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Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was importa

• gjvc 25d ago
  Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
  • hgomersall 25d ago
    It's also a story, and quite an enjoyable and well written one at that. My 8 year old son enjoyed being read it.
    • bluGill 25d ago
      As I recall about half my class enjoyed it, and half hated it. I have nothing wrong with you being in the half that liked it. However I remain in the half that didn't like it.
      • hackyhacky 25d ago
        Is the purpose of school to make you do things that you'll enjoy?
        • bluGill 25d ago
          That is one of the 3 purposes of school. The other two are to get a good job, and to make you a better citizen of the world... (there might be more, but those are the 3 I've come up with). Animal Farm tries to be the last, but the flaws in it mean I can't take it seriously and so it fails. Well maybe it soft of works because nearly everybody has read it, but again, the flaws are so bad I can't take anyone seriously who cites it and so I consider it a failure.
          • foldr 25d ago
            I think you're quite confused about what Animal Farm is. It's a short work of fiction. It's not something that you'd "cite" in support of a particular point, and it wasn't written with the intention of making the reader "a better citizen of the world". Of course it has obvious satirical and allegorical elements, but there's no He-Man-style PSA at the end of it.
            • bluGill 25d ago
              The purpose was to make a statement about communism which in turn means it was intended to be the last.
              • hackyhacky 25d ago
                > which in turn means it was intended to be the last. That's a bold and misguided assertion of authorial intent. Since you're a fan of the scientific method: you can please cite sources in support of your claim?
                • bluGill 25d ago
                  Read all the other replies. In particular foldr (sibling to yours) is a very good analysis that makes my point while looking like a rebuttal.
                  • 25d ago
    • zug_zug 24d ago
      You know that's not the chief goal -- if that's the chief goal, we'd all be assigned to watch Babe rather than read animal farm.
    • gjvc 15d ago
      look up allegory
  • foldr 25d ago
    One of the main reasons to encourage kids to read fiction is to expose them to stories outside their current experience. We don't get kids to read Treasure Island because they can inherently relate to a story about 18th century pirates. While it's true that the finer political nuances of Animal Farm are likely to be lost on most children, it's a perfectly comprehensible story in its own right, and it needn't be read narrowly as an allegory about Communism per se.
  • hackyhacky 25d ago
    > Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best. So, we shouldn't learn about history until we experience it ourselves? Seems like that would eliminate, uh, most of history. I haven't experienced the harsh realities of the Cretaceous period but I still like reading about dinosaurs.
    • gjvc 25d ago
      usual disingeous HN response. Nobody except you is talking about history. Today, the obvious communist societies are China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba perhaps the lesser-known of the bunch.
      • hackyhacky 25d ago
        > Nobody except you is talking about history. You're kind of missing the point of my comment. You said, in essence, that it's impossible to learn about Communism unless you've experienced it personally. > China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba Of those countries, how many have you experienced personally, and thus, by your standard, are qualified to comment on? To what extent is modern China actually Communist, as opposed capitalist-authoritarian?
• hackyhacky 25d ago
  >This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history You've misunderstood the purpose. Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe. You need the question before you can find the answer.
  • bluGill 25d ago
    Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans in general that it is hard to take any questions it provokes seriously. I can accept the impossible for the fun of it, but when something is impossible I don't take is serious. And it wasn't a good book in general.
    • hackyhacky 25d ago
      > Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans Which parts specifically of Animal Farm are untrue? Greed, hypocrisy, cruelty, avarice? Or the talking animals?
    • joenot443 25d ago
      Animal Farm is interesting partially because its satire is actually extremely poignant and directed; the characters are meant to represent the important actors in the Russian Revolution. Old Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin Snowball is Trotsky, etc. Regardless of ones nationality or politics, the story of Russia in 1917 remains one of the most fascinating in our worlds history. For a lot of people, myself included, Animal Farm served as a nice way of being introduced to the tale without getting bogged down by the specifics.
  • zug_zug 24d ago
    I've looked up animal farm in more detail, and it seems like you're fundamentally undereducated on the topic. Animal Farm entered Anglo-American classrooms in the late 1950s, and its adoption was heavily influenced by the Cold War political climate . The book was seen as "useful" for teaching, but its political utility was part of the appeal—it provided "an easy use... as an anti-Communist and anti-revolutionary lesson" . This wasn't just a grassroots phenomenon; it was actively encouraged by intelligence agencies. Both British and American intelligence services promoted the book as an anti-socialist message and supported its distribution . The CIA even arranged for a 1954 animated film adaptation that altered Orwell's story—emphasizing that animals on neighboring farms were content and changing the ending to have the animals overthrow the pigs . This film was widely shown in US and UK classrooms, embedding a distorted version of the story in the educational system for years
• foldr 25d ago
  Sounds like a problem of unrealistic expectations. I read Animal Farm when I was a kid and enjoyed it. No-one told me that it was going to profoundly change my life, and it didn't. Neither did my chemistry class, or my math textbooks, or most of the other stuff I learned in school. There's value in reading significant works of literature, both inherently and because it increases your ability to engage with long and complex texts. Obviously, reading Vanity Fair is not going to confer some kind of profound knowledge, or enable you to do anything in particular that you couldn't do before. I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
• jwrallie 25d ago
  It’s just the context. I grew up in a different culture and we all hated being forced to read at school, just different books. I enjoyed reading Animal Farm but it was something I picked up by myself, and read on my own terms.
  • deleted 25d ago
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  • zug_zug 24d ago
    I agree that a lot of what I didn't like about Animal Farm could have been fixed in a different context (deep dive into the theory of socialism as a classless society, overloading of the word communism, actual history of Russia and how it didn't achieve a classless society, history of Orwell as a person and his own political beliefs, exploration of Animal Farm as polemic tool and analysis of its effectiveness as a tool, analysis of how it's misunderstood today as a criticism of the idea of communism, McCarthyism and how Animal Farm was introduced to classroom during the coldwar) But here's my main thesis -- we have a situation where not-reading books is incentivized: In an information-rich environment, I just learned more about animal farm in 10 minutes by asking AI all of the above questions than I did in 10 hours of reading without proper context back in highschool. If reading itself (and not shaping the values of youth) is really just the goal, then we could solve this by assigning materials to kids that are likely to match their interests (I don't know slenderman, twilight, harry potter, ender's game, whatever).
    • jwrallie 23d ago
      My favorite book reading experience was one teacher that would just bring many of his books to the class and let us browse the collection and pick one by ourselves. Most classmates were competing for the ones with fewer pages, but I remember in one of these I took the thickest book as a personal challenge, and it was a bit more mature in content than I was used to. I was embarrassed when writing the report and purposefully did not mentioned the sex scenes, but it was very educational at my age. I also read Harry Potter before the first movie was released. Props to the informed teacher that included that one in the reading options before it became well known. Some parents forbid their kids from reading it for religious reasons, so I became immediately very curious. I think Harry Potter and the likes at school is a great idea, rarely seen in my country because they tried to push the classics on our local language, but that does not work well with the kids.
• 123-2dsh 25d ago
  Every human organization degrades into Animal Farm. It is just most obvious in communism. Every software developer above 35 has been in an org run by the pigs. You don't need a study. It is literally a profound lesson about life.
• rzerowan 25d ago
  Funnily enough most takes on the book misunderstand the point that was being made (probably due to Death of the author) . In his unpublished preface and subsequent analysis the view by Orwell , who was had Trotskyist leanings, his main critique is that they weren’t communisty enough but sellouts to capitalist tendancies, hence the analysis "Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.");"[1] Obviously once a work is in the public’s hands , interpretations may supersede even the authors original themes.Leaving it as a matter of interpretation/comprehension and generally accepted consensus. Incidentally a good measure of reading comprehension and analysis for the students studying he text. [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm