Comment by stevewodil 2 days ago
I don’t know if this matters much. When I was in school it was rare to actually read a book assignment anyways, and I’m sure with LLMs now it’s less.
I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
I read a lot of books that fit my tastes as a kid, usually adventure/fantasy genre stuff.
Never enjoyed the stuff that got assigned in school though. I’d probably like it now.
It is not just it being homework. It is not like I hated evything in school - I actually discovered quite a few intersting things there.
It is that books everyone here is said that kids dont read anymore or brags they read ... are just not interesting books for a kid.
That was my problem too. Not in the US but in Europe. The stuff we had to read was all by 'highly acclaimed: authors who have carved out this niche of 'literature art ' between them.
However their books were dusty, tough, whiny and horrible to get through. Yuck. I never read fiction in my own language ever again just in spite.
I'm older than you (graduated high school in 1975). I read tons of sci-fi as a kid. I also don't remember reading any whole novels for English class. Maybe we did, but if so I have successfully blocked them out.
I have been amazed at the number of houses I've been in over the years which didn't appear to contain a single book.
I graduated high school in '92 (S.F. Bay Area) and can recall several assigned books we read for class in either junior high or high school. I think there were more, but these are the ones I can recall easily today.
Pride and Prejudice. Last of the Mohicans. A Separate Peace. Tom Jones. Beowulf. Grendel. Crime and Punishment. Waiting for Godot. Tale of Two Cities.
Also, several Shakespeare plays, though I am no longer sure which were read when.
We also had other reading assignments where we chose our own books. The above were assigned to everyone.
interesting. Assuming you're talking about high school I had a totally different experience, we were assigned maybe 6 books/semester for the year I spent in mainstream classes (and about double that when I did the IB program but I expected that to be uncommon)
It doesn’t happen anymore because of phones and the internet. Most people in the past read because they had nothing to do and they were willing to invest the time into a good book. You sacrifice a lot of energy in order to get enjoyment from a book.
Now with the internet there’s an unlimited stream of zero investment snippets of entertainment. People naturally dive into that because it’s more rational in the short term to do that.
Schools stopped reading but it’s as a result of the way students behave. The causal driver is student behavior.
Good point. I am old enough to have lived in a pre smartphone time. Hour long train rides would mean folks opened up a book or newspaper.
> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives
The problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.
The kids don't hate classroom reading because of the reading; they hate it because of the associated curriculum. “Why were the curtains blue?” is a skill wasted on children. I only gained an appreciation for such meta-reading during a weeks-long TV Tropes bender during a spat of unemployment after getting fired from my first big-boy job.
Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.
If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.
> 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant
The foundation of the mystery novel.
The blue curtains has become an almost deranged meme at this point, completely disconnected from either curricula or evaluation. Students are not asked why singular descriptive details are chosen as such.
Being able to perform critical analysis of text is an essential skill today. It might be more essential now than any other moment in history. Understanding how narrative writing uses symbols translates cleanly into understanding how political messaging or any persuasive writing uses symbols.
If the purpose is reading then we let kids read books that they like.
I can read a 1000 page history book but after 50 pages of Dutch literature I want to throw it in the garbage bin. High school KILLS reading. Few survive.
Now that creating written works is trivial, the new skill to have would be figuring out if what you are reading has an ulterior motive, such as advertising.
Or even figuring out if it was created with the intent to have any utility at all for the reader.
Other than avoiding any written works made after 2020, I am not sure what to tell my kids. Even trusting the claim that something was written after 2020 seems difficult, unless you have a physical print showing its age.
My experience was a self-admitted outlier but it started by being read to frequently as a small child, before school started. I could technically read for as long as I could remember but reading by myself was boring compared to being read to due to having a very short attention span then.
Start literacy young and the discovery of reading for fun will be easy and natural.
> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.
I don't understand this. If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading? Or are we taking about kids who never read until school forced them to?
From what I understand, if parents read to kids when they are little, they become readers who enjoy it.
> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading?
I nearly did to me, or atleast the continual assignments did. It took a long time for me to pick up a fiction book again. School never assigned me technical writing and encyclopedias, so I continued to enjoy those, thankfully.
> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading?
Yes. (n=1)
Yes, because it amounts to several hours long homework. Kids are more slower then adults at reading, so this can easily amount to 10 hours of additional homework which you do on top of usual homework.
So yes, if you spent 10 hours reading a book you don't care about this week, you don't feel like reading something else. You feel like you spent awful lot of time reading already and feel like reading is something like vacuum cleaning - duty but not something you do for fun.
I think school ruined fiction books for me. I had to read long boring books about stories that didn't interest me, with useless sentences describing what the scene looked like or what someone had for dinner. Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases.
Maybe if I wasn't forced to read a book in an outdated language about some Christian farmer 300 years ago while I was not in school, and if I could access a succinct version 1/10th of the length of the book, I'd read it.
Maybe if I wasn't asked to describe minor details to prove I read the book, I'd actually focus on the story and not on every irrelevant detail.
Maybe if my teacher didn't force their religious holier-than-thou attitude and allowed us to form our own opinions, I'd be more engaged.
What school taught me was how to get away with not reading the books. I skimmed books by skipping tens of pages at a time or asked friends for the TL;DR or just got an F.
Now I have a feeling of uneasiness and dread when I try to read fiction for fun. So I don't.
Most 300 page fiction books I had to read could've easily been condensed to 30 pages without any loss of information.
Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit. A lot of people won't care about poetry no matter how hard you try to force them to like it. And half of it was propaganda - how $nation survived $struggle, how $nation is so great or beautiful or how $hero did $ethical_thing.
As a native US English speaker, I enjoyed Shakespeare and even when we read Beowulf and some Chaucer in mildly transcribed and annotated Middle English. More than any history lesson, it developed in me a feeling for how, in spite of lots of technological and other societal change, the basic human condition is the same.
I imagine it would be interesting to read early texts in other proto languages too. Sadly, I'm not a polyglot and can't really access that experience first-hand.
I graduated from public school a long time ago. I hated Shakespeare. The phrasing and Englishness of it was a complete turn off. And I read a lot. I believe I read almost a fourth of the books in my little public library in my rural town in Texas. As far as writing, I admire the writing in the King James Bible more than Shakespeare although I am Catholic. I would say most of the books I read were crap and written poorly.
>I would say most of the books I read were crap and written poorly.
So you've encountered Sturgeon's Law[0] in the wild. It applies to pretty much everything, so perhaps you might broaden your focus when considering that.
Were you aware that this is actually a thing?
> Most of the stories and themes were outdated and didn't have enough context to make them understandable. Some books even used outdated words and phrases.
no cap Mr Darcy ur parties are bussin fr fr
I should've used "archaic" instead of "outdated". As in, "incomprehensible to someone speaking proper modern $language". Without a dictionary, a normal student couldn't understand what was being said in many sentences throughout the book. Some books actually had a dictionary in the end, but not for all the archaic words and phrases.
I was intrigued by the idea that it might be unreasonable for a book to include a glossary or dictionary to explain usages for made up or unfamiliar terms. I like that this list [1] exists because I was struggling to think of such a book. But then I thought about The Lord of the Rings, and it even includes an index of terms among its appendices, which is something I remember using to revisit parts of the story when I first read it. Another book with a glossary of terms is Dune, which I found fun and reasonable to avoid trying to explain hierarchy where doing so would break the narrative flow. But maybe that just means it's not as cleverly constructed or organized as it could have been--but the trade-off has to be how to engage a wide selection of readers...
Is the complaint about the dictionary at the end because it wasn't comprehensive? I'm unreasonably curious about the book and which phrases were included and which were not.
I think all written works occur in a context that should be taken into account when thinking critically about them. That context is temporal and linguistic and is more apparent when you consider something like Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Understanding it requires either a modern reinterpretation or consideration given to the sociolinguistic context in which it was written.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/180823.Novels_with_Gloss...
God forbid we learn new words or learn words form the past... Why even bother with history right? It's just old stuff anyways let's focus on new stuff, what could these old things teach us anyways
Meanwhile my grandma still knew how to speak Latin at 70+, which she learned in school as a teenager
It is interesting how everyone parrots that art is important when the vast majority of the population will never actually engage with it.
Opera? Ballet? Literature? Poetry? Classical music? Modern art?
Do the numbers it seems most people can do without them and still be functional.
Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.
> Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.
That's the thing, though - in English literature class, there is nothing stopping the teacher from using popular media to introduce things like tone, ambiance, character motivations, arcs, etc, and then ask for parallels to the set works.
They don't do it though, the system is not set up to produce a bunch of critical thinkers from English Lit.
Yes! Art that's taught in school and that is "required" to know if you want to appear intelligent or fancy is just what GP posted.
But art is also:
* electronic music (if you're not aware, it's not just repetitive dum-dum-dum for 8 minutes, although I enjoy that style, as well);
* rap (it's not just guns, drugs and mysoginy);
* all the other music genres, of course, but I gave electronic music and rap as examples because they're usually treated badly by people who're not familiar with them;
* games (I've been emotionally moved by many flash games, let alone new immersive games);
* movies, series - live action or western animation or anime.
Yet, in school we either learned about classical composers, or about regional composers. Only once, around 10th grade, we had a cool music teacher who played other genres for us - Fat Boy Slim, random metal groups, even a few pretty out-there experimental things. Much better than learning about some composer who lived 50 years ago just because he is from the same country as you.
Same for paintings and similar art. What good does it do a 7th grader to look at Picasso? The context matters, but for people who don't care about such art, it's useless. I won't feel better if I can "intelligently" discuss the art scene in $nation in $year. I have, later in life, read interesting articles that actually mix politics and life in general with the art that was "allowed" to flourish. Like art in Soviet Russia. But that context, if it was given at all, didn't mean anything to a 7th grader, especially if they didn't learn about Soviet Russia in history before the art class. In my experience my education was all over the place.
Agreed. Not to mention the techniques and technical knowhow to create this “lesser” art is far more advanced and requires far more effort then the snobbish art they teach in school.
So you cut off your nose to spite your face.
Good job!
Do you smash your windows when it's cloudy outside too?
You're blaming others for your lack of interest and failings.
I'm glad I don't know you.
> Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit.
Yes and no. I used to start reading at 4 years old, but I forcedly used to memorize some rhymes at 3 years old. Most folk don't believe it is possible to read so early (though Eliezer Yudkowsky has reported about similar age). But my point is - how would I learn reading so early without that poetry?
I don't really like poetry exactly as rest of the fiction genre. And I am still sure it is not shit even for those who are struggling of doing that. I consider poetry exercises as sport exercises: today you claim that some specific muscle is not important for you, but tomorrow you get some injury which happened because of some weak muscle.
But you have also said one important word - propaganda. This is what really shitting any education and propaganda seems like the monster from the Nitzsche's quote "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster".
I also learned to read at 3. I actually remember the switch from illiterate to literate, as I remember realizing that just by looking at road signs I would automatically read them. I told my sister, who couldn't read yet, that there was a downside, as you could never look at language without reading it ever again!
I think 4 IS early, but not that uncommon. 5-6 is typically without it being forced.
Nobody believes this, but I have VHS evidence of myself reading at 2
I read non-fiction all the time. HN and reddit comments, news articles, Wikipedia articles, books, research papers. My ADHD doesn't help, but doesn't prevent me from finishing 300-page books that are actually interesting. I have yet to find a fiction book that's not full of fluff.
I've read a couple of scripts for movies and TV, and they're, by far, much better than fiction books for me. Just more condensed, more to-the-point.
That's not to say that I admit I can't finish (or even start) a fiction book now. They're ruined for me. But I don't care.
It’s odd, I read ravenously as a kid/teen, as did my siblings. You need to read what you enjoy, and for it to not be forced. (For example, summer reading at the library gave out prizes kids cared about for reading books.) Plus, we didn’t have access to much digital media like TV/video games (though it was the early 2010s) because my parents were strict, so books were a solid source of entertainment.