4 ms·

I have a radical insight on this topic: contemporary books and media are good and worth analysing and teaching to students. We are really biased towards old boo

I have a radical insight on this topic: contemporary books and media are good and worth analysing and teaching to students. We are really biased towards old books for some reason and old books have this quality of being completely un relatable. I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale. I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable, that I can understand, that I can have fun reading. Of course, it should not be too easy in which case there is nothing to gain from it academically. For example, a relatable contemporary book might cover contemporary problems like social media, teen angst, technology - this would sit better with high school students. We need to think: why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? What makes them an inherently worse choice than Charles Dickens? Game of Thrones certainly has intricate characters and a nice story line.

IAmBroom 1y ago
Read your first sentence as: "I have a racial insight on this topic", and it still mostly worked.
mjevans 1y ago
Something nice from a cyberpunk series would work well. Snow Crash comes to mind as an, offhand, likely safe enough for teens book that isn't boring.
- teddyh 1y ago
  Maybe if you censored out the underage sex?
  - stevenwoo 1y ago
    I reread that book recently and that immediately raised a red flag where the author makes it seems like the girl consents as in "well, I guess this is happening" then proceeds to portray her as a enjoying it and not really getting into the details of how a person/body may react regardless of a woman's (in this case) consent. This is much better portrayed in My Brilliant Friend with all the complexity of emotion of the victim towards the act and their reaction. I really wish if one thing could be changed about that book is just simply making the 15 year old character an adult.
  - mjevans 1y ago
    I do remember an attempted rape, but I didn't remember the underage part. Probably I was more focused on overpowering an attacker as a positive aspect. It was _many_ years ago that I read that book.
- novia 1y ago
  Yes, you should teach the book that has a sex scene between a 15 year old girl and a 30 year old man to high school students.
  - Der_Einzige 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - germinalphrase 1y ago
      I was a high school English teacher for a decade. While there are texts that may be taught at the grade 12 or AP level that include sex and sexuality, “Lolita” is not being “taught often” at the HS level. I’ve never known it to be discussed in the classroom. I’ve certainly never seen it assigned.
      - Der_Einzige 1y ago
        God damn why do you people sit in denial about this!!?!?!?!?!? Yes it is taught in a lot of high school classrooms in America and folks love to pontificate with their weird justifications for it! 1. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691255?af=R&mobileUi=0 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691255?af=... 2. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/05/14/teaching-lolita-still-appropriate-opinion https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/05/14/teaching-lol... 3. https://highschoolbooks.home.blog/2019/02/08/you-probably-shouldnt-read-lolita-in-high-school/ https://highschoolbooks.home.blog/2019/02/08/you-probably-sh... 4. https://www.thenabokovian.org/comment/71 https://www.thenabokovian.org/comment/71 5. https://www.aclu-or.org/en/news/lolita-and-freedom-read https://www.aclu-or.org/en/news/lolita-and-freedom-read
        aaronbaugher 1y ago
        There's a lot of denial about the state of schooling. Most adults assume the school they attended in their youth is basically the same today, or maybe a bit worse, but it couldn't possibly be exponentially worse.
bombcar 1y ago
There's an almost religious fight against "popular" books - they won't even consider thinking about reading the Lord of The Rings - let alone modern popular novels. Picking "old books" at least means you pick for some level of quality (usually) because they've lasted that long in print. You also don't need to get kids to read Harry Potter; they're already reading that on their own.
- chlodwig 1y ago
  Who in 2025 is actually against putting Lord of the Rings in the curriculum because it is too "popular" or not old enough? It's the same age as a lot of other classic high school texts (1984, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc.) And I think it's quality is actually even more appreciated now than when it became popular. It seems like it is just inertia keeping it out, plus most of the people who want to reform the curriculum want newer books than Lord of the Rings.
  - madcaptenor 1y ago
    Also you might want school texts to be relatively short. LOTR is not.
    - chlodwig 1y ago
      That is true! From what I have seen and heard from the schools around me, every year the assigned texts are getting shorter and with a lower reading level.
Symmetry 1y ago
Back when I read Dickens or Gatsby I hadn't read enough history to really understand what was going on because I'd was missing a lot of context that changed the meaning of events in the book. Gatsby could serve as launching point for learning about the history of the automobile, prohibition, traffic safety, attitudes towards Jews, New York development and geography, and a lot of other things.
- dehrmann 1y ago
  In college, I took a history class called Shakespeare's Kings where we read through most of the Henriad. It presented post-hoc, editorialized versions of history (the plays) against how we currently see it. It's too bad literature isn't generally approached this holistically.
chlodwig 1y ago
I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale. That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story. I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction. But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare > Game Of Thrones I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.
- jerf 1y ago
  "often some sort of depressing coming of age story." I think that while this isn't anywhere near the whole problem, the selection of books is very slanted in certain directions and that is a part of the problem. I'd call it "politics" but people would think I mean left/right, but that's not really what I'm referring to here... there are definitely some tendencies in the books chosen by literature teachers, by the type of people who would become literature teachers, and while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, they can end up badly overrepresented. You've got the broody coming of age stories (which is basically synonymous with "discovering how awful the world is"), the stories about how awful everything is and particularly how awful mankind is, the poems about how depressing everything is, the stories about how nihilistic the author is, the stories that make minimal sense on their own because they are just carrying "literary" symbolism as they make a depressing literary point, etc. A bit more diversity in some of the literature lists wouldn't go amiss... and again, I'm not really talking about "left/right" or the modern sense of the term, but just, casting a wider net in the general sense. It is not actually illegal or unethical for students to maybe occasionally enjoy a book in school. It is not invalid to maybe study a comedy, an actually funny comedy, in the pursuit of learning about humor, for instance.
peacebeard 1y ago
We teach old books because no one would ever agree on what new books to teach.
- memcg 1y ago
  This is what teachers told me when my sons were in high school 2004-2010. Any mention of drug use, sex or race would result in complaints from a few parents.
poulsbohemian 1y ago
>I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable Gatsby is a timeless story of class division. The upstart nouveau riche verses the entrenched institutionalists. You could write a version of it set in practically any time or culture.
nonameiguess 1y ago
There are plenty of very good reasons I can think of to standardize a curriculum as much as possible, not the least of which is the demand you're placing on 25 year-olds being paid $40k a year. They can't teach what they don't know themselves and they can't reasonably be expected to read in a level of detail necessary to teach every book every individual student might enjoy and prefer being taught. They can, on the other hand, become experts on an accepted canon that stays largely the same year to year. You're otherwise recreating the JavaScript framework treadmill that everyone here hates so much but for people earning 1/10th the salary.
- everybodyknows 1y ago
  Back in my HS days, there was a lot of individual choice of books allowed. Effort was tested by writing of "book reports". I read much of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that way. LLMs, unfortunately, can write you a "book report" on almost anything.
CalChris 1y ago
> why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or simply became a marketed franchise: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, …. What's even to teach in Harry Potter? Yes, reading it en masse is a YA shared experience but that's it. I've never heard a Harry Potter quote. OTOH, I noticed that Careless People alluded to and quoted Gatsby. Relatable is overrated. Books should be challenging but not too challenging. I remember reading Animal Farm at the perfect age but 1984 a year too soon. I tried reading Catch-22 in 7th grade but didn't get anything. Later, I read it 24 hours straight my first week in college, cackling the whole way through. I remember the assigned 'relatable' books if slightly. You will relate to this. That is the assignment. I remember them as characters being kind of my age, maybe even in my school. This is the reason I didn't like Catcher In The Rye. OTOH, Winston Smith was definitely not my age, definitely not in my school and unquestionably not me. Relatable books strike me as engineered epistemic closure. I want to know what the author thinks, not what the author thinks I think.
- ryathal 1y ago
  There's plenty of material in Harry Potter to serve as a useful book for the basics of literary analysis. The quotability isn't really relevant to that. There's bravery, slavery, love, loss, fascism, resistance, classism, racism, journalistic integrity, crime and punishment, the hero's journey, and more.

IAmBroom 1y ago

Read your first sentence as: "I have a racial insight on this topic", and it still mostly worked.

mjevans 1y ago

Something nice from a cyberpunk series would work well. Snow Crash comes to mind as an, offhand, likely safe enough for teens book that isn't boring.

teddyh 1y ago
Maybe if you censored out the underage sex?
- stevenwoo 1y ago
  I reread that book recently and that immediately raised a red flag where the author makes it seems like the girl consents as in "well, I guess this is happening" then proceeds to portray her as a enjoying it and not really getting into the details of how a person/body may react regardless of a woman's (in this case) consent. This is much better portrayed in My Brilliant Friend with all the complexity of emotion of the victim towards the act and their reaction. I really wish if one thing could be changed about that book is just simply making the 15 year old character an adult.
- mjevans 1y ago
  I do remember an attempted rape, but I didn't remember the underage part. Probably I was more focused on overpowering an attacker as a positive aspect. It was _many_ years ago that I read that book.
novia 1y ago
Yes, you should teach the book that has a sex scene between a 15 year old girl and a 30 year old man to high school students.
- Der_Einzige 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - germinalphrase 1y ago
    I was a high school English teacher for a decade. While there are texts that may be taught at the grade 12 or AP level that include sex and sexuality, “Lolita” is not being “taught often” at the HS level. I’ve never known it to be discussed in the classroom. I’ve certainly never seen it assigned.
    - Der_Einzige 1y ago
      God damn why do you people sit in denial about this!!?!?!?!?!? Yes it is taught in a lot of high school classrooms in America and folks love to pontificate with their weird justifications for it! 1. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691255?af=R&mobileUi=0 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691255?af=... 2. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/05/14/teaching-lolita-still-appropriate-opinion https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/05/14/teaching-lol... 3. https://highschoolbooks.home.blog/2019/02/08/you-probably-shouldnt-read-lolita-in-high-school/ https://highschoolbooks.home.blog/2019/02/08/you-probably-sh... 4. https://www.thenabokovian.org/comment/71 https://www.thenabokovian.org/comment/71 5. https://www.aclu-or.org/en/news/lolita-and-freedom-read https://www.aclu-or.org/en/news/lolita-and-freedom-read
      - aaronbaugher 1y ago
        There's a lot of denial about the state of schooling. Most adults assume the school they attended in their youth is basically the same today, or maybe a bit worse, but it couldn't possibly be exponentially worse.

bombcar 1y ago

There's an almost religious fight against "popular" books - they won't even consider thinking about reading the Lord of The Rings - let alone modern popular novels. Picking "old books" at least means you pick for some level of quality (usually) because they've lasted that long in print. You also don't need to get kids to read Harry Potter; they're already reading that on their own.

chlodwig 1y ago
Who in 2025 is actually against putting Lord of the Rings in the curriculum because it is too "popular" or not old enough? It's the same age as a lot of other classic high school texts (1984, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc.) And I think it's quality is actually even more appreciated now than when it became popular. It seems like it is just inertia keeping it out, plus most of the people who want to reform the curriculum want newer books than Lord of the Rings.
- madcaptenor 1y ago
  Also you might want school texts to be relatively short. LOTR is not.
  - chlodwig 1y ago
    That is true! From what I have seen and heard from the schools around me, every year the assigned texts are getting shorter and with a lower reading level.

Symmetry 1y ago

Back when I read Dickens or Gatsby I hadn't read enough history to really understand what was going on because I'd was missing a lot of context that changed the meaning of events in the book. Gatsby could serve as launching point for learning about the history of the automobile, prohibition, traffic safety, attitudes towards Jews, New York development and geography, and a lot of other things.

dehrmann 1y ago
In college, I took a history class called Shakespeare's Kings where we read through most of the Henriad. It presented post-hoc, editorialized versions of history (the plays) against how we currently see it. It's too bad literature isn't generally approached this holistically.

chlodwig 1y ago

I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale. That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story. I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction. But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare > Game Of Thrones I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.

jerf 1y ago
"often some sort of depressing coming of age story." I think that while this isn't anywhere near the whole problem, the selection of books is very slanted in certain directions and that is a part of the problem. I'd call it "politics" but people would think I mean left/right, but that's not really what I'm referring to here... there are definitely some tendencies in the books chosen by literature teachers, by the type of people who would become literature teachers, and while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, they can end up badly overrepresented. You've got the broody coming of age stories (which is basically synonymous with "discovering how awful the world is"), the stories about how awful everything is and particularly how awful mankind is, the poems about how depressing everything is, the stories about how nihilistic the author is, the stories that make minimal sense on their own because they are just carrying "literary" symbolism as they make a depressing literary point, etc. A bit more diversity in some of the literature lists wouldn't go amiss... and again, I'm not really talking about "left/right" or the modern sense of the term, but just, casting a wider net in the general sense. It is not actually illegal or unethical for students to maybe occasionally enjoy a book in school. It is not invalid to maybe study a comedy, an actually funny comedy, in the pursuit of learning about humor, for instance.

peacebeard 1y ago

We teach old books because no one would ever agree on what new books to teach.

memcg 1y ago
This is what teachers told me when my sons were in high school 2004-2010. Any mention of drug use, sex or race would result in complaints from a few parents.

poulsbohemian 1y ago

>I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable Gatsby is a timeless story of class division. The upstart nouveau riche verses the entrenched institutionalists. You could write a version of it set in practically any time or culture.

nonameiguess 1y ago

There are plenty of very good reasons I can think of to standardize a curriculum as much as possible, not the least of which is the demand you're placing on 25 year-olds being paid $40k a year. They can't teach what they don't know themselves and they can't reasonably be expected to read in a level of detail necessary to teach every book every individual student might enjoy and prefer being taught. They can, on the other hand, become experts on an accepted canon that stays largely the same year to year. You're otherwise recreating the JavaScript framework treadmill that everyone here hates so much but for people earning 1/10th the salary.

everybodyknows 1y ago
Back in my HS days, there was a lot of individual choice of books allowed. Effort was tested by writing of "book reports". I read much of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that way. LLMs, unfortunately, can write you a "book report" on almost anything.

CalChris 1y ago

> why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or simply became a marketed franchise: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, …. What's even to teach in Harry Potter? Yes, reading it en masse is a YA shared experience but that's it. I've never heard a Harry Potter quote. OTOH, I noticed that Careless People alluded to and quoted Gatsby. Relatable is overrated. Books should be challenging but not too challenging. I remember reading Animal Farm at the perfect age but 1984 a year too soon. I tried reading Catch-22 in 7th grade but didn't get anything. Later, I read it 24 hours straight my first week in college, cackling the whole way through. I remember the assigned 'relatable' books if slightly. You will relate to this. That is the assignment. I remember them as characters being kind of my age, maybe even in my school. This is the reason I didn't like Catcher In The Rye. OTOH, Winston Smith was definitely not my age, definitely not in my school and unquestionably not me. Relatable books strike me as engineered epistemic closure. I want to know what the author thinks, not what the author thinks I think.

ryathal 1y ago
There's plenty of material in Harry Potter to serve as a useful book for the basics of literary analysis. The quotability isn't really relevant to that. There's bravery, slavery, love, loss, fascism, resistance, classism, racism, journalistic integrity, crime and punishment, the hero's journey, and more.