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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives

The problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.

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The kids don't hate classroom reading because of the reading; they hate it because of the associated curriculum. “Why were the curtains blue?” is a skill wasted on children. I only gained an appreciation for such meta-reading during a weeks-long TV Tropes bender during a spat of unemployment after getting fired from my first big-boy job.

Makes me wonder is wrong question been asked. Shouldn't it first be why were curtains described in first place?

Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.

If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.

> 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant

The foundation of the mystery novel.

The blue curtains has become an almost deranged meme at this point, completely disconnected from either curricula or evaluation. Students are not asked why singular descriptive details are chosen as such.

Being able to perform critical analysis of text is an essential skill today. It might be more essential now than any other moment in history. Understanding how narrative writing uses symbols translates cleanly into understanding how political messaging or any persuasive writing uses symbols.

Yes and literature is a pretty bad way to teach critical analysis. My high school did political speeches from history and that segment was infinitely more enjoyable than The Scarlet Letter.

You can just teach the thing you want to teach.

Sure, and there are plenty of classes that use different written forms for their pedagogy. An advantage of novels is that their length often allows for different thematic depth and complexity and their narrative can make it easier to hold a reader's attention through that length.

The problems with teaching symbolism using novels are:

1. Novels considered “curriculum-approved literature” often have symbolism that is irrelevant to a student’s life. It was placed there intentionally by the author, and was blatant to all readers when it was published, but it is indistinguishable to a student from the teacher making things up.

2. Teachers who aren't the best end up teaching from a “it's true because it's true” mindset, which may as well be “because I made it up and said so.” These are quite common.

3. Or the teacher draws from a pool of stock symbolic and thematic answers for all novels. Astute students will spot that immediately and treat it as a game of guessing the teacher’s answer rather than engaging with the text.

If the purpose is reading then we let kids read books that they like.

I can read a 1000 page history book but after 50 pages of Dutch literature I want to throw it in the garbage bin. High school KILLS reading. Few survive.

My experience was a self-admitted outlier but it started by being read to frequently as a small child, before school started. I could technically read for as long as I could remember but reading by myself was boring compared to being read to due to having a very short attention span then.

Start literacy young and the discovery of reading for fun will be easy and natural.

Or, as we've seen recently, you can force them and they still won't be literate enough.

You could force kids to read books without forcing which books to read. The issue as always is to find a balance between giving kids agency and making sure they do what's right.

Now that creating written works is trivial, the new skill to have would be figuring out if what you are reading has an ulterior motive, such as advertising.

Or even figuring out if it was created with the intent to have any utility at all for the reader.

Other than avoiding any written works made after 2020, I am not sure what to tell my kids. Even trusting the claim that something was written after 2020 seems difficult, unless you have a physical print showing its age.

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