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Comment by applecrazy | Hacker News Reader

As a high school student at a relatively high-performing school, I see this all the time. Many people even skip reading the book entirely and write an essay based solely on online summaries of the book. It’s quite disappointing, as the literature we read actually holds some cultural value. For example, To Kill a Mockingbird highlights racial tensions in the 60s and Animal Farm highlights the dangers of an authoritarian society.

I also could get into studying a subject for the sole purpose of passing a test and then forgetting the content after (meaning the topic held no significance to the student). This is a huge problem in high schools all around the US.

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> It’s quite disappointing, as the literature we read actually holds some cultural value.

For me, the biggest problem is that most instructors never really mentioned this. Instead, we ended up having 50 minute discussions about why the wallpaper was yellow, or how brave and sophisticated the protagonist was for drowning herself (I hated "The Awakening.") My experience is my own, but the majority of my classmates didn't care about the reading for this very reason (and this was also at a high-performing school). If high school English literature is still being taught anything like the way it was taught to me, it should be no surprise that American students avoid the subject like the plague.

In high school I read a book or two a week, but I avoided english lit classes like the plague.

I learned far more about writing in my experience in debate than I did in any of my classes.

Learning to research a topic and write a logical argument about it is far more rewarding, and does more to develop skill, than does being assigned a book to read and writing a summary.

Writing about a single source is too easy to game, especially the classics- there's simply too much already written about them, especially when the assignment is more a summary than a thesis.

Supposed "study guides" existed back when I was in school but you had to get to a store and buy one. Today, I guess I assume that any student who doesn't want to read some book can just get whatever information they need about it, including analysis, with a few keystrokes.

To Kill A Mockingbird is set in the 1930s.

I stand corrected.

And yes, I did read the book :) Just forgot the time period.

Yes I was surprised when I did Classical studies (classics in translation) that when Thucydides was one of the set texts that I was the only one in the class that read the entire thing - plus read several other related texts.

I also read several other classical plays and not just the two that where set.

> essay based solely on online summaries of the book.

The solution is to assign books that do not have online summaries, which would be about 99% of books. Plenty to choose from!

Is that true for English language books in the age of Amazon, Goodreads, etc.?

Maybe you should read Animal Farm again. It's not so much about an authoritarian society. It's about communism, which is theoretically non-authoritarian yet never works out that way.

You would benefit from reread it, or at least the SparkNotes

He's right though, it was about how easily-corruptible/controllable communism is by a couple of bad actors.

If you think it was just about an authoritarian society, I suggest looking back at the beginning, before the pigs started changing the rules.

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