Comment by HEmanZ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HEmanZ | Hacker News Reader

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Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds.

Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. (Is Huck exaggerating to you the reader? This is a critical intuition to get about all writing to make you more literate, not less.) You learn to understand through different writing styles, which is another absolutely critical step in becoming literate.

Just thinking about a world where we take your advice above makes my stomach turn it seems so wrong to what the point of reading these books even is…

> Are you being sarcastic?

I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me.

> Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently.

I did not learn this. I am in my 30s and I had no idea that this was the point until reading your comment. In hindsight, what I learned from books like this is that nothing made sense since I would be told one thing is correct and then be forced to read things that normalized the opposite and by the time I finished reading, I had forgotten the correct way. Expecting a child that knows nothing and is literally a blank slate to learn this lesson from a forced reading of this book is expecting too much. It certainly was in my case. It is a disservice to the child and is contrary to the goal of establishing English literacy.

> Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books

I don't recall that in Huckleberry Finn outside of dialog (I may be misremembering, though; I'm 50 so you can probably guess the year that I read it in).

If it's dialog, sometimes but not always, enclosed in quotation marks, why would you expect correct grammar? People don't talk in correct grammar.

If the entire book is a narration, then the entire book will be filled with grammar as it is spoken, not grammar as it is written.

A few exceptions come to mind (Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" and some other stories I recall reading that used broken grammar as part of the plot, story or for effect), but on the whole most books have had grammar that follows the rules.

A better question is, did the adults forcing children to read such books provide a safe space for the child to ask seemingly stupid questions such as "why did this character in this book talk in ungrammatical sentences" not wholesale rejection of such books.

I think the problem was that you were forced to learn formal grammar, not that you were forced to read Huck Finn.

I feel pretty bad for you reading your comments, it sounds like you had a very bad educational experience that caused much more confusion than it should have.

It sounds to me like you may be neurodivergent in some way that made these two parallel aspects of literacy, literature and grammar, hard to disentangle during your education. It sounds like a failure of the education system to adequately guide you or take your particular ways of thinking into account, not a problem with the sort of underlying philosophy of what books we read in school.

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