Comment by bgbntty2 2 days ago
I should've used "archaic" instead of "outdated".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 think you are missing the broader point: why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with? It's not as if there is a dearth of more modern works. It seems like the main function of selecting older works is to make it artificially harder for students to read.
> why should one read things occurring in an alien context to begin with?
I think there's a trivial answer which is that all things you encounter are fundamentally from an alien context. The degree of alien and intention of the action are the things to consider before proceeding.
For example, why would one choose to read the account of a survivor of tragedy? To develop some amount of (emotional or cognitive) empathy? To learn a broader way of thinking that could apply to a future situation? Most simply: to learn from the past.
If the goal is entertainment, evaluate your participation such that you maximize your utility. If the goal is learning, one should be wary of premature rejection without sufficient context to avoid missing the lesson. And there is an annoying reality in which most situations can teach something.
I'm using "context" in the sense of GP as to why it is hard to read e.g. Beowulf. Certainly one could find a modern account of a survivor of tragedy that would be more approachable? But in any case, accounts of tragedies of survivors are not the sort of material one finds in an English class, which is what's being criticized here (and indeed reading such accounts would probably be an improvement for the reasons you give).
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
I sometimes take pleasure at reading old language ... and still think that giving it to kids as introduction to reading is absurd.
If they read 10 interesting books a year adding one like that to the mix or offer them the option is great. If they did not encountered interesting bool after agw of 7 when parents stopped reading them, no.
And interesting books for kids are there. Plenty of them of all kind, including pure action/adventure stuff. Including those related to movies or games they play. It is not lack of resources.
> and still think that giving it to kids as introduction to reading is absurd.
But that is not what is happening. Introduction to reading happens pre-school to class two, historic books come from say class 6 onwards.
> But that is not what is happening. Introduction to reading happens pre-school to class two, historic books come from say class 6 onwards.
That is exactly what is happening. The pre-schooler do not really read books, that is an absurd claim. They puzzle out words and sentences. It takes so much effort, they loose attention one paragraph in and dont really recall what happened on the last page.
Giving historic books to grade 6 is exactly the absurd thing that will convince them books cant be fun. It will become totality of their reading and the idea that reading books could be fun will be lost on them entirely.
And unless the parents really went out of their way to introduce them to interesting books, to try again and again with different books, you are loosing them with that entirely. Because this will be the only book they read last 4 months which is "forever" at that age.
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...