While I have definitely seen many instances of reporters coming with a preconceived narrative, and then just wanting quotes that further that narrative, I could barely get through reading this article. The author seems to want to dump on competing narratives for why kids seem to have trouble with long form reading, but then brings all her own biases and essentially lays them out as fact with 0 evidence. Take early on in the article:
> She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones.
The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days, and no amount of old, out-of-context quotes taken from earlier "technological panics" will change that. I think the works and research of Jonathan Haidt do an excellent job digging into the effects of cell phones on kids.
And don't even get me started on the "Kids don't want to read the old classics because they're dense and hard to read, they're just challenging the white male patriarchy!" Spare me...
> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey
>Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts
Yes, some literature is better than other literature. Some literature should be taught in schools. The fact that this teacher defends giving simpler less sophisticated works because it speaks to the children more (how is a power struggle in a palace speaking to the children more?). Difficult language is not an excuse to not read a book, this is literally lowering expectations. I am not saying those books are bad, but they are all written at a middle school level, and should not be taught in high school. Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.
I'm not familiar with the other items, but "A Long Way Gone" is plenty sophisticated enough from a thematic point of view. Violent, gritty, complicated, it portrays an ugly piece of the world and has some serious perspective. Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.'
I think the author's main point is that if we want to accommodate a new generation of learners we need to shift the canon. It doesn't mean that great classic works don't have their place in the world, it just means they don't have the value they once did for educational purpose at the level students traditionally explored them.
Grounding this in the material world: a book really only helps teach you something if you actually read it.
So the Odyssey was suitable for 2000 years. But suddenly now, it’s a problem? We’ve had new generators of learners every generation. Yet this current generation is apparently more special than the rest.
Lazier is more like it. If someone TiKToc-ified the Odyssey, kids would be quoting it from memory.
> Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.'
No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose. And I agree with what the GP said: we need to be holding our kids to higher standards and expecting they rise to that level, not going "well that language is too hard for them so let's take it off".
"The canon" as most people would recite... Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, etc.... is now at least 60 years old, if not 100. It's a fuzzy thing, but it's certainly old.
Merely being old is not a problem. Great literature is perhaps not literally "timeless", but it can survive being pulled out of its original context, and to the extent that students have to engage with a foreign context, that can be part of the point.
However, that's 60-100 years of language shift since the canon was canonized, and that is a problem. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it's one that needs to be taken into account. I don't see anyone taking it into account, because if anyone questions the canon, they are obviously just a drooling arm-dragging uncultured buffoon who should be evicted from sophisticated society.
But, you know, I'm in my mid-40s, and I've seen real, bona-fide language shifts in American English. Even the English of the 1980s is getting dated. Reading back into the 1950s will result in readers encountering a number of dead words. I remember reading in that era, and every celebrity seemed to be described as "indefatigable". One can assemble from the roots a good guess about what it probably means, and in this case, such a guess is correct, but you can't actually be sure without looking it up or reading it in a lot of contexts. When's the last time you saw an actor described as "indefatigable"?
It doesn't take many of these sorts of things before you are unable to analyze, enjoy, or even necessarily comprehend the "great literature" because you're too busy just figuring what on Earth it is actually saying. It's hard to analyze subtext when you're a normal reader struggling to grasp the text.
Of course, I say this into a culture that is still holding up the original Shakespeare as the sine qua non of Literature, despite the fact it is now over a century past the point that a "normal person" ought to be expected to comprehend it on a base level. If someone wants to teach Shakespeare to a modern teenager, it ought to be done in translation at this point. That I wouldn't mind; there's still a lot of "literature" in it that could be studied through a translation. But the idea that a teenager should be expected to read
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
and get anything out of it is just insane. At least 4 lines have a major vocabulary issue, more depending on what you expect from your teen. All the rest have at least minor issues, using words that are at least unusual in modern English, and many of them with connotations that are even more unusual if not dead.
But 18th century literature is starting to read similarly to a modern teen, and 19th is a bigger stretch now than it was when I was young. It is not wrong to account for this in trying to figure out how to reach modern students, it's just realism.
> They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences.
This, I think, is the core argument of the piece. I find it depressing that a teacher thinks that books should reflect the readers' lived experiences. It's an incredibly narrow-minded view. Fran Lebowitz sums it up quite brilliantly in "Pretend it's a city": a book is not a mirror, it's a door.
> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.
I think the author is talking about the content of the literature more so than books being "more sophisticated" than others, whatever that means. I'm 40 and remember skimming through most of the books given to me in high school -- Les Miserables and Moby Dick included -- because I just didn't connect with them. But I read a ton on my own and was always in a bookstore or a library. I wouldn't call Les Miserables or some Dickens book any more or less "sophisticated" than what I was reading, and if kids are going to be more excited to read something contemporary, or a translation that updates things like Emily Wilson, I'm all for it.
> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.
Even the kids with the greatest cognitive gifts, back in the 80s or 2000s or whenever you grew up and the standards were supposedly higher, and who are now or will be great parents raising great kids themselves, were not eager to read Les Miserables.
I read Les Miserables for fun in high school. I was introduced to the story through the musical (maybe originally just a song from it), I think, and became curious about its origins and elements I might've missed in other depictions.
I can't find my copy now, but it was one of the nice fancy hardcover Borders Classics editions, which afaict is a 600-something-page abridgment of Wilbour's 1862 translation. There were still some slow or awkward parts but I definitely enjoyed it overall.
Moby Dick, though, I was assigned and did not read.
If I'd been assigned Les Miserables and not Moby Dick, maybe it'd have gone the other way around.
Anyway you're wrong that this never happens. Me and my friends growing up read Hugo and Dostoevsky and Kant and Hume and Dickens and Marx for fun, alongside lots of stuff outside the 'Western' literary and philosophical canons.
And dated language is fun sometimes. It adds to a sense of place in the work, and often a lot of flavor. It can even be nostalgic, in a strange way— I recently started reading 3 different translations of Monkey King/Journey to the West. One of the translations is extremely contemporary in its language, which is great because it helps make a lot of jokes land well. But another is an audiobook recording from the 80s of a translation from the 1940s, and it's pleasantly nostalgic for me because it reminds me, just through its 'flavor', of already-outdated media for children that I encountered as a little kid— stuff like School-House Rock and claymation Christmas specials. It gives that presentation of the story a kind of soothing bedtime reading from a storybook vibe for me.
Anyway, even challenging reading can be a lot of fun for kids if you let them choose the challenge and mostly stay out of their way after that (instead of, for example, nagging them with regular quizzes or forcing them to go over each sentence in agonizing detail in a group setting).
The problem getting kids to read at all is that they are prescribed books and said "you need to read this". I hated a lot of the books I had to read in high school and I basically gave up on reading until well into adulthood (though, I do like a good long form article).
Moby Dick isn't an enjoyable book. I'm ABLE to read it in the capacity sense but I'd rather sit and stare at the wall than do it. I read Corey Doctorow and read 3 of his books in 3 days. Is his work literary genius? No. But if you are reading and engaging your imagination who cares?
When I was a student, which was a long time ago, general opinion of students was that these are boring books. Most students skimmed it or read those super shortened tl;dr which you could buy in bookstore. And that was time when reading for pleasure outside of school existed as a past time and quite a lot of those students read a lot by todays standards.
Regardless of what "sophistication" in this context means. Moby Dick is not so much sophisticated as boring.
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world."
That's still a pretty strong start. Especially for literature of the time.
Crime and Punishment and The Odyssey are two of my favorite works and I struggled to read Moby Dick in my 40s. I finished only out of a grim determination and with ( frankly ) a lot of skimming. Happy am I that I was never forced to read it for the sake of my GPA.
I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.
> I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.
I think it really depends on how it is taught. Also in my 40s, I recently read The Sun Also Rises while on vacation - I just had the feeling I wanted to read a "classic" book, and somehow I didn't have to read that book in high school. I hated the book. I kept waiting for a smidge of effort in wanting to make me care at all about any of the characters, and I just never found it. It was like being forced to go through someone's vacation photos for 10 hours straight, where most of the photos were of alcoholics drinking.
But still, I'm glad I read it. I wanted to understand why Hemingway is considered a literary giant, and his writing style (especially his dialogue) was new and innovative at the time, and influenced lots of other writers. If teachers could help explain books in context (e.g. why is Moby Dick considered a classics novel to begin with) I think a lot of students would better appreciate what they're learning.
Not forcing kids to struggle through books they don’t care for creates generations of adults who think they can’t or simply won’t do anything that is hard or that they don’t want to do.
They shouldn’t only be reading these challenging works, but they should be reading some of them.
granted, in my case it was reading in a second language which has its own challenges, but the main point still stands. if i hadn't been able to breeze through that second book i might have come home with the impression that i just can't read english well enough, or that i hate reading english or that english writing is just bad. if i had read that second book first i would probably have realized that hemmingway is just no fun to read, like your experience with moby dick, and i would have asked to pick another book. i don't think that the second book was easier because my english improved by then. if that were the case i should have been able to improve while reading hemmingway, instead of struggling with it to the end.
> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.
Ahh yes, you shouldn't have to read Dostoevsky because he was just an old white guy. FWIW when I was a kid I had to read the Odyssey and books like Beloved and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings in high school, so I think this article author is being a little selective with her examples.
The quote is about literature being "confined" to it. Meaning the overall impression from the reading list you get is that literature is something of the past and concerns only certain race and gender.
The comment refers to what Horowitch’s article counts as literature, not what your teacher/school system counted as a literature.
> The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare is comparable to my own struggles through Chaucer in the original Middle English
I guess I don't talk to enough high school kids but is this really actually true? There has been ~200 years of linguistic evolution between when this teacher went to school and now? English has changed as significantly as it did between
"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote"
and
"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."
Wasn't the theory that recorded media would decrease the rate of core linguistic evolution? There has always been slang, but I would call this a total false equivalence.
Agreed. When I was younger, talking to older (40+ year age gap) people was a bit of a minor shift in vocab or syntax, but I wouldn't call it a "code switch."
If we have hit a point where communicating with people speaking the same language in the same region who are only a generation removed (or 2 at most) requires a "code switch" carrying substantial cognitive overhead... we have a problem.
I'm not claiming that it isn't happening, but it seems like a misstep to just accept it as inevitable. Communication with most of the rest of the same-dialect speaking population of a region should be an innate skill by the time someone is in middle/high school.
(non native speakers or transplants are a whole different ballgame, but I don't think that is what the author is discussing here)
I don't know about kids, but my sample size one is that as short-form dopamine-hit content has exploded in the last 10-15 years, and especially the last 5, my ability to read books has collapsed.
Try anthologies of short stories, it's what I've been reading since covid times. Easy to pick up, put down, and return weeks later with no worries about forgetting a million plot threads or characters.
I recommend the book "How to break up with your phone". I liked it because I thought it gave good practical advice on reducing the most detrimental effects of a smartphone. One of the reviews on the back flap is something like "<This Author> is the Marie Kondo for the mind", and I thought that was a great description.
I'd like to recommend Johann Hari's "Stolen "Focus" to you.
You'll probably recognize several patterns, personal and systemic, that are fighting against (y)our ability to maintain the focus needed for many worthwhile tasks. Knowing is half the battle :)
>Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that.
This, in response to a story about Gen Z and Gen Alpha at elite universities. Why are they attending the elites, then, if not to become part of the power apparatus?
I must admit my cultural observation about those cohorts is they are ideologically docile and easily molded into whatever the establishment deems the correct ideology to uphold. As one data point, I offer up their penchant for policing soon to be published YA fiction and whether it adheres to the prevailing orthodoxy.
I think that the confusion comes from the problem of identifying who "the authority" and "the establishment" is today.
As all the past symbols of rebellion are becoming co-opted and its wearers are assimilating and become "The Them™" (formerly known as, "The Man™"). It doesn't help that there is a dearth of "new" ideologies or trends that the younger generation can discover and iterate over. The continuity of history that is enabled by technologies like the internet and the collective knowledge of older generations, has almost ossified the innovative properties of the kind of rebellion that a hip academic would find quaint and nostalgic of the period of youth that was the springboard to their own assimilation.
All that remains for most people is to reach for absurdity. Which itself is absurd.
I would have gone to an elite university if I had the option to. Not to become part of the "power apparatus" but because I would have a higher chance of making enough money to purchase luxuries like a place to live.
I am suggesting that kids at specifically elite universities aspire to be the power, and therefore question the author's contention that this has anything to do with disrespect for authority.
It is still a perfectly valid argument to analyze whether disrespect for authority has increased or decreased over the years; or whether the disrespect has reached the point it threatens their ability to become functioning adults.
> So when I ask them to code switch further into the recesses of linguistic history to read Shakespeare, the struggle is real.
Reading difficult texts is how you get better at reading?? If students are not struggling at all they are not learning. But the author seems more interested in validating students identities or whatever than actually helping them learn.
But Shakespeare is not "difficult", it's just extremely dated. Shakespeare was not at all difficult at the time, most of the plays would have been considered very easily accessible. They have a ton of simple humor and even puns. Most of them are just lost in translation because language has evolved in such a way that much of it no longer works and the cultural references are lost to time.
In the Shakespeare case I’m not even sure reading plays in their entirety is the best way to gain exposure. Plenty of good and reasonably faithful film versions out there.
> Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables [...] Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading.
An unabridged translation of Les Miserables is 3-6x as long as any of those other books. I feel like that could explain a difference in being able/willing to finish those books by itself. At the same time, updated language and abridgment are extremely normal in translations and would be very appropriate here. I'd be surprised if those choices aren't already considered by professors assigning Les Mis in anything but a class on Les Mis for seniors or grad students. Presumably a competent abridgment would cut much of 'going on for chapters about the sewer system' or whatever. The OP talks about such translation techniques working for her class when she teaches The Odyssey! I don't see how Les Miserables is very different, but maybe the translation(s) she uses for the Odyssey are really exceptional.
An unrelated point the OP kind of gets at but doesn't focus on, in favor of diversity and recency of authorship: the mere fact of assigning reading and setting a schedule for it often sucks the pleasure out of it, doesn't it? I read two authors of classics put down in the OP as 'vanilla' and 'dust-covered', Dostoevsky and Hugo, for pleasure in high school... and by my senior year of high school was skipping many (if not a majority) of assigned readings in favor of bullshitting my way through based on second-hand summaries. (The books I skipped included both titles by 'dead white men' and more contemporary titles by authors of other backgrounds.) If I hadn't the pleasure of choosing the classic texts I did read as referred to above, I probably would have given them a shallow and resentful treatment, too.
Aside: after looking them up, the books the OP lists as examples sound way more interesting than the 'non-canonical' texts I was assigned in high school, and I'm envious of their students in that respect. The non-canonical texts in my school days were infrequent and also often felt like second-rate additions to curriculum: slim volumes, simple language, facile premises.
>> We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers.
How true are these allegations?
For example, book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.
I understand that removing books from a library is bad in principle. But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.
I looked into book banning a while back and AFAICT the vast majority of it is universally agreed as necessary (and every "list of most-banned books" is an outright lie). It's just called "curation" instead of "banning".
Not many people complain if they can't find "Lolita" in their school library, let alone a thousand copycats with less historical relevance.
Sure, you can call it curation but that implies that school libraries previously were filled arbitrarily by whatever random people dumped there. Libraries are always curated by definition.
What changed wasn't the addition of curation but the constraints of it. The reason entire school libraries were emptied following the "book bans" is that these laws often use poorly defined language to classify what content and topics are permissible or not in school libraries and this means all existing literature has to be carefuly combed through to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it violates the law, especially when the consequence of an "illegal book" carries a fine or worse.
It's similar to the abortion bans: the problem isn't just that they ban abortions, the problem is that what an abortion is is often poorly defined because there are plenty of scenarios where a pregnancy has to be terminated to prevent harm to the pregnant person but we wouldn't normally think of this as "getting an abortion". The vague blanket bans mean medical professionals need to get a legal opinion on every individual case because they face liability if the procedure turns out to have been illegal in that situation (and not, for example, if they had performed it 24 hours later even if the progression was predictable at the time).
The same is also true for teaching sex ed in states which use vague language like "age appropriate" or blanket ban certain behavior outside a strictly cis-heterosexual norm (e.g. a teacher telling her students she got married to her husband likely won't get her fired despite her disclosing her sexual orientation whereas a gay teacher might not be allowed to disclose theirs).
Even if you think the state should decide which books can go in a public school library or not, certainly having a central register that reviews each book and classifies it is more efficient and more manageable than just making every librarian or school individually liable if their library carries a book deemed inappropriate after the fact. After all, review boards already exist for films and TV.
If the discussion is specifically about school libraries, than I think it is absolutely legitimate to be concerned about which books are or are not banned. Many kids have easy access to school libraries, but not used bookstores or epubs.
- My own 14 year old has limited internet access and no account at any online retailer.
The question is what “banned” books, if any, would you willingly expose your children to? You already curate their access to the Internet, what difference is there in the school or even state doing the same?
As far as I can tell, book banning means "Republican elected officials enacting imprecise rules to override to the curation decisions of tax-payer funded school librarians." Personally, I think that many school and city librarians have made egregiously bad curation decisions, but I think trying to legislate better curation decisions through broad guidelines is not the best way to go about fixing things.
You provide a source yourself that book banning occurs.
The problem with making books less accessible is that less people have a chance to read them.
Banning books is an effort to control the ideas other people are exposed to. That certain specific efforts aren't 100% successful doesn't make it unproblematic.
The question is one of magnitude, not of simple occurrence.
My argument is that de facto banning has little or no effect on accessibility. I'm sure the described book bans have decreased the probability of certain books being read, but again, what is the magnitude of the change? If I were to guess, it's so small as to be almost unmeasurable.
"Banned books" has always been an indulgent title put on books that have been banned from a handful of school libraries by busybodies, but never used for books so controversial that copies of them might as well be unobtainable.
> But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.
Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic. Parents have been thrown out of school board meetings for reading their content out loud.
>Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic.
Where are you getting the data that most books are pornographic?
Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content. The definition of sexual content includes things like "informational books about puberty" (i.e. sexual content != pornographic).
There's a difference between “talking about sex” and “pornography”.
> So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father. He did not know when she lay down or when she arose. The next day, the firstborn said to the younger, “Behold, I lay last night with my father. Let us make him drink wine tonight also. Then you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve offspring from our father.” So they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger arose and lay with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. (Genesis 19:33–36)
> Your lips drip nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue; the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon. A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a spring locked, a fountain sealed. Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, […] Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden, let its spices flow. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits. I came to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gathered my myrrh with my spice, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, I drank my wine with my milk. Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love! (Song of Solomon 4:11–13, 4:16–5:1)
> How beautiful and pleasant you are, O loved one, with all your delights! Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine. It goes down smoothly for my beloved, gliding over lips and teeth. (Song of Solomon 7:6–9)
> Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts. (Ezekiel 23:19–21)
— The Holy Bible (ESV) (famously not pornography)
And a honourable mention to the KJV translators, who – when faced with a double-meaning – took the literal translation:
> My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. (Song of Solomon 5:4–5)
Idiomatically, “my bowels were moved” in the original Hebrew refers to a strong emotional response (ESV translates it as “my heart was thrilled”) – but considering the rest of this book, I have no doubt that the wordplay is intentional.
A book doesn't become pornography, just because the authors chose not to censor all references to / descriptions of sexuality. I understand keeping these books out of the hands of 6-year-olds, but by the time they've reached the age where their own minds are generating sexual material, I don't see the benefit of denying them a safe environment to explore such ideas (i.e., books). Most teenagers have more pressure (from their peers) to engage in actual sex than to read a particular library book. So… what happens when they're not aware of sexual consent, safe sex practices (e.g. condoms aren't just for contraception), or any kind of role model? (Hint: some effects are visible in the statistical tables.) I'm not sure what these bans are supposed to accomplish, other than make parents feel better.
Readit News
> She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones.
The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days, and no amount of old, out-of-context quotes taken from earlier "technological panics" will change that. I think the works and research of Jonathan Haidt do an excellent job digging into the effects of cell phones on kids.
And don't even get me started on the "Kids don't want to read the old classics because they're dense and hard to read, they're just challenging the white male patriarchy!" Spare me...
Presented as is, no one did the OP dirty. This article is a bait-and-switch.
Nature has a review that basically calls him intellectually dishonest with his analysis.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
Then it would be easy to furnish a few links to source this claim
Impact of mobile phones and wireless devices use on children and adolescents’ mental health: a systematic review
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9200624/
>Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts
Yes, some literature is better than other literature. Some literature should be taught in schools. The fact that this teacher defends giving simpler less sophisticated works because it speaks to the children more (how is a power struggle in a palace speaking to the children more?). Difficult language is not an excuse to not read a book, this is literally lowering expectations. I am not saying those books are bad, but they are all written at a middle school level, and should not be taught in high school. Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.
I think the author's main point is that if we want to accommodate a new generation of learners we need to shift the canon. It doesn't mean that great classic works don't have their place in the world, it just means they don't have the value they once did for educational purpose at the level students traditionally explored them.
Grounding this in the material world: a book really only helps teach you something if you actually read it.
Lazier is more like it. If someone TiKToc-ified the Odyssey, kids would be quoting it from memory.
No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose. And I agree with what the GP said: we need to be holding our kids to higher standards and expecting they rise to that level, not going "well that language is too hard for them so let's take it off".
Merely being old is not a problem. Great literature is perhaps not literally "timeless", but it can survive being pulled out of its original context, and to the extent that students have to engage with a foreign context, that can be part of the point.
However, that's 60-100 years of language shift since the canon was canonized, and that is a problem. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it's one that needs to be taken into account. I don't see anyone taking it into account, because if anyone questions the canon, they are obviously just a drooling arm-dragging uncultured buffoon who should be evicted from sophisticated society.
But, you know, I'm in my mid-40s, and I've seen real, bona-fide language shifts in American English. Even the English of the 1980s is getting dated. Reading back into the 1950s will result in readers encountering a number of dead words. I remember reading in that era, and every celebrity seemed to be described as "indefatigable". One can assemble from the roots a good guess about what it probably means, and in this case, such a guess is correct, but you can't actually be sure without looking it up or reading it in a lot of contexts. When's the last time you saw an actor described as "indefatigable"?
It doesn't take many of these sorts of things before you are unable to analyze, enjoy, or even necessarily comprehend the "great literature" because you're too busy just figuring what on Earth it is actually saying. It's hard to analyze subtext when you're a normal reader struggling to grasp the text.
Of course, I say this into a culture that is still holding up the original Shakespeare as the sine qua non of Literature, despite the fact it is now over a century past the point that a "normal person" ought to be expected to comprehend it on a base level. If someone wants to teach Shakespeare to a modern teenager, it ought to be done in translation at this point. That I wouldn't mind; there's still a lot of "literature" in it that could be studied through a translation. But the idea that a teenager should be expected to read
and get anything out of it is just insane. At least 4 lines have a major vocabulary issue, more depending on what you expect from your teen. All the rest have at least minor issues, using words that are at least unusual in modern English, and many of them with connotations that are even more unusual if not dead.But 18th century literature is starting to read similarly to a modern teen, and 19th is a bigger stretch now than it was when I was young. It is not wrong to account for this in trying to figure out how to reach modern students, it's just realism.
> They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences.
This, I think, is the core argument of the piece. I find it depressing that a teacher thinks that books should reflect the readers' lived experiences. It's an incredibly narrow-minded view. Fran Lebowitz sums it up quite brilliantly in "Pretend it's a city": a book is not a mirror, it's a door.
I think the author is talking about the content of the literature more so than books being "more sophisticated" than others, whatever that means. I'm 40 and remember skimming through most of the books given to me in high school -- Les Miserables and Moby Dick included -- because I just didn't connect with them. But I read a ton on my own and was always in a bookstore or a library. I wouldn't call Les Miserables or some Dickens book any more or less "sophisticated" than what I was reading, and if kids are going to be more excited to read something contemporary, or a translation that updates things like Emily Wilson, I'm all for it.
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Even the kids with the greatest cognitive gifts, back in the 80s or 2000s or whenever you grew up and the standards were supposedly higher, and who are now or will be great parents raising great kids themselves, were not eager to read Les Miserables.
I can't find my copy now, but it was one of the nice fancy hardcover Borders Classics editions, which afaict is a 600-something-page abridgment of Wilbour's 1862 translation. There were still some slow or awkward parts but I definitely enjoyed it overall.
Moby Dick, though, I was assigned and did not read.
If I'd been assigned Les Miserables and not Moby Dick, maybe it'd have gone the other way around.
Anyway you're wrong that this never happens. Me and my friends growing up read Hugo and Dostoevsky and Kant and Hume and Dickens and Marx for fun, alongside lots of stuff outside the 'Western' literary and philosophical canons.
And dated language is fun sometimes. It adds to a sense of place in the work, and often a lot of flavor. It can even be nostalgic, in a strange way— I recently started reading 3 different translations of Monkey King/Journey to the West. One of the translations is extremely contemporary in its language, which is great because it helps make a lot of jokes land well. But another is an audiobook recording from the 80s of a translation from the 1940s, and it's pleasantly nostalgic for me because it reminds me, just through its 'flavor', of already-outdated media for children that I encountered as a little kid— stuff like School-House Rock and claymation Christmas specials. It gives that presentation of the story a kind of soothing bedtime reading from a storybook vibe for me.
Anyway, even challenging reading can be a lot of fun for kids if you let them choose the challenge and mostly stay out of their way after that (instead of, for example, nagging them with regular quizzes or forcing them to go over each sentence in agonizing detail in a group setting).
Moby Dick isn't an enjoyable book. I'm ABLE to read it in the capacity sense but I'd rather sit and stare at the wall than do it. I read Corey Doctorow and read 3 of his books in 3 days. Is his work literary genius? No. But if you are reading and engaging your imagination who cares?
Regardless of what "sophistication" in this context means. Moby Dick is not so much sophisticated as boring.
That's still a pretty strong start. Especially for literature of the time.
I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.
I think it really depends on how it is taught. Also in my 40s, I recently read The Sun Also Rises while on vacation - I just had the feeling I wanted to read a "classic" book, and somehow I didn't have to read that book in high school. I hated the book. I kept waiting for a smidge of effort in wanting to make me care at all about any of the characters, and I just never found it. It was like being forced to go through someone's vacation photos for 10 hours straight, where most of the photos were of alcoholics drinking.
But still, I'm glad I read it. I wanted to understand why Hemingway is considered a literary giant, and his writing style (especially his dialogue) was new and innovative at the time, and influenced lots of other writers. If teachers could help explain books in context (e.g. why is Moby Dick considered a classics novel to begin with) I think a lot of students would better appreciate what they're learning.
They shouldn’t only be reading these challenging works, but they should be reading some of them.
granted, in my case it was reading in a second language which has its own challenges, but the main point still stands. if i hadn't been able to breeze through that second book i might have come home with the impression that i just can't read english well enough, or that i hate reading english or that english writing is just bad. if i had read that second book first i would probably have realized that hemmingway is just no fun to read, like your experience with moby dick, and i would have asked to pick another book. i don't think that the second book was easier because my english improved by then. if that were the case i should have been able to improve while reading hemmingway, instead of struggling with it to the end.
> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.
Ahh yes, you shouldn't have to read Dostoevsky because he was just an old white guy. FWIW when I was a kid I had to read the Odyssey and books like Beloved and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings in high school, so I think this article author is being a little selective with her examples.
The comment refers to what Horowitch’s article counts as literature, not what your teacher/school system counted as a literature.
I guess I don't talk to enough high school kids but is this really actually true? There has been ~200 years of linguistic evolution between when this teacher went to school and now? English has changed as significantly as it did between
"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote"
and
"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."
Wasn't the theory that recorded media would decrease the rate of core linguistic evolution? There has always been slang, but I would call this a total false equivalence.
If we have hit a point where communicating with people speaking the same language in the same region who are only a generation removed (or 2 at most) requires a "code switch" carrying substantial cognitive overhead... we have a problem.
I'm not claiming that it isn't happening, but it seems like a misstep to just accept it as inevitable. Communication with most of the rest of the same-dialect speaking population of a region should be an innate skill by the time someone is in middle/high school.
(non native speakers or transplants are a whole different ballgame, but I don't think that is what the author is discussing here)
Not possible at all with my current life and job, but man I could do with an attention reset.
You'll probably recognize several patterns, personal and systemic, that are fighting against (y)our ability to maintain the focus needed for many worthwhile tasks. Knowing is half the battle :)
Most kids I see around are easily on the first category.
>Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that.
This, in response to a story about Gen Z and Gen Alpha at elite universities. Why are they attending the elites, then, if not to become part of the power apparatus?
As all the past symbols of rebellion are becoming co-opted and its wearers are assimilating and become "The Them™" (formerly known as, "The Man™"). It doesn't help that there is a dearth of "new" ideologies or trends that the younger generation can discover and iterate over. The continuity of history that is enabled by technologies like the internet and the collective knowledge of older generations, has almost ossified the innovative properties of the kind of rebellion that a hip academic would find quaint and nostalgic of the period of youth that was the springboard to their own assimilation.
All that remains for most people is to reach for absurdity. Which itself is absurd.
Sorry what does this mean?
I would have gone to an elite university if I had the option to. Not to become part of the "power apparatus" but because I would have a higher chance of making enough money to purchase luxuries like a place to live.
An apparent conflation of "cow", v.t.
with "kowtow": The author herself exemplifies modern academia's reduced standard of literacy.> And that’s a good thing, since Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake.
As used by this definition: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng....
Is correct. Maybe grab a mirror and stop pointing fingers?
"My life turned up-side down when I realized that those fighting the power were actually just fighting for the power."
I am suggesting that kids at specifically elite universities aspire to be the power, and therefore question the author's contention that this has anything to do with disrespect for authority.
It is still a perfectly valid argument to analyze whether disrespect for authority has increased or decreased over the years; or whether the disrespect has reached the point it threatens their ability to become functioning adults.
Reading difficult texts is how you get better at reading?? If students are not struggling at all they are not learning. But the author seems more interested in validating students identities or whatever than actually helping them learn.
An unabridged translation of Les Miserables is 3-6x as long as any of those other books. I feel like that could explain a difference in being able/willing to finish those books by itself. At the same time, updated language and abridgment are extremely normal in translations and would be very appropriate here. I'd be surprised if those choices aren't already considered by professors assigning Les Mis in anything but a class on Les Mis for seniors or grad students. Presumably a competent abridgment would cut much of 'going on for chapters about the sewer system' or whatever. The OP talks about such translation techniques working for her class when she teaches The Odyssey! I don't see how Les Miserables is very different, but maybe the translation(s) she uses for the Odyssey are really exceptional.
An unrelated point the OP kind of gets at but doesn't focus on, in favor of diversity and recency of authorship: the mere fact of assigning reading and setting a schedule for it often sucks the pleasure out of it, doesn't it? I read two authors of classics put down in the OP as 'vanilla' and 'dust-covered', Dostoevsky and Hugo, for pleasure in high school... and by my senior year of high school was skipping many (if not a majority) of assigned readings in favor of bullshitting my way through based on second-hand summaries. (The books I skipped included both titles by 'dead white men' and more contemporary titles by authors of other backgrounds.) If I hadn't the pleasure of choosing the classic texts I did read as referred to above, I probably would have given them a shallow and resentful treatment, too.
Aside: after looking them up, the books the OP lists as examples sound way more interesting than the 'non-canonical' texts I was assigned in high school, and I'm envious of their students in that respect. The non-canonical texts in my school days were infrequent and also often felt like second-rate additions to curriculum: slim volumes, simple language, facile premises.
How true are these allegations?
For example, book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.
I understand that removing books from a library is bad in principle. But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.
Not many people complain if they can't find "Lolita" in their school library, let alone a thousand copycats with less historical relevance.
What changed wasn't the addition of curation but the constraints of it. The reason entire school libraries were emptied following the "book bans" is that these laws often use poorly defined language to classify what content and topics are permissible or not in school libraries and this means all existing literature has to be carefuly combed through to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it violates the law, especially when the consequence of an "illegal book" carries a fine or worse.
It's similar to the abortion bans: the problem isn't just that they ban abortions, the problem is that what an abortion is is often poorly defined because there are plenty of scenarios where a pregnancy has to be terminated to prevent harm to the pregnant person but we wouldn't normally think of this as "getting an abortion". The vague blanket bans mean medical professionals need to get a legal opinion on every individual case because they face liability if the procedure turns out to have been illegal in that situation (and not, for example, if they had performed it 24 hours later even if the progression was predictable at the time).
The same is also true for teaching sex ed in states which use vague language like "age appropriate" or blanket ban certain behavior outside a strictly cis-heterosexual norm (e.g. a teacher telling her students she got married to her husband likely won't get her fired despite her disclosing her sexual orientation whereas a gay teacher might not be allowed to disclose theirs).
Even if you think the state should decide which books can go in a public school library or not, certainly having a central register that reviews each book and classifies it is more efficient and more manageable than just making every librarian or school individually liable if their library carries a book deemed inappropriate after the fact. After all, review boards already exist for films and TV.
- My own 14 year old has limited internet access and no account at any online retailer.
You provide a source yourself that book banning occurs.
The problem with making books less accessible is that less people have a chance to read them.
Banning books is an effort to control the ideas other people are exposed to. That certain specific efforts aren't 100% successful doesn't make it unproblematic.
My argument is that de facto banning has little or no effect on accessibility. I'm sure the described book bans have decreased the probability of certain books being read, but again, what is the magnitude of the change? If I were to guess, it's so small as to be almost unmeasurable.
Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic. Parents have been thrown out of school board meetings for reading their content out loud.
Where are you getting the data that most books are pornographic?
Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content. The definition of sexual content includes things like "informational books about puberty" (i.e. sexual content != pornographic).
> So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father. He did not know when she lay down or when she arose. The next day, the firstborn said to the younger, “Behold, I lay last night with my father. Let us make him drink wine tonight also. Then you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve offspring from our father.” So they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger arose and lay with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. (Genesis 19:33–36)
> Your lips drip nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue; the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon. A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a spring locked, a fountain sealed. Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, […] Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden, let its spices flow. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits. I came to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gathered my myrrh with my spice, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, I drank my wine with my milk. Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love! (Song of Solomon 4:11–13, 4:16–5:1)
> How beautiful and pleasant you are, O loved one, with all your delights! Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine. It goes down smoothly for my beloved, gliding over lips and teeth. (Song of Solomon 7:6–9)
> Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts. (Ezekiel 23:19–21)
— The Holy Bible (ESV) (famously not pornography)
And a honourable mention to the KJV translators, who – when faced with a double-meaning – took the literal translation:
> My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. (Song of Solomon 5:4–5)
Idiomatically, “my bowels were moved” in the original Hebrew refers to a strong emotional response (ESV translates it as “my heart was thrilled”) – but considering the rest of this book, I have no doubt that the wordplay is intentional.
A book doesn't become pornography, just because the authors chose not to censor all references to / descriptions of sexuality. I understand keeping these books out of the hands of 6-year-olds, but by the time they've reached the age where their own minds are generating sexual material, I don't see the benefit of denying them a safe environment to explore such ideas (i.e., books). Most teenagers have more pressure (from their peers) to engage in actual sex than to read a particular library book. So… what happens when they're not aware of sexual consent, safe sex practices (e.g. condoms aren't just for contraception), or any kind of role model? (Hint: some effects are visible in the statistical tables.) I'm not sure what these bans are supposed to accomplish, other than make parents feel better.