13 ms·

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about? How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is? So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture where you are meant to comment on the motivations of the characters and how the writing style brings that out.

hansonkd 29d ago
I think books in education often serve as an means to putting yourself in those scenarios and attempting to learn more about different times and cultures.
pavel_lishin 29d ago
It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning. The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.
- dehrmann 29d ago
  > where the performance carries a lot of the meaning The big one for me is you don't necessarily know Elizabethan slang, but when you see the play performed, the dirty lines get delivered dirty.
  - gowld 29d ago
    That's why The Taming of The Shrew is recommended for children. The bawdiness s straightforward.
- PsylentKnight 29d ago
  I have heard that Shakespeare is much easier and more enjoyable for non-English speakers, because they get modern translations and we do not Linguist John McWhorter says that Shakespeare is often an "the Emperor has no clothes" situation. No one wants to admit to themselves or others that they don't understand it, and the people who think they understand it are often misunderstanding a lot of it
  - LPisGood 29d ago
    Now, maybe I was convincing myself that I understood in high school when I’ve in fact it not, but I found that reading it aloud and trying to say the words, as if you were the character (acting, if you will), made it much more understandable.
    - PsylentKnight 29d ago
      I mean, even the most famous line in all of Shakespeare, "wherefore art thou Romeo" is frequently misunderstood because many people reasonably assume "wherefore" means something like "where". Yes, you can figure it out from context, but the context is in the same archaic language. Very possible to untangle all that while you're reading it and perhaps it's a good mental exercise. But it can be really tough to keep up when you're watching in the form it was meant to be enjoyed in, a play
      - schoen 29d ago
        That speech is expressing an awesome idea: Juliet is saying that she loves Romeo-the-person, but she is terrified of her bad luck in that he happens to have a certain surname ("Montague") which will automatically cause her family to hate him. Which, indeed, they do. It's basically something like "why did I fall in love with such an inconvenient person?", together with "why does my family care so much about this thing that I'm not sure needs to matter?".
        PsylentKnight 29d ago
        Sure, but the archaic language can obscure the awesome idea. "Why are you Romeo?" may sound less poetic to modern ears, but isn't that how people back then would have parsed it - just as easily as everyday language, because it was their everyday language? I feel like in a way we're losing Shakespeare's intended effect, because we insist on using a "language" that isn't used anymore. Yes, I understand that it's considered the same language, but a language isn't really one thing, it's more of a spectrum without sharp edges. Shakespeare is much closer in time to Middle English (which is considered a different language) than he is to our time
- NobodyNada 29d ago
  I had the same experience reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in high school -- I could follow the story, but it was a slog to get through and I didn't understand what was supposed to be so great about it. Then I saw an actual performance of the play recently, and it all clicked. It was just as understandable as any contemporary film, and easily one of the most fun and entertaining stories I've seen.
  - NoboruWataya 29d ago
    I gave up trying to read plays shortly after school. There's no point to me, they are supposed to be performed. I still think it's worth studying some of the more famous ones in school, but any study should absolutely involve actually going to see the play at some point.
    - conductr 29d ago
      I commented elsewhere but my schooling had a pattern of: read > analyze/discuss > watch movie > analyze/discuss. Most of the material has film adaptations and this was fairly sufficient in closing the loop during the course. Even in history class, when we studied key documents the teacher would often at some point show us an oral presentation of the document- like a clip of (actor portrayed) Abraham Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address. It’s such a well written speech that’s it’s exceedingly simple to comprehend when read. However, when you hear it orated it becomes evident how powerful it was and monumental moment in American history to justify learning about as it was unifying and motivating for all even in the midst of civil war. (Sorry may not be relatable reference for non Americans was just the first that came to mind)
    - nickff 28d ago
      You'd probably be in a better place to understand the scripts now, having seen more performances, for whatever that might be worth. That said, I personally don't read scripts, and have not done so since I was last required to in high school.
  - dredmorbius 29d ago
    I've had a similar experience, with the same play, but in an absolutely minimalist setting. No sets, the only props were a few chairs, and costumes were the same white slacks and smock worn by all the players. And it absolutely worked. This wasn't long after my secondary education --- I'd just started uni. But enough had happened that I got it. As I've commented recently, even as an excellent reader, there's something that hits quite differently from hearing fiction (or even nonfiction) not just read but acted. Selected Shorts is an excellent source for this. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163756>.
- magneticnorth 29d ago
  Yes, I agree completely with the Shakespeare point. I was lucky enough to have a close friend (also a teenager!) who really got Shakespeare. She would explain to me what was actually going on, and read it with the correct emphasis so you could mostly actually follow it. She is 100% of the reason that I was ever able to appreciate Shakespeare. You would hope that most teachers could do this, but in my experience it was only my one friend who had the literary and dramatic talent to explain Shakespeare well to teenagers.
  - bluGill 29d ago
    There is no correct way to read Shakespeare. There are many wrong ways, but don't let your friend's interpretation cloud you from the others. It is really magic when you see some other interpretation and understand both are right despite not being compatible.
    - stackghost 29d ago
      Oh, I hate this sentiment so very much. Example: The song "We Are Young" by fun features the following lyrics. My seat's been taken by some sunglasses / asking 'bout a scar, and / I know I gave it to you months ago / I know you're trying to forget / But between the drinks and subtle things / The holes in my apologies, you know / I'm trying hard to take it back The aspiring song analyst might think it's about the singer being asked by a cop (wearing sunglasses) asking about him abusing his girlfriend, or whatever, but Nate Ruess is on record saying it's just about being hung over, and no more deep than that. Projecting meaning where there is none, or where the meaning is clear, is simply not valid even for Shakespeare.
      - imp0cat 29d ago
        > Projecting deeper meaning where there is none is simply not valid. Nah, that is the most fun part.
    - gowld 29d ago
      Obligatory "To Be or Not to Be" https://youtu.be/iQULEW2JwHE https://youtu.be/iQULEW2JwHE
- iwontberude 29d ago
  [dead]
- SilasX 29d ago
  Rant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever registered as sounding particularly pleasant to me. The word choice, sure, but not the meter or stressing. They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, and how you're "supposed" to stress it, but it came off to me as "technical curiosity you're supposed to memorize" not "universal experience of enjoyment" that I apparently don't share. My lighting talk about this: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZUcvP8CWhB/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DZUcvP8CWhB/ Non-social media link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G58CMUDf-M4loe3MeEus-9gNA5TH7y2D/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G58CMUDf-M4loe3MeEus-9gNA5T...
  - gowld 29d ago
    Meter is a very basic part of English poetry that is usually taught. Almost all popular music and poetry has meter.
    - SilasX 29d ago
      Again, it was taught[1]. The fact that (speaking it with) one meter sounds particularly pleasant (to some people), and that this is a big part of its appeal (to those who like it) was not taught. IOW, it's the difference between "these words in this poem rhyme" vs "this poem sounds nice because these words rhyme". Which, incidentally, is an analogy I make in the lightning talk to explain why this part would be glossed over: people assume that appreciation of rhyming/iambic pentameter is universal. [1] "They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378069
  - Telaneo 29d ago
    Yeah, Shakespeare is not going to land if iambic pentameter doesn't sound like anything special to you. It's a big part of why many Shakespearean quotes stick so hard in people's brains, like 'To be or not to be', 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' and 'If music be the food of love, play on'. If all of these have to carry their weight with only their literal words on the page, and not how they're actually said and stressed, they're going to be a lot less memorable.
- ninalanyon 29d ago
  Reading these comments about Shakespeare makes me think that most of you had terrible teachers of Eng. Lit. Plays, all of them not just Shakespeare, are written to be performed. If your teachers didn't have you perform plays and also watch professional and amateur performances they were derelict in their duties as teachers. Performance isn't just rote recitation.
  - pavel_lishin 29d ago
    I guess I can't lump every English teacher into the same bucket, but in my experience, they aren't particularly skilled at explaining the context behind a lot of the stuff being taught.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 29d ago
      I would agree wrt my High School teachers. They were basically competent, but not particularly good. In college however, my Humanities professors were better than I appreciated at the time. They forced us to think about the material and challenged us to defend our interpretations. As an Engineering student who just wanted the class to be over, I really missed out on a lot of good stuff.
  - ydat 29d ago
    Frankly, Shakespeare is one of the few things I enjoyed reading in school. It was classic American novels I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t tell you why, but getting through something even as simple as Tom Sawyer was such a chore for me.
    - smelendez 29d ago
      Twain can be tedious because he’s a humorist and we’ve heard those jokes a million times by now. Also he writes speech in dialect which now means nothing to us and makes him harder to read. I find him easier to read as an adult but he can still be a slog. I think a lot of classic American lit is hard as an American kid because it’s removed enough from today that you don’t get the nuances and also so influential that the storytelling feels trite, even if it was revolutionary at the time.
- crooked-v 29d ago
  If not for Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, I'd probably had just completely bounced off Shakespeare's works in high school.
  - CocaKoala 29d ago
    Another really good and interesting film adaptation of Shakespeare is "Scotland, PA" - Macbeth, set against the backdrop of a 1970s fast food restaurant featuring a soundtrack that consists entirely of Bad Company songs (apparently the library was shockingly inexpensive?) and Christopher Walken as an inspired Detective Macduff. I think there's a lot of value in going back to examine the original text in school, but adaptations can do a lot to help students connect the idea that this story has characters and motivations that are human and resonate even outside the context of whatever the setting of the original play is.
- HeyLaughingBoy 29d ago
  A couple years after I graduated college, I came across the 1972 movie of Macbeth. The experience was so drastically different from reading it in high school that it seemed like a completely different play. Suddenly, it all made sense now that I had a visual context. I remember one of the characters (Macduff?) covered in blood after a battle and grinning about how he had opened up his opponent "from the knave to the chop" with appropriate gestures. I remembered that specific phrase from high school and now, instead of being an abstract comment, it had actual meaning that I could relate to. I'm of the opinion that most plays simply shouldn't be taught in high school English class. There just isn't enough context to really understand them.
  - abighamb 29d ago
    They really need to be produced to be appreciated. I came to love Shakespeare in High School because I happened to perform it in a Theatre Class. Acting it is totally different from reading it.
- Night_Thastus 29d ago
  I felt the same way. I think we were on Hamlet, and reading it alone just felt so confusing and lifeless. I couldn't tell when characters were upset, sarcastic, ecstatic, etc. It drained it of all character. But then later on I saw a play version of it and suddenly it all made sense! Even if the words were identical, the context made it much easier to follow the story. I could piece together what it meant even if it wasn't modern English. You could hear the emotion in the voices and better follow what they're reacting to. I really appreciated it! It's not like it would have cost the school anything...it was freely available online!
mcmcmc 29d ago
> But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. I think you just had bad teachers. Historical context was always part of the English language/literature curricula at my high school, and it definitely made a difference. I didn’t even go to a good school. Our district was the worst funded in our state with a 40% dropout rate.
- criddell 29d ago
  The average high school English teacher isn’t great, and half of all teachers are worse than that!
- mrweasel 29d ago
  I really liked my teachers, and have always thought of them as good teachers, however it's also very clear to me as an adult that they didn't teach literature or art. We where taught to read and write, but not have an appreciation of the language, nor to see text as anything but text. I did have teachers that briefly touched on the subject of interpreting a text, I still view that subject as mostly bullshit as you can basically read anything you want into a text, e.g. a lot of works can be read as a struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie, without it being remotely the intention. Also not all books are great works of art, created to teach you about the world, humanity or life in general, most are just entertainment. The problem, in my mind, is that teachers feel like they need to pick out classics, and "great works of art" most of which aren't written for children or even teenagers. A great number of people have had their potential joy of reading and art stomped out of them, by not introducing them to works relevant for their age and life situation. Doing so might however mean picking 20 or more different books for a single class. In my case Danish and history was two different subjects and rarely did they cross paths. Just as an example of how terrible history lessons can be, the general summary of my schools teaching of WW2: A time of rationing, blackout curtains and bunkers. Oh and the Germans where there, they appeared to enjoy their stay.
  - lordnacho 28d ago
    But you did read and maybe watch the movie of Det Forsømte Forår. Interestingly we had a couple of much more recent books about young people in my school. But again, how would you know even about your own country without quite a lot of context? I just never thought I could place things until I was quite old.
Avicebron 29d ago
I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with "strange torture" more like "sore muscles from exercising mental muscles". Yes I remember hating The Great Gatsby when I was 14 and having to read it critically in school, I sure didn't have a lot context, but I remember having to do it, and I can look back after years of secondary and post secondary schooling and appreciate the exercise. I think we should be much denser and more rigorous with school material in the middle/high schoolers, at least relative to what my experience in public school USA was, but that's sort of a separate discussion.
- criddell 29d ago
  Gatsby is one of those books I hated in high school. A few years ago I read it again and confirmed it’s a terrible book filled with shallow characters living boring lives doing nothing of interest to me. My opinion of 1984 also dropped when I reread it. Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Chrysalids, and Lost Horizon are all books I liked more when I reread them as an adult.
  - Zee2 29d ago
    I’m certain the vapidity of the characters in Gatsby is entirely the point.
    - criddell 29d ago
      Vapid characters aren’t a problem if they are doing something interesting or if there is non-trivial conflict or mystery or confusion or tension or drama of any sort or anything that leads to some kind of meaningful change in a character. Gatsby's death might have counted if Fitzgerald hadn't telegraphed it from so far away that it became a non-event. You know how kids’ books for beginning readers are mostly about stringing together words that are easy to read and make a sensible sentence? See Jane run. Run, Jane, run! why is Jane running? Because she wants to. That’s how Gatsby read to me with more complex words and sentences. I don’t even mind books where nothing much happens (Iyashikei) if the setting is novel. But Gatsby was predictable and dull for me with cardboard characters living passive lives. The other book that lots of people seem to love that I've never been able to finish is Moby Dick. I don't dislike it but he pace is a bit slow for me.
thfuran 29d ago
It’s certainly true that an adult would tend to have more additional knowledge and be better able to understand a lot of writing, but if you avoid exposing kids to anything they don’t have total understanding of the context of, you won’t really be able to teach them anything. Discussing books can help provide some of that context they’re missing. It’s probably fine to teach arithmetic before algebraic number theory too.
- fluoridation 29d ago
  I'm honestly of the opinion that teaching children arithmetic (as in, having them perform arithmetic algorithms) is not just a complete waste of time, but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".
  - deleted 29d ago
    [deleted]
  - kccqzy 29d ago
    At their young age, it typically takes children the ritual of performing arithmetic algorithms at least several dozens of times if not a hundred times to get them to understand and internalize the algorithm itself. You can't actually teach the algorithm itself because they haven't studied basic algebra yet, so the only approximation is using the algorithm on multiple numbers. Then afterwards just give them a calculator. In contrast, in high school, when a student has sufficient mental maturity to understand algorithms abstractly, it suffices to have the student do a few integrations by hand (say using the integration by parts technique) and then hand them a computer algebra system.
    - fluoridation 29d ago
      >Then afterwards just give them a calculator. If problems were properly designed the students shouldn't even need calculators. In math the specific numerical value of a result is far less important than how it relates to the inputs. Raw calculation doesn't develop the intuition of when one operation is more appropriate than another.
dylan604 29d ago
> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about? I think this depends on who is reading it, but not the "obviously" type of depends. I'd imagine a teenager from America reading it would have a different take than someone from the UK (possibly Europe at large as well). A lot of that understanding will come from the context of living in the same area. A lot of history is learned/absorbed without formal teaching. Kids just ask questions about various buildings and the why? type of questions that start forming that kind of context.
RobotToaster 29d ago
School in general is terrible at teaching the "everything is connected to everything else" of history.
- alephnerd 29d ago
  Depends on your teachers and your school. I've been lucky to have really good teachers despite attending public schools from K-12 (except Spanish - my Spanish teachers sucked. Turns out being fluent Spanish first speakers doesn't make someone a good teacher).
- deleted 29d ago
  [deleted]
alephnerd 29d ago
I feel like it depends on how the classics are introduced. Being forced to read classics in their original form, while illuminating is unneccesary at the K-12 level where classics, humanities, and arts are meant to spark curiosity and an openness to synthesis. Using abridged adaptations (eg. Illustrated abridged classics, wishbone) aren't a bad way to impart much of the ethos of those works.
- j7ake 29d ago
  Yes, imagine classical physics were taught by studying the original works from Newton. It would never work!
  - alephnerd 29d ago
    A couple of my buddies and I tried that in HS - it didn't go well. Halliday Resnick and Mir publishers was the way to go for USAPhO.
NoboruWataya 29d ago
> So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture A lot of school is like this though. English is basically my only language, I have taught myself some very basic Spanish over the years but it is a struggle when you are busy and don't have a consistent routine. I can't believe that for years the state paid a professional to spend hours each week trying to teach me not one but two languages and I completely wasted it. I just had no interest. In school they basically teach you a bit of everything (maths, science, languages, arts, history, etc), if you are lucky you will take to one or two of those subjects and view the rest as a chore, but all of them are potentially valuable if you really embrace them. > So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about? Ideally, a good English teacher will explain these things, and/or you will also be learning history which may touch on them. Sure, maybe that isn't enough, but I still think it is better for people to be exposed to these things at a young age. Many young people do actually really take to these works and get a lot of value out of them.
- conductr 29d ago
  A lot of people revisit these works later in life and have even further appreciation of them. I think it all validates the goal is to teach learning as a life skill. Learning is never complete. Even things you know, you may not understand until later. It’s all part of the process of learning to learn and emphasizing curiosity and critical thinking. These are the high level objectives of education and inform a lot of the processes that exist.
  - lunatuna 29d ago
    I’m in my fifties and taking a break from work and have now found myself reading Macbeth, Doctor Faustus, along with Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. My movie watching is now much more auteur and reaching for the unconscious and immaterial experience. I’ve wonder if I was taught Shakespeare too early, but see it more as an Easter egg or gift waiting for me to catch up. I think more so I was so focused on the rational I was ignoring the other parts though fully immersed in being the other part. Now I see it and appreciate so much have the right lens from early teachings with my experiences. And to your point continuing to learn.
cyberge99 29d ago
The point of school is to expose you briefly to many things in hopes that one catches your fancy.
- intrasight 29d ago
  This is a message that should be conveyed to kids. It's one that I didn't get. I wore blinders and prejudged that basically all the humanities was a waste of time. The guidance counselor would sign me up for history classes and I literally didn't even show up beyond the first day when I told the teacher that I have better things to do. I regret doing that. My daughter, fortunately, did not make that mistake and got exposed to a great deal of art and history and literature that I had denied myself. Now I love history and I'm trying to make up for the gap.
  - cyberge99 25d ago
    Ha! I was very similar. Now I have a few accomplishments under my belt, I can appreciate craftsmanship and art for the sake of art.
AIorNot 29d ago
I think the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now applies, life is a conversation with experience.. you are not the same person you were in your teens, in your twenties.. and once you go through life some more life you perspectives shift even more drastically. Doesn't mean younger perspectives are useless.. you were more engaged with the world when you younger and more innocent.. you really can't get back to that I don't know any 50+ year who really looks as young people as anything other than filtered reflections of themselves who will learn on their own.. is innocence unwise and experience embittered? Perhaps but that is a Judgemental and cynical perspective - we need more perspective in this world..and we must expose our best art early so that conversation can begin...The young will get there.
- adgjlsfhk1 29d ago
  I think my favorite part of this song is that there are excellent versions of this song from her in her 20s, 70s and 90s
  - eapriv 29d ago
    ??? She’s 82.
yipinwong 29d ago
I learned not to like literatures, and arts learning them in school. There were some kids who did great, and did not like it. Some liked it. Giving as much experience to students provides a way to decide their own life. I still am not fond of arts, and literatures, started digging it a bit.
dmurray 29d ago
But fiction is the best way to learn about those past times. You could read in a history book - in the few sentences your locality's curriculum can spare for Victorian England - that there was a lot of urban poverty in London after the industrial revolution. Or in a geography book, that that area is prone to smog if you build coal-burning factories in it. But are you really going to get it in the same way as someone who reads and imagines young Oliver Twist asking for "more", or about the smoke and the mud and the fog crawling down over rooftops in Bleak House?
stackghost 29d ago
There is no vampire in all of literature able to suck blood from victims as well as high school English classes are able to suck all the joy from reading. Here's a seminal work of literature. Instead of taking your time and reading it, write an essay about something you don't give a shit about that's tangentially related to the book.
patrickmay 29d ago
> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. That suggests a need for better cooperation across subjects. In college I learned calculus at the same time as physics and the two reinforced each other. We should be aligning English reading requirements with what's being taught in history class.
jrm4 29d ago
Wow. So I'm a college instructor (in IT) and you're nailing what I'm trying to defeat to the best of my ability. I do an intro class, and I think most everyone around me believes that my job is to "go over the technologies that are important to students." And it's kind of like that, but overwhelmingly what I'm really doing is "I find technology to be endlessly fascinating and exciting and important, and here is both how and why, let me see if I can transfer this excitement to you." If that's there, the learning just happens, that's the easy part.
m463 29d ago
I've always thought about that with history - it should be taught to people with enough life experience to realize the subtleties. On the other hand, art class can teach personal creation to young folks, before it gets optimized away as you grow older in favor of consumption.
- deleted 29d ago
  [deleted]
frollogaston 29d ago
It's this, and also a lot of required readings were just girl books even in hindsight. I wasn't part of the intended audience. It's like if some day Twilight becomes an American classic.
- LEDThereBeLight 26d ago
  Most required readings are just boy books. Not being part of the intended audience gives you understanding of other people.
allturtles 29d ago
> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? We did talk about these things in English class in high school. The teachers would lay out the historical/social/cultural context of each book we read. Did your school not do that?
- gloryjulio 29d ago
  In my case I didn't understand the context of the context. Also, having no life experience at the time didn't help. Most of my time was spent on grinding stem subjects
- sigbottle 29d ago
  It still feels academic though. Suppose your response to that is, "Well, suck it up, its formalized". I'd argue that it'd be worse if you could teach your book, and a 50 year old who both has rich lived experience and grew up in the time period the book was talking about has the exact same understanding of said book as a bored edgy 16 year old. Either you're a godly teacher, or chances are the book doesn't have much depth. And maybe you are a really good teacher, I certainly wouldn't want to teach public school teenagers for a job. But while I'm charitable to teachers, I'm also charitable to the depth of novels. I read Dostoevsky when I was 16 and I'm still learning more things about him and myself a decade later.
  - Syntonicles 29d ago
    There are books that I read every decade or so, and there is always new insight. Sometimes I will identify with an older character and see the entire story through their eyes. Often times an interesting novel will prompt me to study the cultural context independently. There was still tremendous value in exposing myself to Dostoyevsky as a teenager. I have observed myself make the same mistakes as his characters, blinded in the moment by emotion. He had so much insight into human nature - but even if forewarning doesn't prevent us from folly, it can highlight a path to acceptance, repentance or redemption that otherwise may take a lifetime of self-reflection. I don't mean that in a religious context, if that matters.
gloryjulio 29d ago
This. I am late bloomer in humanity subjects. I was a typical stem students that didn't really understand any of those classes. It was not until working after finishing Universities, I started to get back to understand those topics. It also became much more enjoyable once I had the contexts. And learning the contexts is a actually a bigger part of the fun
dredmorbius 29d ago
The real value isn't in getting it at the time, it's having those seeds planted, among a population who will likely read very little after graduation, to find fertile ground later. There's all manner of things I'd Studied in School (primary, secondary, uni) which only became clear to me many, many decades later. I'm helping an older friend with their one remaining pastime, audiobooks, many of which are re-readings of works they'd first encountered as a teen or young adult (now in their 10th decade). As TFA notes, there's a thickness to many of these works, and even having read them several times already, there's a reward in hearing them again, 60 or 70 years after first encountering them. I listen in on some of the books. They've covered over 2,000 titles, which is impressive for anyone. One aspect that stands out to me is that I now catch the references to many of them: Herman Hesse commenting on Dante Gabriel Rosetti's "Beata Beatrix" (at the Tate), several references to Erewhon, and numerous places, people, and historical events of which I now have far more context.
radlad 29d ago
> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. I agree with this premise - but the arts and humanities are a big part of how we learn these things in the first place! In other words, you have to start somewhere. Context builds on context.
obviouslynotme 29d ago
I second this. As a teenager, you don't have the life experience to appreciate most classic literature. I don't even think you have it in college, although this is less true. That being said, there is important literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that should be introduced early, even if they won't really grasp it for decades. Most would be early philosophy and mythology, along with their best refutations. Learning how to read, think, and discuss them is the skill you're really looking to impart on the students to prepare them for real reading as adults. Unfortunately, the education system is designed to train children to the minimum requirements of their predestined jobs and no further. It's no surprise that schools have made reading and thinking so unpleasant that most people are too traumatized to do it on their own.
serbuvlad 29d ago
Because the book tells you? To my shame I've never read Dickens, but I did read the Romanian canonical authors (I am Romanian), and a lot of them, the ones I liked, gave you a very real sense of the life of the people at the time. Ion, for example, is basically a tragedy about the titular character scheming to marry a woman whom he doesn't love (but who loves him) because he's poor and she's "rich" (owns land). And the book really shows you how important and spiritually so it is for the main character (and therein, for the average farmer at the time) to work his own land, to sweat and toil over his land. How he collapses to his knees and kisses the dirt when he finally gets it etc. High schoolers can get most books with adult themes, and most books require very little context, since they are filled with passages upon passages upon passages of description. > How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is? Because they literally say it! “Not that I am afraid of myself, but I dread other people’s remarks.” “How can I promise to be wiser … if I am tempted?” “My father’s opinion of me does me the greatest honour; and I should be miserable to forfeit it.” “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.” Or the narrator does “To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or finer success.” And from the books YOU LEARN WHAT THE SOCIETY WAS LIKE! I don't think waiting 20 years to acquire a much vaguer and much less correct understanding of the context from YouTube/TikTok/TV cultural diffusion is very wise.
- RealityVoid 29d ago
  Oh, such a day, a talk about Ion on HN. I get your point, and the book does say that. It's just... For a teenager, it rarely lands. And connecting context is super important. I mean, sure Ion wanted land, but you really can't contextualize that kind of desire when your needs and desires are completely different. Maybe you were more capable of empathy or better at contextualizing what you were reading. I sure as hell was not. And only now later in like I think I am able to read and understand books. And really get them at a much deeper level. I do wonder though if without going through the motions of reading stuff you contextualize poorly if you ever gain the capability to understand. Or if it just makes no sens to engage with certain material until mature enough, in the right frame of mind and, importantly, _interested in it_.
joshgachnang 29d ago
The best class I had in high school was American Dream: a mixture of literature and history/social studies. You'd learn about a time and then read a book for that time, like Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle or All Quiet on the Western Front. It was a double period, had two dynamic teachers (one old hippie and one young fun guy), and most of the grades were from papers about how the book and history related. More schools should have something like that.
bloomca 29d ago
> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about? Well, you probably had some history classes, maybe watched a movie or two, heard something, maybe asked your parents or the teacher, etc. Also the books usually do set the scene by describing the environments, so you can infer from them. It also works the other way, after reading that book it gives you some foundation for when you consume other media related to that period/place.
edgarvaldes 29d ago
>there isn't time for that If there is one thing I miss about my adolescence, it is the vast amount of free time. I have never again been able to devote hours upon hours to reading. I used to be able to finish entire books in a couple of days, or a week at most.
anonlinc77 29d ago
100% agree. The best literature class I ever had was in college. In class our professor spent very little time discussing the book and spent most of the time discussing the author's life and historical context. I understood those books way more than I had ever understood classical literature before.
cestith 29d ago
One might consider this an argument for an integrated curriculum. Teach Les Misérables during a unit on the French revolution. Teach Huckleberry Finn or Roots when discussing the history of slavery in the US. Teach The Great Gatsby as part of a unit on the roaring 20s and Prohibition or alternately on the second world war.
groundzeros2015 29d ago
It’s not only the historical context is missing but you yourself haven’t experienced life to be interested in the topic. If you haven’t had a child or a marriage, or even a friend who had one. Why would you understand that relationship. How can you possibly think about government structures when you’ve never led anything.
mulmen 29d ago
School is about wide exposure to concepts that wouldn’t be encountered elsewhere. The goal is to teach students how to think, not what to think. The actual subject matter is irrelevant. I don’t remember if the area of a triangle in my geometry homework was 5 or 7 and it genuinely doesn’t matter. What I do remember is that formulas are generalized way to solve problems. Nobody needs to remember the content of fictional literature. But malleable brains do need to examine it critically so they can examine anything critically. A book report is simply a demonstration that you can ingest and comprehend non-trivial information. That’s it. The content is irrelevant. A book report on Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels serves the same purpose. But your instructors need to be familiar in order to assess your competency so they stick with the classics. Having completed book reports on any topic at all better prepares you to study history (or any topic) later in life because it is literally just “how to internalize information”.
Night_Thastus 29d ago
Context is everything for art and literature! It's not to say they can't be enjoyed out of context, but a lot can be lost without it, especially for a teenager. I'm tempted to say that history and literature classes should just be combined, gradually working in books from (or about) the period and place being taught!
scarecrowbob 29d ago
Yeah, I feel you on that. It took about 20 years for my philosophy and literature degrees pay off. I know more now, but I had to start -somewhere- even if it was hard to get the whole context. Much of that time between putting in all that work and feeling like it was worth it was spent reading a lot of other things and amassing life experience, raising my kids, and working in unrelated professions. However, having that context for the experiences I was getting is probably why it feels useful in retrospect. Even though I didn't really understand Sartre or Kirkegaard or whoever (and I suspect that they don't have the best ideas all the time), having them available to me was helpful. To me, even if I didn't totally get the context of "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or "Ulysses" or "Pamela" or "Borderlands/La Frontera" or "The Sun Also Rises": a) knowing that these were things people do deeply explore was helpful and b) the little bits that did resonate have stayed with me. Further, it's been very useful to re-visit these texts as I've gotten older has been supremely interesting. So yeah, education is wasted on the young and all but it set me up well. As a not-super-old 48-year-old with adult children, I'm quite pleased that I can review the texts from my 20s and will be able to do the same if I get to be in my 70s or 80s.
Agingcoder 29d ago
So that’s what I thought - but if I hadn’t been exposed to it early I don’t think I’d have gone back to it as an adult. So I think it’s useful.
deleted 29d ago
[deleted]
throwforfeds 29d ago
> How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is? I remember when I was a senior in (public) high school they created a two period class for one of the earlier grades that was a combined history and literature class, with one history teacher and one english teacher co-teaching it. The idea was that you'd learn the historical context and then in the same class also be reading the literature that came out of the period. Seemed like a great idea and I wonder what ever came of it.
_carbyau_ 29d ago
> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. Play "Fuck Tha Police" for someone. Usually, they are shocked that someone would listen to a song with so many swear words and clearly so disrespectful to an institution most have been brought up to respect. The sheer anger in it... And then you put it in context. The societal mores of the time, the specific events, how this album landed and why it resonated. Just look at the lyrics and count swear words? It means nothing. In the context of it's time? Scintillating.

hansonkd 29d ago

I think books in education often serve as an means to putting yourself in those scenarios and attempting to learn more about different times and cultures.

pavel_lishin 29d ago

It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning. The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.

dehrmann 29d ago
> where the performance carries a lot of the meaning The big one for me is you don't necessarily know Elizabethan slang, but when you see the play performed, the dirty lines get delivered dirty.
- gowld 29d ago
  That's why The Taming of The Shrew is recommended for children. The bawdiness s straightforward.
PsylentKnight 29d ago
I have heard that Shakespeare is much easier and more enjoyable for non-English speakers, because they get modern translations and we do not Linguist John McWhorter says that Shakespeare is often an "the Emperor has no clothes" situation. No one wants to admit to themselves or others that they don't understand it, and the people who think they understand it are often misunderstanding a lot of it
- LPisGood 29d ago
  Now, maybe I was convincing myself that I understood in high school when I’ve in fact it not, but I found that reading it aloud and trying to say the words, as if you were the character (acting, if you will), made it much more understandable.
  - PsylentKnight 29d ago
    I mean, even the most famous line in all of Shakespeare, "wherefore art thou Romeo" is frequently misunderstood because many people reasonably assume "wherefore" means something like "where". Yes, you can figure it out from context, but the context is in the same archaic language. Very possible to untangle all that while you're reading it and perhaps it's a good mental exercise. But it can be really tough to keep up when you're watching in the form it was meant to be enjoyed in, a play
    - schoen 29d ago
      That speech is expressing an awesome idea: Juliet is saying that she loves Romeo-the-person, but she is terrified of her bad luck in that he happens to have a certain surname ("Montague") which will automatically cause her family to hate him. Which, indeed, they do. It's basically something like "why did I fall in love with such an inconvenient person?", together with "why does my family care so much about this thing that I'm not sure needs to matter?".
      - PsylentKnight 29d ago
        Sure, but the archaic language can obscure the awesome idea. "Why are you Romeo?" may sound less poetic to modern ears, but isn't that how people back then would have parsed it - just as easily as everyday language, because it was their everyday language? I feel like in a way we're losing Shakespeare's intended effect, because we insist on using a "language" that isn't used anymore. Yes, I understand that it's considered the same language, but a language isn't really one thing, it's more of a spectrum without sharp edges. Shakespeare is much closer in time to Middle English (which is considered a different language) than he is to our time
NobodyNada 29d ago
I had the same experience reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in high school -- I could follow the story, but it was a slog to get through and I didn't understand what was supposed to be so great about it. Then I saw an actual performance of the play recently, and it all clicked. It was just as understandable as any contemporary film, and easily one of the most fun and entertaining stories I've seen.
- NoboruWataya 29d ago
  I gave up trying to read plays shortly after school. There's no point to me, they are supposed to be performed. I still think it's worth studying some of the more famous ones in school, but any study should absolutely involve actually going to see the play at some point.
  - conductr 29d ago
    I commented elsewhere but my schooling had a pattern of: read > analyze/discuss > watch movie > analyze/discuss. Most of the material has film adaptations and this was fairly sufficient in closing the loop during the course. Even in history class, when we studied key documents the teacher would often at some point show us an oral presentation of the document- like a clip of (actor portrayed) Abraham Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address. It’s such a well written speech that’s it’s exceedingly simple to comprehend when read. However, when you hear it orated it becomes evident how powerful it was and monumental moment in American history to justify learning about as it was unifying and motivating for all even in the midst of civil war. (Sorry may not be relatable reference for non Americans was just the first that came to mind)
  - nickff 28d ago
    You'd probably be in a better place to understand the scripts now, having seen more performances, for whatever that might be worth. That said, I personally don't read scripts, and have not done so since I was last required to in high school.
- dredmorbius 29d ago
  I've had a similar experience, with the same play, but in an absolutely minimalist setting. No sets, the only props were a few chairs, and costumes were the same white slacks and smock worn by all the players. And it absolutely worked. This wasn't long after my secondary education --- I'd just started uni. But enough had happened that I got it. As I've commented recently, even as an excellent reader, there's something that hits quite differently from hearing fiction (or even nonfiction) not just read but acted. Selected Shorts is an excellent source for this. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163756>.
magneticnorth 29d ago
Yes, I agree completely with the Shakespeare point. I was lucky enough to have a close friend (also a teenager!) who really got Shakespeare. She would explain to me what was actually going on, and read it with the correct emphasis so you could mostly actually follow it. She is 100% of the reason that I was ever able to appreciate Shakespeare. You would hope that most teachers could do this, but in my experience it was only my one friend who had the literary and dramatic talent to explain Shakespeare well to teenagers.
- bluGill 29d ago
  There is no correct way to read Shakespeare. There are many wrong ways, but don't let your friend's interpretation cloud you from the others. It is really magic when you see some other interpretation and understand both are right despite not being compatible.
  - stackghost 29d ago
    Oh, I hate this sentiment so very much. Example: The song "We Are Young" by fun features the following lyrics. My seat's been taken by some sunglasses / asking 'bout a scar, and / I know I gave it to you months ago / I know you're trying to forget / But between the drinks and subtle things / The holes in my apologies, you know / I'm trying hard to take it back The aspiring song analyst might think it's about the singer being asked by a cop (wearing sunglasses) asking about him abusing his girlfriend, or whatever, but Nate Ruess is on record saying it's just about being hung over, and no more deep than that. Projecting meaning where there is none, or where the meaning is clear, is simply not valid even for Shakespeare.
    - imp0cat 29d ago
      > Projecting deeper meaning where there is none is simply not valid. Nah, that is the most fun part.
  - gowld 29d ago
    Obligatory "To Be or Not to Be" https://youtu.be/iQULEW2JwHE https://youtu.be/iQULEW2JwHE
iwontberude 29d ago
[dead]
SilasX 29d ago
Rant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever registered as sounding particularly pleasant to me. The word choice, sure, but not the meter or stressing. They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, and how you're "supposed" to stress it, but it came off to me as "technical curiosity you're supposed to memorize" not "universal experience of enjoyment" that I apparently don't share. My lighting talk about this: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZUcvP8CWhB/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DZUcvP8CWhB/ Non-social media link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G58CMUDf-M4loe3MeEus-9gNA5TH7y2D/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G58CMUDf-M4loe3MeEus-9gNA5T...
- gowld 29d ago
  Meter is a very basic part of English poetry that is usually taught. Almost all popular music and poetry has meter.
  - SilasX 29d ago
    Again, it was taught[1]. The fact that (speaking it with) one meter sounds particularly pleasant (to some people), and that this is a big part of its appeal (to those who like it) was not taught. IOW, it's the difference between "these words in this poem rhyme" vs "this poem sounds nice because these words rhyme". Which, incidentally, is an analogy I make in the lightning talk to explain why this part would be glossed over: people assume that appreciation of rhyming/iambic pentameter is universal. [1] "They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378069
- Telaneo 29d ago
  Yeah, Shakespeare is not going to land if iambic pentameter doesn't sound like anything special to you. It's a big part of why many Shakespearean quotes stick so hard in people's brains, like 'To be or not to be', 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' and 'If music be the food of love, play on'. If all of these have to carry their weight with only their literal words on the page, and not how they're actually said and stressed, they're going to be a lot less memorable.
ninalanyon 29d ago
Reading these comments about Shakespeare makes me think that most of you had terrible teachers of Eng. Lit. Plays, all of them not just Shakespeare, are written to be performed. If your teachers didn't have you perform plays and also watch professional and amateur performances they were derelict in their duties as teachers. Performance isn't just rote recitation.
- pavel_lishin 29d ago
  I guess I can't lump every English teacher into the same bucket, but in my experience, they aren't particularly skilled at explaining the context behind a lot of the stuff being taught.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 29d ago
    I would agree wrt my High School teachers. They were basically competent, but not particularly good. In college however, my Humanities professors were better than I appreciated at the time. They forced us to think about the material and challenged us to defend our interpretations. As an Engineering student who just wanted the class to be over, I really missed out on a lot of good stuff.
- ydat 29d ago
  Frankly, Shakespeare is one of the few things I enjoyed reading in school. It was classic American novels I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t tell you why, but getting through something even as simple as Tom Sawyer was such a chore for me.
  - smelendez 29d ago
    Twain can be tedious because he’s a humorist and we’ve heard those jokes a million times by now. Also he writes speech in dialect which now means nothing to us and makes him harder to read. I find him easier to read as an adult but he can still be a slog. I think a lot of classic American lit is hard as an American kid because it’s removed enough from today that you don’t get the nuances and also so influential that the storytelling feels trite, even if it was revolutionary at the time.
crooked-v 29d ago
If not for Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, I'd probably had just completely bounced off Shakespeare's works in high school.
- CocaKoala 29d ago
  Another really good and interesting film adaptation of Shakespeare is "Scotland, PA" - Macbeth, set against the backdrop of a 1970s fast food restaurant featuring a soundtrack that consists entirely of Bad Company songs (apparently the library was shockingly inexpensive?) and Christopher Walken as an inspired Detective Macduff. I think there's a lot of value in going back to examine the original text in school, but adaptations can do a lot to help students connect the idea that this story has characters and motivations that are human and resonate even outside the context of whatever the setting of the original play is.
HeyLaughingBoy 29d ago
A couple years after I graduated college, I came across the 1972 movie of Macbeth. The experience was so drastically different from reading it in high school that it seemed like a completely different play. Suddenly, it all made sense now that I had a visual context. I remember one of the characters (Macduff?) covered in blood after a battle and grinning about how he had opened up his opponent "from the knave to the chop" with appropriate gestures. I remembered that specific phrase from high school and now, instead of being an abstract comment, it had actual meaning that I could relate to. I'm of the opinion that most plays simply shouldn't be taught in high school English class. There just isn't enough context to really understand them.
- abighamb 29d ago
  They really need to be produced to be appreciated. I came to love Shakespeare in High School because I happened to perform it in a Theatre Class. Acting it is totally different from reading it.
Night_Thastus 29d ago
I felt the same way. I think we were on Hamlet, and reading it alone just felt so confusing and lifeless. I couldn't tell when characters were upset, sarcastic, ecstatic, etc. It drained it of all character. But then later on I saw a play version of it and suddenly it all made sense! Even if the words were identical, the context made it much easier to follow the story. I could piece together what it meant even if it wasn't modern English. You could hear the emotion in the voices and better follow what they're reacting to. I really appreciated it! It's not like it would have cost the school anything...it was freely available online!

mcmcmc 29d ago

> But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. I think you just had bad teachers. Historical context was always part of the English language/literature curricula at my high school, and it definitely made a difference. I didn’t even go to a good school. Our district was the worst funded in our state with a 40% dropout rate.

criddell 29d ago
The average high school English teacher isn’t great, and half of all teachers are worse than that!
mrweasel 29d ago
I really liked my teachers, and have always thought of them as good teachers, however it's also very clear to me as an adult that they didn't teach literature or art. We where taught to read and write, but not have an appreciation of the language, nor to see text as anything but text. I did have teachers that briefly touched on the subject of interpreting a text, I still view that subject as mostly bullshit as you can basically read anything you want into a text, e.g. a lot of works can be read as a struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie, without it being remotely the intention. Also not all books are great works of art, created to teach you about the world, humanity or life in general, most are just entertainment. The problem, in my mind, is that teachers feel like they need to pick out classics, and "great works of art" most of which aren't written for children or even teenagers. A great number of people have had their potential joy of reading and art stomped out of them, by not introducing them to works relevant for their age and life situation. Doing so might however mean picking 20 or more different books for a single class. In my case Danish and history was two different subjects and rarely did they cross paths. Just as an example of how terrible history lessons can be, the general summary of my schools teaching of WW2: A time of rationing, blackout curtains and bunkers. Oh and the Germans where there, they appeared to enjoy their stay.
- lordnacho 28d ago
  But you did read and maybe watch the movie of Det Forsømte Forår. Interestingly we had a couple of much more recent books about young people in my school. But again, how would you know even about your own country without quite a lot of context? I just never thought I could place things until I was quite old.

Avicebron 29d ago

I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with "strange torture" more like "sore muscles from exercising mental muscles". Yes I remember hating The Great Gatsby when I was 14 and having to read it critically in school, I sure didn't have a lot context, but I remember having to do it, and I can look back after years of secondary and post secondary schooling and appreciate the exercise. I think we should be much denser and more rigorous with school material in the middle/high schoolers, at least relative to what my experience in public school USA was, but that's sort of a separate discussion.

criddell 29d ago
Gatsby is one of those books I hated in high school. A few years ago I read it again and confirmed it’s a terrible book filled with shallow characters living boring lives doing nothing of interest to me. My opinion of 1984 also dropped when I reread it. Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Chrysalids, and Lost Horizon are all books I liked more when I reread them as an adult.
- Zee2 29d ago
  I’m certain the vapidity of the characters in Gatsby is entirely the point.
  - criddell 29d ago
    Vapid characters aren’t a problem if they are doing something interesting or if there is non-trivial conflict or mystery or confusion or tension or drama of any sort or anything that leads to some kind of meaningful change in a character. Gatsby's death might have counted if Fitzgerald hadn't telegraphed it from so far away that it became a non-event. You know how kids’ books for beginning readers are mostly about stringing together words that are easy to read and make a sensible sentence? See Jane run. Run, Jane, run! why is Jane running? Because she wants to. That’s how Gatsby read to me with more complex words and sentences. I don’t even mind books where nothing much happens (Iyashikei) if the setting is novel. But Gatsby was predictable and dull for me with cardboard characters living passive lives. The other book that lots of people seem to love that I've never been able to finish is Moby Dick. I don't dislike it but he pace is a bit slow for me.

thfuran 29d ago

It’s certainly true that an adult would tend to have more additional knowledge and be better able to understand a lot of writing, but if you avoid exposing kids to anything they don’t have total understanding of the context of, you won’t really be able to teach them anything. Discussing books can help provide some of that context they’re missing. It’s probably fine to teach arithmetic before algebraic number theory too.

fluoridation 29d ago
I'm honestly of the opinion that teaching children arithmetic (as in, having them perform arithmetic algorithms) is not just a complete waste of time, but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".
- deleted 29d ago
  [deleted]
- kccqzy 29d ago
  At their young age, it typically takes children the ritual of performing arithmetic algorithms at least several dozens of times if not a hundred times to get them to understand and internalize the algorithm itself. You can't actually teach the algorithm itself because they haven't studied basic algebra yet, so the only approximation is using the algorithm on multiple numbers. Then afterwards just give them a calculator. In contrast, in high school, when a student has sufficient mental maturity to understand algorithms abstractly, it suffices to have the student do a few integrations by hand (say using the integration by parts technique) and then hand them a computer algebra system.
  - fluoridation 29d ago
    >Then afterwards just give them a calculator. If problems were properly designed the students shouldn't even need calculators. In math the specific numerical value of a result is far less important than how it relates to the inputs. Raw calculation doesn't develop the intuition of when one operation is more appropriate than another.

dylan604 29d ago

> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about? I think this depends on who is reading it, but not the "obviously" type of depends. I'd imagine a teenager from America reading it would have a different take than someone from the UK (possibly Europe at large as well). A lot of that understanding will come from the context of living in the same area. A lot of history is learned/absorbed without formal teaching. Kids just ask questions about various buildings and the why? type of questions that start forming that kind of context.

RobotToaster 29d ago

School in general is terrible at teaching the "everything is connected to everything else" of history.

alephnerd 29d ago
Depends on your teachers and your school. I've been lucky to have really good teachers despite attending public schools from K-12 (except Spanish - my Spanish teachers sucked. Turns out being fluent Spanish first speakers doesn't make someone a good teacher).
deleted 29d ago
[deleted]

alephnerd 29d ago

I feel like it depends on how the classics are introduced. Being forced to read classics in their original form, while illuminating is unneccesary at the K-12 level where classics, humanities, and arts are meant to spark curiosity and an openness to synthesis. Using abridged adaptations (eg. Illustrated abridged classics, wishbone) aren't a bad way to impart much of the ethos of those works.

j7ake 29d ago
Yes, imagine classical physics were taught by studying the original works from Newton. It would never work!
- alephnerd 29d ago
  A couple of my buddies and I tried that in HS - it didn't go well. Halliday Resnick and Mir publishers was the way to go for USAPhO.

NoboruWataya 29d ago

> So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture A lot of school is like this though. English is basically my only language, I have taught myself some very basic Spanish over the years but it is a struggle when you are busy and don't have a consistent routine. I can't believe that for years the state paid a professional to spend hours each week trying to teach me not one but two languages and I completely wasted it. I just had no interest. In school they basically teach you a bit of everything (maths, science, languages, arts, history, etc), if you are lucky you will take to one or two of those subjects and view the rest as a chore, but all of them are potentially valuable if you really embrace them. > So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about? Ideally, a good English teacher will explain these things, and/or you will also be learning history which may touch on them. Sure, maybe that isn't enough, but I still think it is better for people to be exposed to these things at a young age. Many young people do actually really take to these works and get a lot of value out of them.

conductr 29d ago
A lot of people revisit these works later in life and have even further appreciation of them. I think it all validates the goal is to teach learning as a life skill. Learning is never complete. Even things you know, you may not understand until later. It’s all part of the process of learning to learn and emphasizing curiosity and critical thinking. These are the high level objectives of education and inform a lot of the processes that exist.
- lunatuna 29d ago
  I’m in my fifties and taking a break from work and have now found myself reading Macbeth, Doctor Faustus, along with Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. My movie watching is now much more auteur and reaching for the unconscious and immaterial experience. I’ve wonder if I was taught Shakespeare too early, but see it more as an Easter egg or gift waiting for me to catch up. I think more so I was so focused on the rational I was ignoring the other parts though fully immersed in being the other part. Now I see it and appreciate so much have the right lens from early teachings with my experiences. And to your point continuing to learn.

cyberge99 29d ago

The point of school is to expose you briefly to many things in hopes that one catches your fancy.

intrasight 29d ago
This is a message that should be conveyed to kids. It's one that I didn't get. I wore blinders and prejudged that basically all the humanities was a waste of time. The guidance counselor would sign me up for history classes and I literally didn't even show up beyond the first day when I told the teacher that I have better things to do. I regret doing that. My daughter, fortunately, did not make that mistake and got exposed to a great deal of art and history and literature that I had denied myself. Now I love history and I'm trying to make up for the gap.
- cyberge99 25d ago
  Ha! I was very similar. Now I have a few accomplishments under my belt, I can appreciate craftsmanship and art for the sake of art.

AIorNot 29d ago

I think the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now applies, life is a conversation with experience.. you are not the same person you were in your teens, in your twenties.. and once you go through life some more life you perspectives shift even more drastically. Doesn't mean younger perspectives are useless.. you were more engaged with the world when you younger and more innocent.. you really can't get back to that I don't know any 50+ year who really looks as young people as anything other than filtered reflections of themselves who will learn on their own.. is innocence unwise and experience embittered? Perhaps but that is a Judgemental and cynical perspective - we need more perspective in this world..and we must expose our best art early so that conversation can begin...The young will get there.

adgjlsfhk1 29d ago
I think my favorite part of this song is that there are excellent versions of this song from her in her 20s, 70s and 90s
- eapriv 29d ago
  ??? She’s 82.

yipinwong 29d ago

I learned not to like literatures, and arts learning them in school. There were some kids who did great, and did not like it. Some liked it. Giving as much experience to students provides a way to decide their own life. I still am not fond of arts, and literatures, started digging it a bit.

dmurray 29d ago

But fiction is the best way to learn about those past times. You could read in a history book - in the few sentences your locality's curriculum can spare for Victorian England - that there was a lot of urban poverty in London after the industrial revolution. Or in a geography book, that that area is prone to smog if you build coal-burning factories in it. But are you really going to get it in the same way as someone who reads and imagines young Oliver Twist asking for "more", or about the smoke and the mud and the fog crawling down over rooftops in Bleak House?

stackghost 29d ago

There is no vampire in all of literature able to suck blood from victims as well as high school English classes are able to suck all the joy from reading. Here's a seminal work of literature. Instead of taking your time and reading it, write an essay about something you don't give a shit about that's tangentially related to the book.

patrickmay 29d ago

> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. That suggests a need for better cooperation across subjects. In college I learned calculus at the same time as physics and the two reinforced each other. We should be aligning English reading requirements with what's being taught in history class.

jrm4 29d ago

Wow. So I'm a college instructor (in IT) and you're nailing what I'm trying to defeat to the best of my ability. I do an intro class, and I think most everyone around me believes that my job is to "go over the technologies that are important to students." And it's kind of like that, but overwhelmingly what I'm really doing is "I find technology to be endlessly fascinating and exciting and important, and here is both how and why, let me see if I can transfer this excitement to you." If that's there, the learning just happens, that's the easy part.

m463 29d ago

I've always thought about that with history - it should be taught to people with enough life experience to realize the subtleties. On the other hand, art class can teach personal creation to young folks, before it gets optimized away as you grow older in favor of consumption.

deleted 29d ago
[deleted]

frollogaston 29d ago

It's this, and also a lot of required readings were just girl books even in hindsight. I wasn't part of the intended audience. It's like if some day Twilight becomes an American classic.

LEDThereBeLight 26d ago
Most required readings are just boy books. Not being part of the intended audience gives you understanding of other people.

allturtles 29d ago

> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? We did talk about these things in English class in high school. The teachers would lay out the historical/social/cultural context of each book we read. Did your school not do that?

gloryjulio 29d ago
In my case I didn't understand the context of the context. Also, having no life experience at the time didn't help. Most of my time was spent on grinding stem subjects
sigbottle 29d ago
It still feels academic though. Suppose your response to that is, "Well, suck it up, its formalized". I'd argue that it'd be worse if you could teach your book, and a 50 year old who both has rich lived experience and grew up in the time period the book was talking about has the exact same understanding of said book as a bored edgy 16 year old. Either you're a godly teacher, or chances are the book doesn't have much depth. And maybe you are a really good teacher, I certainly wouldn't want to teach public school teenagers for a job. But while I'm charitable to teachers, I'm also charitable to the depth of novels. I read Dostoevsky when I was 16 and I'm still learning more things about him and myself a decade later.
- Syntonicles 29d ago
  There are books that I read every decade or so, and there is always new insight. Sometimes I will identify with an older character and see the entire story through their eyes. Often times an interesting novel will prompt me to study the cultural context independently. There was still tremendous value in exposing myself to Dostoyevsky as a teenager. I have observed myself make the same mistakes as his characters, blinded in the moment by emotion. He had so much insight into human nature - but even if forewarning doesn't prevent us from folly, it can highlight a path to acceptance, repentance or redemption that otherwise may take a lifetime of self-reflection. I don't mean that in a religious context, if that matters.

gloryjulio 29d ago

This. I am late bloomer in humanity subjects. I was a typical stem students that didn't really understand any of those classes. It was not until working after finishing Universities, I started to get back to understand those topics. It also became much more enjoyable once I had the contexts. And learning the contexts is a actually a bigger part of the fun

dredmorbius 29d ago

The real value isn't in getting it at the time, it's having those seeds planted, among a population who will likely read very little after graduation, to find fertile ground later. There's all manner of things I'd Studied in School (primary, secondary, uni) which only became clear to me many, many decades later. I'm helping an older friend with their one remaining pastime, audiobooks, many of which are re-readings of works they'd first encountered as a teen or young adult (now in their 10th decade). As TFA notes, there's a thickness to many of these works, and even having read them several times already, there's a reward in hearing them again, 60 or 70 years after first encountering them. I listen in on some of the books. They've covered over 2,000 titles, which is impressive for anyone. One aspect that stands out to me is that I now catch the references to many of them: Herman Hesse commenting on Dante Gabriel Rosetti's "Beata Beatrix" (at the Tate), several references to Erewhon, and numerous places, people, and historical events of which I now have far more context.

radlad 29d ago

> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. I agree with this premise - but the arts and humanities are a big part of how we learn these things in the first place! In other words, you have to start somewhere. Context builds on context.

obviouslynotme 29d ago

I second this. As a teenager, you don't have the life experience to appreciate most classic literature. I don't even think you have it in college, although this is less true. That being said, there is important literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that should be introduced early, even if they won't really grasp it for decades. Most would be early philosophy and mythology, along with their best refutations. Learning how to read, think, and discuss them is the skill you're really looking to impart on the students to prepare them for real reading as adults. Unfortunately, the education system is designed to train children to the minimum requirements of their predestined jobs and no further. It's no surprise that schools have made reading and thinking so unpleasant that most people are too traumatized to do it on their own.

serbuvlad 29d ago

Because the book tells you? To my shame I've never read Dickens, but I did read the Romanian canonical authors (I am Romanian), and a lot of them, the ones I liked, gave you a very real sense of the life of the people at the time. Ion, for example, is basically a tragedy about the titular character scheming to marry a woman whom he doesn't love (but who loves him) because he's poor and she's "rich" (owns land). And the book really shows you how important and spiritually so it is for the main character (and therein, for the average farmer at the time) to work his own land, to sweat and toil over his land. How he collapses to his knees and kisses the dirt when he finally gets it etc. High schoolers can get most books with adult themes, and most books require very little context, since they are filled with passages upon passages upon passages of description. > How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is? Because they literally say it! “Not that I am afraid of myself, but I dread other people’s remarks.” “How can I promise to be wiser … if I am tempted?” “My father’s opinion of me does me the greatest honour; and I should be miserable to forfeit it.” “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.” Or the narrator does “To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or finer success.” And from the books YOU LEARN WHAT THE SOCIETY WAS LIKE! I don't think waiting 20 years to acquire a much vaguer and much less correct understanding of the context from YouTube/TikTok/TV cultural diffusion is very wise.

RealityVoid 29d ago
Oh, such a day, a talk about Ion on HN. I get your point, and the book does say that. It's just... For a teenager, it rarely lands. And connecting context is super important. I mean, sure Ion wanted land, but you really can't contextualize that kind of desire when your needs and desires are completely different. Maybe you were more capable of empathy or better at contextualizing what you were reading. I sure as hell was not. And only now later in like I think I am able to read and understand books. And really get them at a much deeper level. I do wonder though if without going through the motions of reading stuff you contextualize poorly if you ever gain the capability to understand. Or if it just makes no sens to engage with certain material until mature enough, in the right frame of mind and, importantly, _interested in it_.

joshgachnang 29d ago

The best class I had in high school was American Dream: a mixture of literature and history/social studies. You'd learn about a time and then read a book for that time, like Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle or All Quiet on the Western Front. It was a double period, had two dynamic teachers (one old hippie and one young fun guy), and most of the grades were from papers about how the book and history related. More schools should have something like that.

bloomca 29d ago

> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about? Well, you probably had some history classes, maybe watched a movie or two, heard something, maybe asked your parents or the teacher, etc. Also the books usually do set the scene by describing the environments, so you can infer from them. It also works the other way, after reading that book it gives you some foundation for when you consume other media related to that period/place.

edgarvaldes 29d ago

>there isn't time for that If there is one thing I miss about my adolescence, it is the vast amount of free time. I have never again been able to devote hours upon hours to reading. I used to be able to finish entire books in a couple of days, or a week at most.

anonlinc77 29d ago

100% agree. The best literature class I ever had was in college. In class our professor spent very little time discussing the book and spent most of the time discussing the author's life and historical context. I understood those books way more than I had ever understood classical literature before.

cestith 29d ago

One might consider this an argument for an integrated curriculum. Teach Les Misérables during a unit on the French revolution. Teach Huckleberry Finn or Roots when discussing the history of slavery in the US. Teach The Great Gatsby as part of a unit on the roaring 20s and Prohibition or alternately on the second world war.

groundzeros2015 29d ago

It’s not only the historical context is missing but you yourself haven’t experienced life to be interested in the topic. If you haven’t had a child or a marriage, or even a friend who had one. Why would you understand that relationship. How can you possibly think about government structures when you’ve never led anything.

mulmen 29d ago

School is about wide exposure to concepts that wouldn’t be encountered elsewhere. The goal is to teach students how to think, not what to think. The actual subject matter is irrelevant. I don’t remember if the area of a triangle in my geometry homework was 5 or 7 and it genuinely doesn’t matter. What I do remember is that formulas are generalized way to solve problems. Nobody needs to remember the content of fictional literature. But malleable brains do need to examine it critically so they can examine anything critically. A book report is simply a demonstration that you can ingest and comprehend non-trivial information. That’s it. The content is irrelevant. A book report on Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels serves the same purpose. But your instructors need to be familiar in order to assess your competency so they stick with the classics. Having completed book reports on any topic at all better prepares you to study history (or any topic) later in life because it is literally just “how to internalize information”.

Night_Thastus 29d ago

Context is everything for art and literature! It's not to say they can't be enjoyed out of context, but a lot can be lost without it, especially for a teenager. I'm tempted to say that history and literature classes should just be combined, gradually working in books from (or about) the period and place being taught!

scarecrowbob 29d ago

Yeah, I feel you on that. It took about 20 years for my philosophy and literature degrees pay off. I know more now, but I had to start -somewhere- even if it was hard to get the whole context. Much of that time between putting in all that work and feeling like it was worth it was spent reading a lot of other things and amassing life experience, raising my kids, and working in unrelated professions. However, having that context for the experiences I was getting is probably why it feels useful in retrospect. Even though I didn't really understand Sartre or Kirkegaard or whoever (and I suspect that they don't have the best ideas all the time), having them available to me was helpful. To me, even if I didn't totally get the context of "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or "Ulysses" or "Pamela" or "Borderlands/La Frontera" or "The Sun Also Rises": a) knowing that these were things people do deeply explore was helpful and b) the little bits that did resonate have stayed with me. Further, it's been very useful to re-visit these texts as I've gotten older has been supremely interesting. So yeah, education is wasted on the young and all but it set me up well. As a not-super-old 48-year-old with adult children, I'm quite pleased that I can review the texts from my 20s and will be able to do the same if I get to be in my 70s or 80s.

Agingcoder 29d ago

So that’s what I thought - but if I hadn’t been exposed to it early I don’t think I’d have gone back to it as an adult. So I think it’s useful.

deleted 29d ago

[deleted]

throwforfeds 29d ago

> How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is? I remember when I was a senior in (public) high school they created a two period class for one of the earlier grades that was a combined history and literature class, with one history teacher and one english teacher co-teaching it. The idea was that you'd learn the historical context and then in the same class also be reading the literature that came out of the period. Seemed like a great idea and I wonder what ever came of it.

_carbyau_ 29d ago

> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. Play "Fuck Tha Police" for someone. Usually, they are shocked that someone would listen to a song with so many swear words and clearly so disrespectful to an institution most have been brought up to respect. The sheer anger in it... And then you put it in context. The societal mores of the time, the specific events, how this album landed and why it resonated. Just look at the lyrics and count swear words? It means nothing. In the context of it's time? Scintillating.