English. Even the English of the 1980s is getting dated. Reading back into the 1950s will result in readers encountering a number of dead words. I remember reading in that era, and every celebrity seemed to be described as "indefatigable". One can assemble from the roots a good guess about what it probably means, and in this case, such a guess is correct, but you can't actually be sure without looking it up or reading it in a lot of contexts. When's the last time you saw an actor described as "indefatigable"? It doesn't take many of these sorts of things before you are unable to analyze, enjoy, or even necessarily comprehend the "great literature" because you're too busy just figuring what on Earth it is actually saying. It's hard to analyze subtext when you're a normal reader struggling to grasp the text. Of course, I say this into a culture that is still holding up the original Shakespeare as the sine qua non of Literature, despite the fact it is now over a century past the point that a "normal person" ought to be expected to comprehend it on a base level. If someone wants to teach Shakespeare to a modern teenager, it ought to be done in translation at this point. That I wouldn't mind; there's still a lot of "literature" in it that could be studied through a translation. But the idea that a teenager should be expected to read For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? and get anything out of it is just insane. At least 4 lines have a major vocabulary issue, more depending on what you expect from your teen. All the rest have at least minor issues, using words that are at least unusual in modern English, and many of them with connotations that are even more unusual if not dead. But 18th century literature is starting to read similarly to a modern teen, and 19th is a bigger stretch now than it was when I was young. It is not wrong to account for this in trying to figure out how to reach modern students, it's just realism.
- briandear 2y ago
  So the Odyssey was suitable for 2000 years. But suddenly now, it’s a problem? We’ve had new generators of learners every generation. Yet this current generation is apparently more special than the rest. Lazier is more like it. If someone TiKToc-ified the Odyssey, kids would be quoting it from memory.
  - ruraljuror 2y ago
    So you have pretty much the exact opposite position of the original article then (which does not suggest The Odyssey itself is a problem).
  - panarky 2y ago
    > So the Odyssey was suitable for 2000 years Historically, Homer's epics and other advanced texts were taught primarily to the top 5% to 10% of teenage students, specifically those from privileged social classes, in various classical education systems. However, it's only in the last 40 to 50 years that rigorous education has been expanded to include the remaining 90% to 95% of the teenage population through widespread public education reforms. It's misleading to label the current generation as uniquely lazy or incompetent. Instead, they're being challenged in ways that the vast majority of teenagers for the last 2000 years simply were not.
marsavar 2y ago
Absolutely. > They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences. This, I think, is the core argument of the piece. I find it depressing that a teacher thinks that books should reflect the readers' lived experiences. It's an incredibly narrow-minded view. Fran Lebowitz sums it up quite brilliantly in "Pretend it's a city": a book is not a mirror, it's a door.
- edgarvaldes 2y ago
  And I'm sure those "mirror" books exist. Are young students reading those?
mtalantikite 2y ago
> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue. I think the author is talking about the content of the literature more so than books being "more sophisticated" than others, whatever that means. I'm 40 and remember skimming through most of the books given to me in high school -- Les Miserables and Moby Dick included -- because I just didn't connect with them. But I read a ton on my own and was always in a bookstore or a library. I wouldn't call Les Miserables or some Dickens book any more or less "sophisticated" than what I was reading, and if kids are going to be more excited to read something contemporary, or a translation that updates things like Emily Wilson, I'm all for it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
You cut off that quote too soon: > 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. Ahh yes, you shouldn't have to read Dostoevsky because he was just an old white guy. FWIW when I was a kid I had to read the Odyssey and books like Beloved and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings in high school, so I think this article author is being a little selective with her examples.
- watwut 2y ago
  The quote is about literature being "confined" to it. Meaning the overall impression from the reading list you get is that literature is something of the past and concerns only certain race and gender. The comment refers to what Horowitch’s article counts as literature, not what your teacher/school system counted as a literature.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    It's ironic that in a comment section on an article bemoaning the death of reading comprehension, so many comments skim and miss points the author was making.
    - mcphage 2y ago
      Reading comprehension isn’t especially strong on this site, sadly.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        Well, it is a collection of individuals with the primary unifying skill set of being able to rapidly skim documentation (and produce correct results... most of the time).
nineplay 2y ago
Crime and Punishment and The Odyssey are two of my favorite works and I struggled to read Moby Dick in my 40s. I finished only out of a grim determination and with ( frankly ) a lot of skimming. Happy am I that I was never forced to read it for the sake of my GPA. I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  > I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading. I think it really depends on how it is taught. Also in my 40s, I recently read The Sun Also Rises while on vacation - I just had the feeling I wanted to read a "classic" book, and somehow I didn't have to read that book in high school. I hated the book. I kept waiting for a smidge of effort in wanting to make me care at all about any of the characters, and I just never found it. It was like being forced to go through someone's vacation photos for 10 hours straight, where most of the photos were of alcoholics drinking. But still, I'm glad I read it. I wanted to understand why Hemingway is considered a literary giant, and his writing style (especially his dialogue) was new and innovative at the time, and influenced lots of other writers. If teachers could help explain books in context (e.g. why is Moby Dick considered a classics novel to begin with) I think a lot of students would better appreciate what they're learning.
  - briandear 2y ago
    Hemingway is hard because people demand explicit. The story behind the obvious is what makes The Sun Also Rises so powerful. It defined the lost generation. It was the 1920s version of Clerks. I’m sure people read Hills Like White Elephants expecting to find an elephant in the story. Of course there is — a big one right there in the room.
    - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      > It was the 1920s version of Clerks. You should be a teacher :) I love that quote, and it's exactly what I'm talking about. Without the context of what the lost generation is/was, and without understanding how the generational trauma of WWI had such a strong influence on the interwar period, you lose a ton of understanding about how the book was so influential.
watwut 2y ago
When I was a student, which was a long time ago, general opinion of students was that these are boring books. Most students skimmed it or read those super shortened tl;dr which you could buy in bookstore. And that was time when reading for pleasure outside of school existed as a past time and quite a lot of those students read a lot by todays standards. Regardless of what "sophistication" in this context means. Moby Dick is not so much sophisticated as boring.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." That's still a pretty strong start. Especially for literature of the time.
  - themaninthedark 2y ago
    I was a voracious reader and was signed up for honors English Lit. The teacher gave us a test on Moby Dick, one of the questions was what was the main character's name. I didn't remember because it only appears right there at the beginning..... Still pretty bitter about that question.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      My favorite literary hack on that was Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, where he plays on your assumption that an intelligence that is human-like is actually human-shaped. It's a decent chunk of the book (told from their perspective!) before he starts sprinkling in things that make you realize they aren't actually human-shaped (or thinking) at all.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue. Even the kids with the greatest cognitive gifts, back in the 80s or 2000s or whenever you grew up and the standards were supposedly higher, and who are now or will be great parents raising great kids themselves, were not eager to read Les Miserables.
- pxc 2y ago
  I read Les Miserables for fun in high school. I was introduced to the story through the musical (maybe originally just a song from it), I think, and became curious about its origins and elements I might've missed in other depictions. I can't find my copy now, but it was one of the nice fancy hardcover Borders Classics editions, which afaict is a 600-something-page abridgment of Wilbour's 1862 translation. There were still some slow or awkward parts but I definitely enjoyed it overall. Moby Dick, though, I was assigned and did not read. If I'd been assigned Les Miserables and not Moby Dick, maybe it'd have gone the other way around. Anyway you're wrong that this never happens. Me and my friends growing up read Hugo and Dostoevsky and Kant and Hume and Dickens and Marx for fun, alongside lots of stuff outside the 'Western' literary and philosophical canons. And dated language is fun sometimes. It adds to a sense of place in the work, and often a lot of flavor. It can even be nostalgic, in a strange way— I recently started reading 3 different translations of Monkey King/Journey to the West. One of the translations is extremely contemporary in its language, which is great because it helps make a lot of jokes land well. But another is an audiobook recording from the 80s of a translation from the 1940s, and it's pleasantly nostalgic for me because it reminds me, just through its 'flavor', of already-outdated media for children that I encountered as a little kid— stuff like School-House Rock and claymation Christmas specials. It gives that presentation of the story a kind of soothing bedtime reading from a storybook vibe for me. Anyway, even challenging reading can be a lot of fun for kids if you let them choose the challenge and mostly stay out of their way after that (instead of, for example, nagging them with regular quizzes or forcing them to go over each sentence in agonizing detail in a group setting).
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    If a gifted kid chooses not to read Les Miserables, is that a more, or less, valid choice, compared to the same choice done by a more middle learner?
TravisPeacock 2y ago
The problem getting kids to read at all is that they are prescribed books and said "you need to read this". I hated a lot of the books I had to read in high school and I basically gave up on reading until well into adulthood (though, I do like a good long form article). Moby Dick isn't an enjoyable book. I'm ABLE to read it in the capacity sense but I'd rather sit and stare at the wall than do it. I read Corey Doctorow and read 3 of his books in 3 days. Is his work literary genius? No. But if you are reading and engaging your imagination who cares?

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
  What good is flowery prose or outdated, verbose subject matter like Parisian sewer systems, if it actively discourages kids from reading it? Horses to water.
  - mrthrowaway999 2y ago
    But is it the matter or the teacher--their own approach or lack of ability--that discourages kids from reading? It's not clear which is the case here.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    The point of reading education isn't just to get text in front of students' eyeballs. We're trying to develop the ability to read well, to effectively comprehend any text which you might encounter. There's quite a lot of things people might like to do in their lives that involve reading overly flowery or obnoxiously verbose text. Just yesterday I had to read a super dense and frankly poorly written document for work. If nobody had ever made me slog through something I didn't want to read in school, I suspect I would have been unable to comprehend it and might very well have not made it to the end at all.
    - soco 2y ago
      A problem might be the (missing) gradual approach, like hitting the kids with Les Miserables without getting them hooked on reading already with easier stuff. I'm also pretty sure there's enough good material speaking a more contemporary language and addressing more contemporary issues - it's not like the literary trove of the world is made of 5 good books only (or so I hope).
  - NeutralCrane 2y ago
    The goal isn’t just to get kids to look at a book. It’s to get them to stretch themselves and get better at something that is hard. The idea that you should have the kids read what is interesting to foster a love of reading and then they will be able to grow into mature reading habits as they grow has been around for a while now. As someone with a child in the 4/5th grader range, the effects are not pretty. When I was that age, the most popular books were shorter novels like Goosebumps and Animorphs, or longer novels like Redwall and Harry Potter. At my daughter’s school book fair a few weeks ago, it is almost exclusively graphic novels, be it childish slop like Dav Pilkey puts out, or simplified graphic novel versions of books like Goosebumps. Let’s be clear, stuff like Captain Underpants existed 30 years ago, but today it’s almost exclusively that. We haven’t created a generation of children who love to read, we’ve created a generation of children who largely, by middle school, haven’t graduated past picture books. Prescribing challenging reads is also to get kids used to the idea of doing something that might not be their choice of what they want to do, which is an important life skill to have as an adult. Education isn’t simply about learning math and phonics. It’s about learning how to be a human being who can function in society. Ask your educator friends about how the recent generation is doing, especially since the pandemic. It’s a dumpster fire, with kids never having been less equipped to do things like following instructions, interacting appropriately with classmates, or holding their focus for even small amounts of time. Simultaneously we are seeing employers increasingly wary of Gen Z employees due to their inability to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace. We are creating a curriculum based on the idea that kids should minimize having to do things they don’t want to do or might be difficult, and are now seeing a generation of children who are incapable of doing anything they don’t want to do or anything difficult, and it’s impacting their ability to function in society.
jerf 2y ago
"The canon" as most people would recite... Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, etc.... is now at least 60 years old, if not 100. It's a fuzzy thing, but it's certainly old. Merely being old is not a problem. Great literature is perhaps not literally "timeless", but it can survive being pulled out of its original context, and to the extent that students have to engage with a foreign context, that can be part of the point. However, that's 60-100 years of language shift since the canon was canonized, and that is a problem. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it's one that needs to be taken into account. I don't see anyone taking it into account, because if anyone questions the canon, they are obviously just a drooling arm-dragging uncultured buffoon who should be evicted from sophisticated society. But, you know, I'm in my mid-40s, and I've seen real, bona-fide language shifts in American English. Even the English of the 1980s is getting dated. Reading back into the 1950s will result in readers encountering a number of dead words. I remember reading in that era, and every celebrity seemed to be described as "indefatigable". One can assemble from the roots a good guess about what it probably means, and in this case, such a guess is correct, but you can't actually be sure without looking it up or reading it in a lot of contexts. When's the last time you saw an actor described as "indefatigable"? It doesn't take many of these sorts of things before you are unable to analyze, enjoy, or even necessarily comprehend the "great literature" because you're too busy just figuring what on Earth it is actually saying. It's hard to analyze subtext when you're a normal reader struggling to grasp the text. Of course, I say this into a culture that is still holding up the original Shakespeare as the sine qua non of Literature, despite the fact it is now over a century past the point that a "normal person" ought to be expected to comprehend it on a base level. If someone wants to teach Shakespeare to a modern teenager, it ought to be done in translation at this point. That I wouldn't mind; there's still a lot of "literature" in it that could be studied through a translation. But the idea that a teenager should be expected to read For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? and get anything out of it is just insane. At least 4 lines have a major vocabulary issue, more depending on what you expect from your teen. All the rest have at least minor issues, using words that are at least unusual in modern English, and many of them with connotations that are even more unusual if not dead. But 18th century literature is starting to read similarly to a modern teen, and 19th is a bigger stretch now than it was when I was young. It is not wrong to account for this in trying to figure out how to reach modern students, it's just realism.
briandear 2y ago
So the Odyssey was suitable for 2000 years. But suddenly now, it’s a problem? We’ve had new generators of learners every generation. Yet this current generation is apparently more special than the rest. Lazier is more like it. If someone TiKToc-ified the Odyssey, kids would be quoting it from memory.
- ruraljuror 2y ago
  So you have pretty much the exact opposite position of the original article then (which does not suggest The Odyssey itself is a problem).
- panarky 2y ago
  > So the Odyssey was suitable for 2000 years Historically, Homer's epics and other advanced texts were taught primarily to the top 5% to 10% of teenage students, specifically those from privileged social classes, in various classical education systems. However, it's only in the last 40 to 50 years that rigorous education has been expanded to include the remaining 90% to 95% of the teenage population through widespread public education reforms. It's misleading to label the current generation as uniquely lazy or incompetent. Instead, they're being challenged in ways that the vast majority of teenagers for the last 2000 years simply were not.

marsavar 2y ago

Absolutely. > They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences. This, I think, is the core argument of the piece. I find it depressing that a teacher thinks that books should reflect the readers' lived experiences. It's an incredibly narrow-minded view. Fran Lebowitz sums it up quite brilliantly in "Pretend it's a city": a book is not a mirror, it's a door.

edgarvaldes 2y ago
And I'm sure those "mirror" books exist. Are young students reading those?

mtalantikite 2y ago

> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue. I think the author is talking about the content of the literature more so than books being "more sophisticated" than others, whatever that means. I'm 40 and remember skimming through most of the books given to me in high school -- Les Miserables and Moby Dick included -- because I just didn't connect with them. But I read a ton on my own and was always in a bookstore or a library. I wouldn't call Les Miserables or some Dickens book any more or less "sophisticated" than what I was reading, and if kids are going to be more excited to read something contemporary, or a translation that updates things like Emily Wilson, I'm all for it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

You cut off that quote too soon: > 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. Ahh yes, you shouldn't have to read Dostoevsky because he was just an old white guy. FWIW when I was a kid I had to read the Odyssey and books like Beloved and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings in high school, so I think this article author is being a little selective with her examples.

watwut 2y ago
The quote is about literature being "confined" to it. Meaning the overall impression from the reading list you get is that literature is something of the past and concerns only certain race and gender. The comment refers to what Horowitch’s article counts as literature, not what your teacher/school system counted as a literature.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  It's ironic that in a comment section on an article bemoaning the death of reading comprehension, so many comments skim and miss points the author was making.
  - mcphage 2y ago
    Reading comprehension isn’t especially strong on this site, sadly.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Well, it is a collection of individuals with the primary unifying skill set of being able to rapidly skim documentation (and produce correct results... most of the time).

nineplay 2y ago

Crime and Punishment and The Odyssey are two of my favorite works and I struggled to read Moby Dick in my 40s. I finished only out of a grim determination and with ( frankly ) a lot of skimming. Happy am I that I was never forced to read it for the sake of my GPA. I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading. I think it really depends on how it is taught. Also in my 40s, I recently read The Sun Also Rises while on vacation - I just had the feeling I wanted to read a "classic" book, and somehow I didn't have to read that book in high school. I hated the book. I kept waiting for a smidge of effort in wanting to make me care at all about any of the characters, and I just never found it. It was like being forced to go through someone's vacation photos for 10 hours straight, where most of the photos were of alcoholics drinking. But still, I'm glad I read it. I wanted to understand why Hemingway is considered a literary giant, and his writing style (especially his dialogue) was new and innovative at the time, and influenced lots of other writers. If teachers could help explain books in context (e.g. why is Moby Dick considered a classics novel to begin with) I think a lot of students would better appreciate what they're learning.
- briandear 2y ago
  Hemingway is hard because people demand explicit. The story behind the obvious is what makes The Sun Also Rises so powerful. It defined the lost generation. It was the 1920s version of Clerks. I’m sure people read Hills Like White Elephants expecting to find an elephant in the story. Of course there is — a big one right there in the room.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    > It was the 1920s version of Clerks. You should be a teacher :) I love that quote, and it's exactly what I'm talking about. Without the context of what the lost generation is/was, and without understanding how the generational trauma of WWI had such a strong influence on the interwar period, you lose a ton of understanding about how the book was so influential.

watwut 2y ago

When I was a student, which was a long time ago, general opinion of students was that these are boring books. Most students skimmed it or read those super shortened tl;dr which you could buy in bookstore. And that was time when reading for pleasure outside of school existed as a past time and quite a lot of those students read a lot by todays standards. Regardless of what "sophistication" in this context means. Moby Dick is not so much sophisticated as boring.

ethbr1 2y ago
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." That's still a pretty strong start. Especially for literature of the time.
- themaninthedark 2y ago
  I was a voracious reader and was signed up for honors English Lit. The teacher gave us a test on Moby Dick, one of the questions was what was the main character's name. I didn't remember because it only appears right there at the beginning..... Still pretty bitter about that question.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    My favorite literary hack on that was Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, where he plays on your assumption that an intelligence that is human-like is actually human-shaped. It's a decent chunk of the book (told from their perspective!) before he starts sprinkling in things that make you realize they aren't actually human-shaped (or thinking) at all.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue. Even the kids with the greatest cognitive gifts, back in the 80s or 2000s or whenever you grew up and the standards were supposedly higher, and who are now or will be great parents raising great kids themselves, were not eager to read Les Miserables.

pxc 2y ago
I read Les Miserables for fun in high school. I was introduced to the story through the musical (maybe originally just a song from it), I think, and became curious about its origins and elements I might've missed in other depictions. I can't find my copy now, but it was one of the nice fancy hardcover Borders Classics editions, which afaict is a 600-something-page abridgment of Wilbour's 1862 translation. There were still some slow or awkward parts but I definitely enjoyed it overall. Moby Dick, though, I was assigned and did not read. If I'd been assigned Les Miserables and not Moby Dick, maybe it'd have gone the other way around. Anyway you're wrong that this never happens. Me and my friends growing up read Hugo and Dostoevsky and Kant and Hume and Dickens and Marx for fun, alongside lots of stuff outside the 'Western' literary and philosophical canons. And dated language is fun sometimes. It adds to a sense of place in the work, and often a lot of flavor. It can even be nostalgic, in a strange way— I recently started reading 3 different translations of Monkey King/Journey to the West. One of the translations is extremely contemporary in its language, which is great because it helps make a lot of jokes land well. But another is an audiobook recording from the 80s of a translation from the 1940s, and it's pleasantly nostalgic for me because it reminds me, just through its 'flavor', of already-outdated media for children that I encountered as a little kid— stuff like School-House Rock and claymation Christmas specials. It gives that presentation of the story a kind of soothing bedtime reading from a storybook vibe for me. Anyway, even challenging reading can be a lot of fun for kids if you let them choose the challenge and mostly stay out of their way after that (instead of, for example, nagging them with regular quizzes or forcing them to go over each sentence in agonizing detail in a group setting).
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  If a gifted kid chooses not to read Les Miserables, is that a more, or less, valid choice, compared to the same choice done by a more middle learner?

TravisPeacock 2y ago

The problem getting kids to read at all is that they are prescribed books and said "you need to read this". I hated a lot of the books I had to read in high school and I basically gave up on reading until well into adulthood (though, I do like a good long form article). Moby Dick isn't an enjoyable book. I'm ABLE to read it in the capacity sense but I'd rather sit and stare at the wall than do it. I read Corey Doctorow and read 3 of his books in 3 days. Is his work literary genius? No. But if you are reading and engaging your imagination who cares?