What's the point? Math has clear purpose. I do enjoy some books. I just didn't get the point of studying them beyond reading. Why are they babbling about ? Is there any use for this information or is it just a torture in memorization? Why would I ever care about all these abstract literature terms?
Ironically they missed telling the meta story: why would anyone care about stories.
If stories are just something you read for fun, why would anyone care to teach me how to analyze them?
I also remember reading 1984 on my own time in high school- it wasn't in the curriculum the year I might have. It blew me away. But if I'd been forced to read it, I probably would have been bored.
I was like this too. I had no interest in ol' Bill. Then I read his 'best' works. And then I read them again. It takes a bit to get really used to iambic pentameter, to the old words, to the places and people he was writing for, to his limitations of candlelight and lack of amps, etc.
Reader, it is totally worth it.
There are very many very good reasons that he is still produced and studied. I encourage you in this new year to give him a solid try. Not just a play or two. Read him and watch the plays at the same time. There are hundreds of productions on YT for every play of his, all free, most very good.
Something else that might impact our current understanding is that we are not in their time period, so many things we don't understand might be specific to their time, even if we get the broad strokes and very human themes, such as love or revenge. It's the same as if someone 400 years from now saw the movies we put out, some things are just very specific to the time and place.
There's also the change in English and pronunciation too, of course.
Learning is one thing, being tested on facts and trivia is totally something else.
He told me that the reason he chose that book was that it was actually easy and a page turner, but also different than what most kids read. But most of all he chose it cause it's a big honking bok. To that point at the end of the class 90% of the kids had near on finished the book. Even the laziest kid in class had to agree that no it wasn't a big chore to read that big of a book if you broke it down and they weren't afraid of big books anymore.
I also read a few books I otherwise would’ve never picked up that ended up very interesting.
Ultimately, sacrifices get made to try and get mass education working; the current system is barely scalable, so anything even more personalized is pretty much out of the question.
There’s a number of classics I read at the time that I didn’t enjoy until adulthood. Reading them early on gave me a framework for understanding them later on in life.
For me it was axctually the first novel I read. My aunt gave me The Malloreon. I was bored in winter break in the late 80s and I felt guilty I hadn't used my aunt's gift. So I read it. Now I recall spending an entire day curled up with a quick trip insulated mug in our breakfast nook when it was below freezing out reading the next book next to my mom. It'd take about 3 hours to finish that herbal tea.
Shortly after my dad gave me unlimited allowance for books. It was a smart but mildly costly move.
Perhaps the solution is to not force specific books on anyone. If kids want to read Twilight for class, let them. Maybe it’s more important (and effective) to have them read anything and enjoy it than cramming “high literature” down their throats.
I posit that a person who enjoys the experience of reading a bad book is likely to later on pick up several good ones, while someone who was forced to read a handful of ostensibly good books they weren’t ready for is likely to never pick up a book again.
We had two separate classes in school, one for English, and one just called "reading". In it, we could read whatever we wanted, as long as we read for the entire period. Sometimes we'd discuss our books. It was great.
If they instead taught students easier books in schools, student would never develop the reading skills to tackle the classics, and a much smaller percentage of adults would ever bother rereading the classics or even acknowledge their power.
Of course, the teaching has to be improved so that students never hate it.
The issue is that performance arts, or the arts in general, usually are the first on the chopping block at schools that are either facing budgetary pressures or need to improve standardized test scores.
Stuff like: "What was the meaning of the yellow curtains?"
They pretty much ruined my enjoyment of every book I had to read, even though I did and still do love reading. For books required by classes, I just read the cliff's notes.
Then one day the teacher didn’t want to teach and instead showed an episode of Connections, and I was blown away. Learning about how and why our science and technology became what it is was something I could related to and seemed actually useful. I still don’t care for military history, though.
Is that actually true? Do we have good reason to believe that people who study history/literature behave more ethically?
Really depends on HOW you learn it IME. If it's just regurgitating dates/names/whatever it isn't helpful at all, at least for me. If you establish that event x led to y because of z, it just clicks and suddenly makes sense.
For example, let's take hitlers rise to power: "He became the chancellor of germany in 1933" That is just about useless. "Hitler rose to power with the help of the nazi party, which was partially formed in response to the treaty of versailles' excessively harsh terms, leading to an extreme amount of inflation and a harsh drop in industry. This set the stage for hitler arguing to use a war as a means of getting rid of the penalties of versailles and bringing germany out from the slump"
For me, in school I was mostly taught the first variation.
I was a total STEM math nerd in school. I used to frequently complain how I don't get what's the point of it, or how it's a waste of time and I'm learning nothing. I still think the emphasis of school was off, but I get the point of it now.
Stories are like code for humans. You can't tell someone what it means to be good or bad, or to give them a course in philosophy and they will become good people. But you can tell them a good story, that engages with them emotionally, and it will change their perception. And history shows that in fact, those stories being told and repeated aren't just interesting minor curiosity, but they have shaped the direction of humanity and they are driving it. A single person with a single story can change history in such a way that it would be completely different without it. And some stories about stories need to be told as a warning so that people will not fall for those kinds of stories again.