Comment by jtr1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtr1 | Hacker News Reader

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Journalism is actually a great example of the utility of literature classes - because even if you don't enjoy literature, the act of reading critically is an important skill to making sense of the world.

I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted?

There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;)

I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.

> language drives human interaction.

Very much so - and another reason I am all the more bitter about the waste of time that lit classes were: they also soured me to the whole thing for a long while.

That journalism class was great because, indeed, we also discussed how a story can misinform, even given the same underlying facts. I thought that was very useful and interesting. It was, like you say, about communication, its uses and misuses. The lit stuff never seemed to be about that, it was about obfuscation and the teacher's (?) interpretation of whatever.

I see. That's why I partially blame the teacher in that situation. I think a critical part of teaching is to contextualize the material in the larger picture.

I had a math teacher in high school who, when I asked why I had to learn the quadratic equation, answered with an asinine anecdote about someone asking her to recite it in a social setting. Mathematics felt similarly arbitrary to me at that point, and I was turned off to it for an unfortunately long period of time.

The thing was; it was a pretty clear pattern. I had good and bad science and math teachers, but even with the benefit of time and perspective, I don't hold most of the English ones in a very high regard, at least in terms of their teaching - many of them seemed to be perfectly kind and agreeable people.

One of the ones who was also held in fairly high regard in the school once got into 'time being relative', and trotted out, in the same sentence, something about experiments showing time being different at the poles and the equator, as well as something about time in "latin" cultures. That drove me up the wall!

That's a good point.

The most common question out of a student's mouth is "But why do we have to learn this?" And that's a pretty good question.

Unfortunately they're asking the people least likely to know. Teachers don't even know why most of these things are important. They learned them at school, and then they grew up and taught them, but they never passed through the stage of actually putting them to use in any other context.

Yeah! Lately I've read a few books on copy writing. That would have been hugely useful to study in high school; both in terms of learning to sell someone on something, which everyone needs to do sooner or later, as well as learning how other people try to sell to you.

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