5 ms·

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 port

• 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    What good is flowery prose or outdated, verbose subject matter like Parisian sewer systems, if it actively discourages kids from reading it?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.
      • NoGravitas 2y ago
        > Simultaneously we are seeing employers increasingly wary of Gen Z employees due to their inability to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace. What I've seen of Gen Z suggests less an inability and more an unwillingness to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace. And good for them. The workplace remains an unquestioned reservoir of authoritarianism in our culture, and I'd love to see the young people dismantle it.
    • mrkstu 2y ago
      There are plenty of abridged versions of Les Misérables that includes all the parts relevant to the student reader and retains the appropriate level of challenge in leveling up the student's ability to engage with higher level writing.
      • mtalantikite 2y ago
        I think the point the author is making is why choose Les Miserables, even in an abridged format, if the kids would respond better to something more contemporary. There's no shortage of phenomenal writing from the past 50 years. So many of the books in the "canon" they teach kids are so boring that I have a hard time believing anyone isn't lying when they say they sat through something like "In Search of Lost Time".
  • munchbunny 2y ago
    > No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose. I disagree with that take on sophistication. As a counterexample, Hemingway's work is a masterclass on sophisticated prose done with minimal language, but I wouldn't want to read Pride and Prejudice in Hemingway's style. There isn't one yardstick for "sophistication". The Odyssey is an interesting example of this (and one the author uses). I was taught the Fagles translation. That translation is not easy to read, and in many ways its choice of language is a distraction from studying the literature. I wouldn't pick that translation for my own children, even if I feel that they should at some point study The Odyssey, which I do. We should be treating these works as what they are: literary classics, but in a historic dialect, where part of the literary exercise is the archeological/anthropological dig through the prose. As far as I can tell, that's how the author is approaching it, and I don't think calling it out that way is lowering any bar.
    • pxc 2y ago
      To me, 'sophisticated' connotes complexity in a way that means I'd never use it to describe something extremely simple or minimal, including Hemingway's prose— even if it meets the definition of another sense of the word. I might use other adjectives to praise it, but not 'sophisticated'. And I think any reasonable curriculum should include some 'sophisticated' texts in the narrower sense described above. I actually don't think that sophistication in the sense of worldliness is as important a thing to try to ensure in this kind of curriculum. That's more a matter of fashion or ingroup signaling than any textual feature, and you'll get it for free in any school curriculum anyway— preexisting canons will impose themselves one way or another and demonstrating fluency in the canon is the main thing that evinces sophistication (divorced from complexity) in a text (or a student, for that matter). I agree with the rest of what you're saying, though.
• 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.