The Atlantic Did Me Dirty | Hacker News Reader

The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

cmsthomas.substack.com

90 pointsmakeitdouble248 comments

While I have definitely seen many instances of reporters coming with a preconceived narrative, and then just wanting quotes that further that narrative, I could barely get through reading this article. The author seems to want to dump on competing narratives for why kids seem to have trouble with long form reading, but then brings all her own biases and essentially lays them out as fact with 0 evidence. Take early on in the article:

> She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones.

The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days, and no amount of old, out-of-context quotes taken from earlier "technological panics" will change that. I think the works and research of Jonathan Haidt do an excellent job digging into the effects of cell phones on kids.

And don't even get me started on the "Kids don't want to read the old classics because they're dense and hard to read, they're just challenging the white male patriarchy!" Spare me...

I would also add that the actual Atlantic article does not seem to misrepresent or reference the OP at all https://archive.md/R9uqH.

Presented as is, no one did the OP dirty. This article is a bait-and-switch.

Jonathan Haidt's work is not without controversy though, and he's pushing a certain viewpoint on order to sell his book.

Nature has a review that basically calls him intellectually dishonest with his analysis.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

That was interesting. I also found Haidt’s response:

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...

“ The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days”

Then it would be easy to furnish a few links to source this claim

Here you go:

Impact of mobile phones and wireless devices use on children and adolescents’ mental health: a systematic review

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9200624/

[flagged]

Please don't cross into snark or personal attack. The GP could have been more polite but your response is a noticeable step flameward. We're trying to go the opposite direction here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Haidt’s evidence is weak https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

Haidt is not the only one with lots of evidence. This article got a lot of responses on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34993912

Edit: Also, Jonathan Haidt responded to the article you posted, and he also posted Aaron Brown's follow up to that: https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1664082247274713092

> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey

>Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts

Yes, some literature is better than other literature. Some literature should be taught in schools. The fact that this teacher defends giving simpler less sophisticated works because it speaks to the children more (how is a power struggle in a palace speaking to the children more?). Difficult language is not an excuse to not read a book, this is literally lowering expectations. I am not saying those books are bad, but they are all written at a middle school level, and should not be taught in high school. Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.

I'm not familiar with the other items, but "A Long Way Gone" is plenty sophisticated enough from a thematic point of view. Violent, gritty, complicated, it portrays an ugly piece of the world and has some serious perspective. Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.'

I think the author's main point is that if we want to accommodate a new generation of learners we need to shift the canon. It doesn't mean that great classic works don't have their place in the world, it just means they don't have the value they once did for educational purpose at the level students traditionally explored them.

Grounding this in the material world: a book really only helps teach you something if you actually read it.

So the Odyssey was suitable for 2000 years. But suddenly now, it’s a problem? We’ve had new generators of learners every generation. Yet this current generation is apparently more special than the rest.

Lazier is more like it. If someone TiKToc-ified the Odyssey, kids would be quoting it from memory.

> So the Odyssey was suitable for 2000 years

Historically, Homer's epics and other advanced texts were taught primarily to the top 5% to 10% of teenage students, specifically those from privileged social classes, in various classical education systems.

However, it's only in the last 40 to 50 years that rigorous education has been expanded to include the remaining 90% to 95% of the teenage population through widespread public education reforms.

It's misleading to label the current generation as uniquely lazy or incompetent. Instead, they're being challenged in ways that the vast majority of teenagers for the last 2000 years simply were not.

So you have pretty much the exact opposite position of the original article then (which does not suggest The Odyssey itself is a problem).

> Just because it doesn't have flowery prose that only an English lit undergrad would weep over doesn't mean it's not 'sophisticated.'

No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose. And I agree with what the GP said: we need to be holding our kids to higher standards and expecting they rise to that level, not going "well that language is too hard for them so let's take it off".

> No, but it does mean it's less sophisticated than a work which does have such prose.

I disagree with that take on sophistication. As a counterexample, Hemingway's work is a masterclass on sophisticated prose done with minimal language, but I wouldn't want to read Pride and Prejudice in Hemingway's style. There isn't one yardstick for "sophistication".

The Odyssey is an interesting example of this (and one the author uses). I was taught the Fagles translation. That translation is not easy to read, and in many ways its choice of language is a distraction from studying the literature. I wouldn't pick that translation for my own children, even if I feel that they should at some point study The Odyssey, which I do.

We should be treating these works as what they are: literary classics, but in a historic dialect, where part of the literary exercise is the archeological/anthropological dig through the prose. As far as I can tell, that's how the author is approaching it, and I don't think calling it out that way is lowering any bar.

To me, 'sophisticated' connotes complexity in a way that means I'd never use it to describe something extremely simple or minimal, including Hemingway's prose— even if it meets the definition of another sense of the word. I might use other adjectives to praise it, but not 'sophisticated'.

And I think any reasonable curriculum should include some 'sophisticated' texts in the narrower sense described above. I actually don't think that sophistication in the sense of worldliness is as important a thing to try to ensure in this kind of curriculum. That's more a matter of fashion or ingroup signaling than any textual feature, and you'll get it for free in any school curriculum anyway— preexisting canons will impose themselves one way or another and demonstrating fluency in the canon is the main thing that evinces sophistication (divorced from complexity) in a text (or a student, for that matter).

I agree with the rest of what you're saying, though.

What good is flowery prose or outdated, verbose subject matter like Parisian sewer systems, if it actively discourages kids from reading it? Horses to water.

There are plenty of abridged versions of Les Misérables that includes all the parts relevant to the student reader and retains the appropriate level of challenge in leveling up the student's ability to engage with higher level writing.

I think the point the author is making is why choose Les Miserables, even in an abridged format, if the kids would respond better to something more contemporary. There's no shortage of phenomenal writing from the past 50 years. So many of the books in the "canon" they teach kids are so boring that I have a hard time believing anyone isn't lying when they say they sat through something like "In Search of Lost Time".

The point of reading education isn't just to get text in front of students' eyeballs. We're trying to develop the ability to read well, to effectively comprehend any text which you might encounter. There's quite a lot of things people might like to do in their lives that involve reading overly flowery or obnoxiously verbose text.

Just yesterday I had to read a super dense and frankly poorly written document for work. If nobody had ever made me slog through something I didn't want to read in school, I suspect I would have been unable to comprehend it and might very well have not made it to the end at all.

A problem might be the (missing) gradual approach, like hitting the kids with Les Miserables without getting them hooked on reading already with easier stuff. I'm also pretty sure there's enough good material speaking a more contemporary language and addressing more contemporary issues - it's not like the literary trove of the world is made of 5 good books only (or so I hope).

But is it the matter or the teacher--their own approach or lack of ability--that discourages kids from reading? It's not clear which is the case here.

The goal isn’t just to get kids to look at a book. It’s to get them to stretch themselves and get better at something that is hard. The idea that you should have the kids read what is interesting to foster a love of reading and then they will be able to grow into mature reading habits as they grow has been around for a while now. As someone with a child in the 4/5th grader range, the effects are not pretty. When I was that age, the most popular books were shorter novels like Goosebumps and Animorphs, or longer novels like Redwall and Harry Potter. At my daughter’s school book fair a few weeks ago, it is almost exclusively graphic novels, be it childish slop like Dav Pilkey puts out, or simplified graphic novel versions of books like Goosebumps. Let’s be clear, stuff like Captain Underpants existed 30 years ago, but today it’s almost exclusively that. We haven’t created a generation of children who love to read, we’ve created a generation of children who largely, by middle school, haven’t graduated past picture books.

Prescribing challenging reads is also to get kids used to the idea of doing something that might not be their choice of what they want to do, which is an important life skill to have as an adult. Education isn’t simply about learning math and phonics. It’s about learning how to be a human being who can function in society. Ask your educator friends about how the recent generation is doing, especially since the pandemic. It’s a dumpster fire, with kids never having been less equipped to do things like following instructions, interacting appropriately with classmates, or holding their focus for even small amounts of time.

Simultaneously we are seeing employers increasingly wary of Gen Z employees due to their inability to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace.

We are creating a curriculum based on the idea that kids should minimize having to do things they don’t want to do or might be difficult, and are now seeing a generation of children who are incapable of doing anything they don’t want to do or anything difficult, and it’s impacting their ability to function in society.

> Simultaneously we are seeing employers increasingly wary of Gen Z employees due to their inability to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace.

What I've seen of Gen Z suggests less an inability and more an unwillingness to meet basic expectations and function in the workplace. And good for them. The workplace remains an unquestioned reservoir of authoritarianism in our culture, and I'd love to see the young people dismantle it.

Some of this dates to the idea that if we’re not making education always be fun we’re doing it wrong.

> We are creating a curriculum based on the idea that kids should minimize having to do things they don’t want to do or might be difficult, and are now seeing a generation of children who are incapable of doing anything they don’t want to do or anything difficult, and it’s impacting their ability to function in society.

This is a solid point. Mostly I don't really agree that the right arena here is the domain of the canon. Real problem here is material - more parents work more hours and bring home less than they used to, and they devote less attention to their kids' education. It's not surprising that kids would rather stare at their phone than do any meaningful learning given that trend. Adjusting the canon to be more forgiving and hopefully give kids something to grasp onto and challenge themselves with is probably a fine intermediate solution for the moment, but there's a larger problem at play.

"The canon" as most people would recite... Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, etc.... is now at least 60 years old, if not 100. It's a fuzzy thing, but it's certainly old.

Merely being old is not a problem. Great literature is perhaps not literally "timeless", but it can survive being pulled out of its original context, and to the extent that students have to engage with a foreign context, that can be part of the point.

However, that's 60-100 years of language shift since the canon was canonized, and that is a problem. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it's one that needs to be taken into account. I don't see anyone taking it into account, because if anyone questions the canon, they are obviously just a drooling arm-dragging uncultured buffoon who should be evicted from sophisticated society.

But, you know, I'm in my mid-40s, and I've seen real, bona-fide language shifts in American English. Even the English of the 1980s is getting dated. Reading back into the 1950s will result in readers encountering a number of dead words. I remember reading in that era, and every celebrity seemed to be described as "indefatigable". One can assemble from the roots a good guess about what it probably means, and in this case, such a guess is correct, but you can't actually be sure without looking it up or reading it in a lot of contexts. When's the last time you saw an actor described as "indefatigable"?

It doesn't take many of these sorts of things before you are unable to analyze, enjoy, or even necessarily comprehend the "great literature" because you're too busy just figuring what on Earth it is actually saying. It's hard to analyze subtext when you're a normal reader struggling to grasp the text.

Of course, I say this into a culture that is still holding up the original Shakespeare as the sine qua non of Literature, despite the fact it is now over a century past the point that a "normal person" ought to be expected to comprehend it on a base level. If someone wants to teach Shakespeare to a modern teenager, it ought to be done in translation at this point. That I wouldn't mind; there's still a lot of "literature" in it that could be studied through a translation. But the idea that a teenager should be expected to read

    For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
    The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
    The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
    The insolence of office, and the spurns
    That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
    When he himself might his quietus make
    With a bare bodkin?

and get anything out of it is just insane. At least 4 lines have a major vocabulary issue, more depending on what you expect from your teen. All the rest have at least minor issues, using words that are at least unusual in modern English, and many of them with connotations that are even more unusual if not dead.

But 18th century literature is starting to read similarly to a modern teen, and 19th is a bigger stretch now than it was when I was young. It is not wrong to account for this in trying to figure out how to reach modern students, it's just realism.

Right, but nothing's new about that. I, like I assume every other American high school student of my time (high school in the 90s), read it and discussed it. We had the standard book with the text on one side and definitions and help on the other. What's so different about this generation that they can't handle that?

Part of your argument is that Shakespeare is not worth learning or being a part of "the canon", which is fine, but it being difficult is irrelevant.

re: Shakespeare, any edition of the plays that high school or undergrad students are being asked to read will have line/word glosses that address the vocabulary problem. When I read Shakespeare in high school we also read key passages aloud together in class and discussed the meaning, and in some cases were asked to memorize a passage. We covered one Shakespeare play in each of my four years of high school, and I got plenty out of it.

In other words, you read a translation but with extra steps.

We might as well cut out the extra steps.

I did say that there's plenty of literary content there, but there's no reason to jam the original in student's faces and insist "THIS! THIS IS LITERATURE! oh by the way here's the definition of every tenth word and commentary on every third phrase".

You could get the content with a pure translation. But part of Shakespeare is the cadence, and that's really hard to preserve in a translation.

You think that's not important for modern people? Hip hop would disagree with you. So would many preachers (including politicians). And showing high school students who are into hip hop "look, Shakespeare is doing the same things" is a really interesting hook for them.

Okay, you seem to have some bee in your bonnet about Shakespeare, I will drop the subject.

Cavalcade [0] is one of my favorite formerly-common (19th century), now-unused words.

It's interesting to see words with strong technological suggestions erase themselves from a language when technology moves on.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cavalcade

When I was a teenager, about 20 years ago. I read shakespeare without any issues. Beowulf was challenging but doable with effort and didnt require outside source. What has changed so much in the last 20 years that the teenagers should need a translation?

Your homework is to go find a teenager and ask them:

What is a bodkin?

What is "contumely"?

What is "dispriz’d love"?

What does "his quietus make" mean?

Finally, you can give them the entire passage and ask, what is Hamlet actually contemplating here?

A abnormally well-read teenager stands a chance at that last one... but only a chance. An average teenager does not.

I will be blunt. I don't believe you read it "without any issues". Either you're just saying that so you don't bear the dread stigma of "couldn't read Shakespeare", you had a commentary you were reading it with, or you don't even know what you were missing. That's just a single portion of one famous passage from Hamlet. The plays are rife with these issues, it's not like those are the four missing vocabulary things that you need to know to read Shakespeare and after that it's smooth sailing. I could read 18th century stuff in school fairly comfortably and read into the 17th century, I know what's that's like, and even then Shakespeare was something I could just barely catch the main plot for. The innuendo, the subtext, the historical interrelationships, much of the actual literature of the literature, no way. The change hasn't happened in the past 20 years, it's the past 100 at least.

And people need to stop pretending otherwise. People need to stop pretending that, oh, yes, I totally caught Shakespeare's commentary on the politics of medieval Italy, quite obvious really, who could be stupid enough to miss it it's so obvious to anyone? It's not helping. It's hurting people and turning them off to literature. It needs to stop.

Did you never read Shakespeare in school? You are not asked to read the bare text, there are glosses in the margins. Go look at the Amazon preview of a Folger library Shakespeare play, e.g. [0]. You also have a teacher to provide context and guidance. You are getting worked up into a tizzy in an attack on a straw man.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Folger-Library-Shakespeare-Wil...

Absolutely.

> They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences.

This, I think, is the core argument of the piece. I find it depressing that a teacher thinks that books should reflect the readers' lived experiences. It's an incredibly narrow-minded view. Fran Lebowitz sums it up quite brilliantly in "Pretend it's a city": a book is not a mirror, it's a door.

And I'm sure those "mirror" books exist. Are young students reading those?

> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.

I think the author is talking about the content of the literature more so than books being "more sophisticated" than others, whatever that means. I'm 40 and remember skimming through most of the books given to me in high school -- Les Miserables and Moby Dick included -- because I just didn't connect with them. But I read a ton on my own and was always in a bookstore or a library. I wouldn't call Les Miserables or some Dickens book any more or less "sophisticated" than what I was reading, and if kids are going to be more excited to read something contemporary, or a translation that updates things like Emily Wilson, I'm all for it.

> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.

Even the kids with the greatest cognitive gifts, back in the 80s or 2000s or whenever you grew up and the standards were supposedly higher, and who are now or will be great parents raising great kids themselves, were not eager to read Les Miserables.

I read Les Miserables for fun in high school. I was introduced to the story through the musical (maybe originally just a song from it), I think, and became curious about its origins and elements I might've missed in other depictions.

I can't find my copy now, but it was one of the nice fancy hardcover Borders Classics editions, which afaict is a 600-something-page abridgment of Wilbour's 1862 translation. There were still some slow or awkward parts but I definitely enjoyed it overall.

Moby Dick, though, I was assigned and did not read.

If I'd been assigned Les Miserables and not Moby Dick, maybe it'd have gone the other way around.

Anyway you're wrong that this never happens. Me and my friends growing up read Hugo and Dostoevsky and Kant and Hume and Dickens and Marx for fun, alongside lots of stuff outside the 'Western' literary and philosophical canons.

And dated language is fun sometimes. It adds to a sense of place in the work, and often a lot of flavor. It can even be nostalgic, in a strange way— I recently started reading 3 different translations of Monkey King/Journey to the West. One of the translations is extremely contemporary in its language, which is great because it helps make a lot of jokes land well. But another is an audiobook recording from the 80s of a translation from the 1940s, and it's pleasantly nostalgic for me because it reminds me, just through its 'flavor', of already-outdated media for children that I encountered as a little kid— stuff like School-House Rock and claymation Christmas specials. It gives that presentation of the story a kind of soothing bedtime reading from a storybook vibe for me.

Anyway, even challenging reading can be a lot of fun for kids if you let them choose the challenge and mostly stay out of their way after that (instead of, for example, nagging them with regular quizzes or forcing them to go over each sentence in agonizing detail in a group setting).

If a gifted kid chooses not to read Les Miserables, is that a more, or less, valid choice, compared to the same choice done by a more middle learner?

tl;dr: all kids need/deserve both choiceful and choiceless reading, regardless of skill or talent. Parents and teachers can and should assign kids choiceless reading that usefully challenges and/or tests them. But kids also deserve activities and rituals and games that encourage and reward them for choiceful reading, where their choices are not to be questioned.

I'm not sure how to read the question. I think freedom is one of the things that helps make reading attractive, and that stepping back and giving students/kids/whomever freedom in their reading choices can sometimes make even pretty surprising books attractive enough that people pick them up and read them.

But if I'm really committed to giving someone that space and freedom of choice, when they do choose something to read, that freedom includes freedom from the constraint of validation!

There are separate questions about whether or not someone's total literary diet is sufficient for their needs and goals. Parents (with respect to their kids), teachers (with respect to their students), and individuals (with respect to themselves) will likely formulate and answer those questions in different, if overlapping, ways.

One of the things my mom did that I'm very grateful for is rewarding me for reading without respect to my reading choices. She often did this with games where reading time or book reports could earn me screen time or points I could exchange for prizes, and that was really fun. For those games, any book would do.

Another thing she did to make reading a cite of freedom was suspend all household censorship rules when it came to books. There were no age-appropriateness checks for books like there were for TV and movies. And (sometimes?) if a movie I wanted to see was forbidden but it had a novelization, I could even get that restriction lifted by reading the novelization! (I used that to watch Godzilla. :D)

But incentives don't to be direct, external rewards like that, either. It could be quality time or an organized activity like 'choose any book, and we'll both read it and talk about our favorite parts', a informal little two-person book club.

Rewards can be weaved into a reading-adjaceng activity, too: I used to go to bookstores with my dad and we'd just sit in the book's coffee shop together. He'd get an Americano and I'd get one of whatever I wanted, and so trips to the bookstore meant a free coffee-themed milkshake at least. ;

Books can also be made into their own treats! On those bookstore trips soth my dad, when it was time to go, he'd offer me a deal: I'll buy you any one magazine. When I picked an expensive, imported Linux magazine, I felt like a winner— I was gaming the system. And since he'd only buy one, if I finished a magazine while sitting with him, that meant I got to take home one that was brand new to me instead of one I already started. That's practically a twofer!

When I was really lucky, he'd offer to buy a book instead. When the item I chose was expensive and his offer had been unconstrained, he'd always make a show of griping and balking, but he stuck to his word. And so he let me feel like I was getting away with something when my 'one book' was a fancy hardcover classic with golden-edged pages— even if the translation was from 1862 and I'd have to do some work to get through it. My dad's griping about prices kinda turned his offer into a game and the book itself into a treasured prize. :)

When I was little, my parents would also take me to the library often, and when they did, I was never restricted once I got there. Sometimes they took me to a specific event or activity. But afterwards and otherwise, I was on my own! I could play games on the library computers or just nap in a bean bag chair thw whole time, and that was fine. I could come home with books but I didn't have to. All of that helped to make the library a relaxing and fun place.

My examples so far were all outside of school, but allowing reading choices in school is necessary, too. One year in high school, my English class was presented with a pile of books, and told to each choose one to read and write about. One of my besties chose The Brothers Karamozov, and he loved it. He talked about it with me and all his other friends, sometimes making playful allusions to it by comparing classmates to characters or referring to them by the names of characters. That got some of us interested in it that book and its author, too. I ended up picking a Dostoevsky book, too (The Idiot, a blessedly thinner volume).

Assigning that same book to the whole class would probably have been a disaster. It definitely wouldn't have clicked with some of us, and it's long as fuck. I might've bitched about it myself! But in a context of freedom? The book was evidently perfectly choosable, rewarding for the student who chose it, and intriguing to at least some of his classmates. The freedom to choose is powerful.

That kind of freedom is something all learners deserve. And it's not surprising that in the absence of such freedom, students (of all skill levels) often shirk, cheat, or refuse to read what they're assigned. But that behavior doesn't necessarily indicate a general unwillingness or inability to read comparable books.

To try to kind of answer your question: not every book a kid reads will be their choice, and that's okay. Parents and teachers will want kids to read books that challenge them. They'll also want them to read books that help adults assess the kid's reading skills. For those purposes, there are probably some times that gifted and enthusiastic readers don't need any particular books prescribed to them at all. And for those purposes, there will be times when students (gifted or not) will be asked to do reading that feels like work to them. Maybe reading that feels like work will be more frequent for readers who are less advanced or less talented.

But both inside school and outside school, kids should be given opportunities to choose what they read, too. Sometimes that can be from s selection of prescribed options but imo sometimes their freedom of choice should be absolute. Whether they have a choice or not should always be clear (no take-backsies!). And when they do have a choice, their choices are sacred and not to be judged, regardless of how skilled or enthusiastic a reader they are. The only feedback they should get about their reading choices (if any) is some kind of sincere encouragement or congratulation.

I appreciate the detailed response. Gifted kids in my opinion waste a lot of their life on performative enthusiasm about stuff they don't care very much about.

> Parents and teachers will want kids to read books that challenge them.

You say "challenge" them but you really mean "belong to the tribe." Classical Russian Literature is a tribe. "Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote" are also a tribe, I will not make up a name for that tribe, but it is one. Playing in the orchestra is a tribe. LISP is Paul Graham's tribe. Fencing and crew are tribes. This is why people are so passionate about this: it's all about tribes.

The mistake the HN commenters are making here is they think their tribe means "the smart kids tribe." I don't know what their tribe means, but I can tell you now, no one group of people owns "the smart kids."

> You say "challenge" them but you really mean "belong to the tribe."

What I had in mind was more like books that are require some reasonable level of effort or ask something new of the reader, which will depend on them and what they're used to/practiced with. Here are some things I had in mind as useful challenges a book might present to a reader:

  - including words they haven't seen before or using words they know in new ways
    - hopefully this also means they are at least sometimes looking those words up
  - describing precise logical forms in natural language
     - a book that relies on this might push a student who doesn't normally feel the need to take notes to draw a diagram or create a glossary or table or taxonomy
  - including sentences with complex syntactic structure
    - may not be good writing, may not be enjoyable. Potentially valuable for the same kinds of reasons as the previous example, plus helping develop some appreciation for the relative ease of consisw language
  - involving unfamiliar literary forms
  - using language in narrow technical ways
    - can help readers develop an intuition for quickly whether a term is being used conventionally or as a term of art
  - presenting an opportunity (or demand) to empathize with a strange person or a strange situation
  - being translated in a different way (more literal, denser with annotations, more liberal) than the reader is used to
    - comparisons would probably be productive.

You get the idea. Considerations like this are already worked into school curricula. But what I meant was that generally people recognize an interest in reading that advances the learner's skills in some way. And that could look really different kinds of things for students with different talents, backgrounds, and interests.

It's also distinct from membership in any purported literary canon. I'm sure some kids could be productively challenged for an entire school year by works drawn entirely from some obscure fanfic community I've never heard of.

You're totally right that general notions of what texts are 'worthy' (sophisticated, substantive, difficult, beautiful, subtle, poweful, whatever) are culturally bound, and that choosing which books to praise or recommend or mandate goes deep beyond nationality or ethnicity into much finer ingroup signaling, too.

But that's not what I had in mind. I meant 'usefully challenging for some specific student at some specific time', not some metaphysically dubious concept of inherent sophistication.

I meant it more in the sense of making sure a student is coasting nor stumped— that at least some of their reading is really helping them grow. And I mean growth not just intellectually but also in a broader developmental sense. Emotional stuff, too. Even just figuring out how to connect with new settings or genres or why other people the like things they like. Trying to advance any of those would be a good reason to recommend a book for a student. (One genre I wish I'd figured out how to read and evaluate much earlier is math textbooks, for instance. But fiction genre-swap exercises between friends could be valuable, too. Say I don't like sci-fi, and you've not read much romance. We agree together to parallel missions to find each other a book in their disfavored genre that they actually connect with. Both the searching and establishing of such a new connection counts as one kind of useful challenge in this context, for me.)

Anyway I agree about why these conversations get so heated and unproductive. Many people either get too caught up in the cultural/affiliative dimension of the judgments involved or completely trip over them without acknowledging their existence.

The problem getting kids to read at all is that they are prescribed books and said "you need to read this". I hated a lot of the books I had to read in high school and I basically gave up on reading until well into adulthood (though, I do like a good long form article).

Moby Dick isn't an enjoyable book. I'm ABLE to read it in the capacity sense but I'd rather sit and stare at the wall than do it. I read Corey Doctorow and read 3 of his books in 3 days. Is his work literary genius? No. But if you are reading and engaging your imagination who cares?

When I was a student, which was a long time ago, general opinion of students was that these are boring books. Most students skimmed it or read those super shortened tl;dr which you could buy in bookstore. And that was time when reading for pleasure outside of school existed as a past time and quite a lot of those students read a lot by todays standards.

Regardless of what "sophistication" in this context means. Moby Dick is not so much sophisticated as boring.

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world."

That's still a pretty strong start. Especially for literature of the time.

I was a voracious reader and was signed up for honors English Lit.

The teacher gave us a test on Moby Dick, one of the questions was what was the main character's name. I didn't remember because it only appears right there at the beginning.....

Still pretty bitter about that question.

My favorite literary hack on that was Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, where he plays on your assumption that an intelligence that is human-like is actually human-shaped.

It's a decent chunk of the book (told from their perspective!) before he starts sprinkling in things that make you realize they aren't actually human-shaped (or thinking) at all.

Crime and Punishment and The Odyssey are two of my favorite works and I struggled to read Moby Dick in my 40s. I finished only out of a grim determination and with ( frankly ) a lot of skimming. Happy am I that I was never forced to read it for the sake of my GPA.

I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.

> I'm of the opposite mind, I think forcing kids to struggle through books they don't care for creates generations of adults who think they hate reading.

I think it really depends on how it is taught. Also in my 40s, I recently read The Sun Also Rises while on vacation - I just had the feeling I wanted to read a "classic" book, and somehow I didn't have to read that book in high school. I hated the book. I kept waiting for a smidge of effort in wanting to make me care at all about any of the characters, and I just never found it. It was like being forced to go through someone's vacation photos for 10 hours straight, where most of the photos were of alcoholics drinking.

But still, I'm glad I read it. I wanted to understand why Hemingway is considered a literary giant, and his writing style (especially his dialogue) was new and innovative at the time, and influenced lots of other writers. If teachers could help explain books in context (e.g. why is Moby Dick considered a classics novel to begin with) I think a lot of students would better appreciate what they're learning.

Hemingway is hard because people demand explicit. The story behind the obvious is what makes The Sun Also Rises so powerful. It defined the lost generation. It was the 1920s version of Clerks.

I’m sure people read Hills Like White Elephants expecting to find an elephant in the story. Of course there is — a big one right there in the room.

> It was the 1920s version of Clerks.

You should be a teacher :) I love that quote, and it's exactly what I'm talking about. Without the context of what the lost generation is/was, and without understanding how the generational trauma of WWI had such a strong influence on the interwar period, you lose a ton of understanding about how the book was so influential.

I probably prefer A Farewell to Arms. But Hemingway and Fitzgerald are pretty much textbook examples to me of accessible literary works.

Not forcing kids to struggle through books they don’t care for creates generations of adults who think they can’t or simply won’t do anything that is hard or that they don’t want to do.

They shouldn’t only be reading these challenging works, but they should be reading some of them.

exactly this. i just wrote about my experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41771683

granted, in my case it was reading in a second language which has its own challenges, but the main point still stands. if i hadn't been able to breeze through that second book i might have come home with the impression that i just can't read english well enough, or that i hate reading english or that english writing is just bad. if i had read that second book first i would probably have realized that hemmingway is just no fun to read, like your experience with moby dick, and i would have asked to pick another book. i don't think that the second book was easier because my english improved by then. if that were the case i should have been able to improve while reading hemmingway, instead of struggling with it to the end.

You cut off that quote too soon:

> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.

Ahh yes, you shouldn't have to read Dostoevsky because he was just an old white guy. FWIW when I was a kid I had to read the Odyssey and books like Beloved and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings in high school, so I think this article author is being a little selective with her examples.

The quote is about literature being "confined" to it. Meaning the overall impression from the reading list you get is that literature is something of the past and concerns only certain race and gender.

The comment refers to what Horowitch’s article counts as literature, not what your teacher/school system counted as a literature.

It's ironic that in a comment section on an article bemoaning the death of reading comprehension, so many comments skim and miss points the author was making.

Reading comprehension isn’t especially strong on this site, sadly.

Well, it is a collection of individuals with the primary unifying skill set of being able to rapidly skim documentation (and produce correct results... most of the time).

> The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare is comparable to my own struggles through Chaucer in the original Middle English

I guess I don't talk to enough high school kids but is this really actually true? There has been ~200 years of linguistic evolution between when this teacher went to school and now? English has changed as significantly as it did between

"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote"

and

"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."

Wasn't the theory that recorded media would decrease the rate of core linguistic evolution? There has always been slang, but I would call this a total false equivalence.

Agreed. When I was younger, talking to older (40+ year age gap) people was a bit of a minor shift in vocab or syntax, but I wouldn't call it a "code switch."

If we have hit a point where communicating with people speaking the same language in the same region who are only a generation removed (or 2 at most) requires a "code switch" carrying substantial cognitive overhead... we have a problem.

I'm not claiming that it isn't happening, but it seems like a misstep to just accept it as inevitable. Communication with most of the rest of the same-dialect speaking population of a region should be an innate skill by the time someone is in middle/high school.

(non native speakers or transplants are a whole different ballgame, but I don't think that is what the author is discussing here)

I don't know about kids, but my sample size one is that as short-form dopamine-hit content has exploded in the last 10-15 years, and especially the last 5, my ability to read books has collapsed.

It's not gone forever, you're just habituated to paying attention for shorter amounts of time. You can train it back up when you're ready.

I have a fantasy of getting an airbnb in the woods for a month while leaving my phone and laptop at home.

Not possible at all with my current life and job, but man I could do with an attention reset.

Buy an e-book reader, and load it with a mix of fiction from genres you like, and non-fiction on topics you're interested in. Make it your primary form of entertainment. You'll build your patience and reading stamina back up in no time, cabin in the woods not needed.

I did an ocean crossing a few months back and I succumbed to the siren call of Starlink. Really should have just caught up on my Kindle.

Why not try to practice tech minimalism? Personally I’ve found great success in even just limiting my smartphone to a feature phone.

You really effectively need a smartphone for more and more things. A few days ago I had to pay for parking with an app. In a couple hours I’m going to a theater that only takes tickets in digital form.

Okay, so a feature phone and a crowbar. :)

Nothing stuck for me until I found books in subjects I was interested in at the time. Then I built it back up, ever so slowly.

Try anthologies of short stories, it's what I've been reading since covid times. Easy to pick up, put down, and return weeks later with no worries about forgetting a million plot threads or characters.

I recommend the book "How to break up with your phone". I liked it because I thought it gave good practical advice on reducing the most detrimental effects of a smartphone. One of the reviews on the back flap is something like "<This Author> is the Marie Kondo for the mind", and I thought that was a great description.

I'd like to recommend Johann Hari's "Stolen "Focus" to you.

You'll probably recognize several patterns, personal and systemic, that are fighting against (y)our ability to maintain the focus needed for many worthwhile tasks. Knowing is half the battle :)

Are you too stressed out to have fun reading them, or are you expecting to suffer through an entire book you don't like out of virtue or something?

Most kids I see around are easily on the first category.

From the article:

>Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that.

This, in response to a story about Gen Z and Gen Alpha at elite universities. Why are they attending the elites, then, if not to become part of the power apparatus?

I must admit my cultural observation about those cohorts is they are ideologically docile and easily molded into whatever the establishment deems the correct ideology to uphold. As one data point, I offer up their penchant for policing soon to be published YA fiction and whether it adheres to the prevailing orthodoxy.

I think that the confusion comes from the problem of identifying who "the authority" and "the establishment" is today.

As all the past symbols of rebellion are becoming co-opted and its wearers are assimilating and become "The Them™" (formerly known as, "The Man™"). It doesn't help that there is a dearth of "new" ideologies or trends that the younger generation can discover and iterate over. The continuity of history that is enabled by technologies like the internet and the collective knowledge of older generations, has almost ossified the innovative properties of the kind of rebellion that a hip academic would find quaint and nostalgic of the period of youth that was the springboard to their own assimilation.

All that remains for most people is to reach for absurdity. Which itself is absurd.

> I offer up their penchant for policing soon to be published YA fiction and whether it adheres to the prevailing orthodoxy.

Sorry what does this mean?

The YA publishing industry has a recurring phenomenon of new books getting spiked at the finish line due to social media arguments over identity politics. (https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...)

IIRC there's rather a lot of "cancellation" of authors in the YA fiction market.

>if not to become part of the power apparatus?

I would have gone to an elite university if I had the option to. Not to become part of the "power apparatus" but because I would have a higher chance of making enough money to purchase luxuries like a place to live.

That is literally part and parcel of the power apparatus. Money is power.

Improving your chances at making a decent living is not the same as striving to become part of the power apparatus, despite the fact that both need money.

Why do you think an elite university would give you a greater chance of improvement than a community college?

Well, mainly because employers are more likely to hire a candidate from Harvard than they are from East Mississippi Community College.

Exactly: access to networks of power.

At the risk of repeating myself: wanting to improve your chances at making a decent living (i.e. being hired, having a place to live, etc.) is not the same as striving to become part of the power apparatus, despite the fact that both benefit from networking.

You are right of course: accessing and leveraging networks of power is not striving to become part of the power apparatus.

It is de facto evidence of being a part of the power apparatus, regardless of your intent in using it.

First you make the money to buy cool stuff, then you use your power to protect your money to continue buying stuff. Welcome to the power apparatus.

If your definition of striving to be a part of the power apparatus is simply using money, then sure, I stand corrected.

> cow to

An apparent conflation of "cow", v.t.

   https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cow

with "kowtow":

   https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kowtow

The author herself exemplifies modern academia's reduced standard of literacy.

You mean this:

> And that’s a good thing, since Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake.

As used by this definition: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng....

Is correct. Maybe grab a mirror and stop pointing fingers?

No, its not correct.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not doing the cowing. If you cow, you intimidate someone else. That is not what is happening in the excerpted sentence.

Rather, they are the intended targets of the cowing, which would require the use of "be," for example:

> Gen Z and Gen Alpha won't be cowed by authority for authority's sake.

You didn’t read the link huh?

Every example that agrees with you is preceded by the verb "be" which is not used by the author of the article in question.

Not only did I read the link, I understood it, which seems to have evaded you.

Everyone is fighting for power. There is a great quote that has stuck with me, although I forget it's origin, that goes

"My life turned up-side down when I realized that those fighting the power were actually just fighting for the power."

This observation could have been made about young people throughout the ages. Disrespect for authority is nothing new.

My point is not the disrespect for authority.

I am suggesting that kids at specifically elite universities aspire to be the power, and therefore question the author's contention that this has anything to do with disrespect for authority.

> Disrespect for authority is nothing new.

It is still a perfectly valid argument to analyze whether disrespect for authority has increased or decreased over the years; or whether the disrespect has reached the point it threatens their ability to become functioning adults.

You can sure make that argument, but it's still only a rephrasing of the millenia-old meme of old people complaining about the lack of respect in young people. No, young people are not in danger of being unable to become functional adults, no more than any generation before them (of which the same has been said).

Society changes, you're old, young people are doing things differently. The wheel keeps on turning.

Any time people bring this argument up I don't think they realize how much it can have the opposite effect of what they intend. I can see, with my own eyes, how much my generation (millennials) has fallen short compared to our parents. Let alone the zoomers etc, who seem to be on an even worse trajectory. When someone points out "people have made these claims for millennia", I don't take that as evidence I'm wrong - I realize that perhaps people have been right for millennia.

This is actually a fairly ridiculous argument in my view - look at what happened to every country before ours. They failed.

Why did they fail? Obviously, famine, wars, etc had a part; but as the saying goes:

Hard times create strong men.

Strong men create good times.

Good times create weak men.

Weak men create hard times.

This is a popular history cliche that isn't grounded in actual history. See, e.g., https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... for an accessible critique by a professional historian.

I do agree with your broader point though that it's worth asking if society is getting more illiberal and intolerant of opposing views. It's not just a "young people these days" kind of thing.

Ooh ooh, time to pitch the acoup for that

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

That saying is ahistorical and Bret goes to great lengths to show where it fails.

Hard times create desperate men who make like hell to everyone else as they lash out. Good times are created by men who care. Good times create nice people.

Fascists seen empathy and niceness as weakness and something bad. They were also something that emerged from hard times and created misery and pain. Lets not promote their ideology.

"Hard times create strong men". At what age do the hard times start for this to be true? Do children who are victims of abuse become strong? Some perhaps, but I suspect not more than a control group. Do the hard times occur when the people are full adults? Anecdotally in my life, I've seen hard times be precursors to people cope by using drink and drugs, and seen hard times to lead other people to step up to the challenge. And what is the definition of strong, here? Seems so vague as to be pointless. This old saying seems like complete bunk to me.

Functioning adults are paving the roads with good intentions.

It's a pat saying, but I don't think history bears it out.

The German people after World War I were suffering. Significant reparation burdens had been placed upon them. They were starving and angry. These should have been the "hard times that create strong men," yes?

It created the Nazis and they were defeated militarily. Seems something went off in step 2 there; nobody considers Germany during World War II "Good times."

Agreed. Western society is very much in a pattern of decline right now. Whether it's terminal remains to be seen, but the decay is blindingly obvious imo.

Having the desire to be able to choose doesn’t change the available choices. This seems to be a false equivalency.

> So when I ask them to code switch further into the recesses of linguistic history to read Shakespeare, the struggle is real.

Reading difficult texts is how you get better at reading?? If students are not struggling at all they are not learning. But the author seems more interested in validating students identities or whatever than actually helping them learn.

But Shakespeare is not "difficult", it's just extremely dated. Shakespeare was not at all difficult at the time, most of the plays would have been considered very easily accessible. They have a ton of simple humor and even puns. Most of them are just lost in translation because language has evolved in such a way that much of it no longer works and the cultural references are lost to time.

In the Shakespeare case I’m not even sure reading plays in their entirety is the best way to gain exposure. Plenty of good and reasonably faithful film versions out there.

> Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables [...] Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading.

An unabridged translation of Les Miserables is 3-6x as long as any of those other books. I feel like that could explain a difference in being able/willing to finish those books by itself. At the same time, updated language and abridgment are extremely normal in translations and would be very appropriate here. I'd be surprised if those choices aren't already considered by professors assigning Les Mis in anything but a class on Les Mis for seniors or grad students. Presumably a competent abridgment would cut much of 'going on for chapters about the sewer system' or whatever. The OP talks about such translation techniques working for her class when she teaches The Odyssey! I don't see how Les Miserables is very different, but maybe the translation(s) she uses for the Odyssey are really exceptional.

An unrelated point the OP kind of gets at but doesn't focus on, in favor of diversity and recency of authorship: the mere fact of assigning reading and setting a schedule for it often sucks the pleasure out of it, doesn't it? I read two authors of classics put down in the OP as 'vanilla' and 'dust-covered', Dostoevsky and Hugo, for pleasure in high school... and by my senior year of high school was skipping many (if not a majority) of assigned readings in favor of bullshitting my way through based on second-hand summaries. (The books I skipped included both titles by 'dead white men' and more contemporary titles by authors of other backgrounds.) If I hadn't the pleasure of choosing the classic texts I did read as referred to above, I probably would have given them a shallow and resentful treatment, too.

Aside: after looking them up, the books the OP lists as examples sound way more interesting than the 'non-canonical' texts I was assigned in high school, and I'm envious of their students in that respect. The non-canonical texts in my school days were infrequent and also often felt like second-rate additions to curriculum: slim volumes, simple language, facile premises.

>> We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers.

How true are these allegations?

For example, book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.

I understand that removing books from a library is bad in principle. But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.

I looked into book banning a while back and AFAICT the vast majority of it is universally agreed as necessary (and every "list of most-banned books" is an outright lie). It's just called "curation" instead of "banning".

Not many people complain if they can't find "Lolita" in their school library, let alone a thousand copycats with less historical relevance.

Sure, you can call it curation but that implies that school libraries previously were filled arbitrarily by whatever random people dumped there. Libraries are always curated by definition.

What changed wasn't the addition of curation but the constraints of it. The reason entire school libraries were emptied following the "book bans" is that these laws often use poorly defined language to classify what content and topics are permissible or not in school libraries and this means all existing literature has to be carefuly combed through to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it violates the law, especially when the consequence of an "illegal book" carries a fine or worse.

It's similar to the abortion bans: the problem isn't just that they ban abortions, the problem is that what an abortion is is often poorly defined because there are plenty of scenarios where a pregnancy has to be terminated to prevent harm to the pregnant person but we wouldn't normally think of this as "getting an abortion". The vague blanket bans mean medical professionals need to get a legal opinion on every individual case because they face liability if the procedure turns out to have been illegal in that situation (and not, for example, if they had performed it 24 hours later even if the progression was predictable at the time).

The same is also true for teaching sex ed in states which use vague language like "age appropriate" or blanket ban certain behavior outside a strictly cis-heterosexual norm (e.g. a teacher telling her students she got married to her husband likely won't get her fired despite her disclosing her sexual orientation whereas a gay teacher might not be allowed to disclose theirs).

Even if you think the state should decide which books can go in a public school library or not, certainly having a central register that reviews each book and classifies it is more efficient and more manageable than just making every librarian or school individually liable if their library carries a book deemed inappropriate after the fact. After all, review boards already exist for films and TV.

Hear, hear.

I'd chalk it up to typical legislative imprecision in writing laws... except for that imprecision's pervasiveness.

Now, I think inspiring self-censorship is exactly the intent.

It makes it easier to pass censorship laws ('We're really talking about {most egregious scenario}. We'd never charge someone for doing {something lesser}'), while simultaneously apportioning governments more power to selectively weapon the law via prosecutorial discretion ('It'd be a shame if you fought us on this. Everyone has done something wrong...').

There are multiple factors at play.

On the one hand, in the case of book bans, creating an actual state-mandated review board to make these decisions in advance would make it much easier to call this out for the censorship that it is while offloading the decisions to librarians or schools and making them liable for guessing wrong frames it as a matter of "personal responsibility" and framing violations as parents making themselves heard instead of the state intervening directly.

On the other, it creates a culture of fear around "taboo" subjects ensuring that those that would be held liable for transgressions (the teachers, librarians and school boards in case of the book ban) will over-comply and apply the most far-reaching interpretation of the law in order to minimize risks of liability because even when you haven't actually violated the law you don't want to risk having to demonstrate this in court. This is of course done in full knowledge of the intended but unstated parts of the law, e.g. if "sexual orientation" becomes a taboo subject that only means "anything other than perfectly straight" but also the mere status of being in a homosexual relationship or being trans will be treated as taboo and a risk of liability (which in turn influences hiring decisions as the legal risk of hiring discrimination is lower than that of an emboldened activist parent suing over perceived immodesty).

And finally of course as you say it creates an almost blank cheque presumption of illegality that can be used by weaponized law enforcement through unequal application of the law. This is perfectly exemplified by Russian laws that don't outright make it illegal to be gay but make it illegal to "promote homosexuality" where you then you simply sue visibly or openly gay people for "promotion" instead. In the case of the anti-abortion laws this can be as simple as having had a miscarriage or a delayed period and being forced to prove your innocence.

I would complain. If a kid has the ability and patience to read Lolita, who am I to stop them?

If the discussion is specifically about school libraries, than I think it is absolutely legitimate to be concerned about which books are or are not banned. Many kids have easy access to school libraries, but not used bookstores or epubs.

- My own 14 year old has limited internet access and no account at any online retailer.

Is your 14 yo not allowed to go to friends' houses where they might have much more access to these things?

My 14 year old can read any book at any time and our shelves are full of books that would upset many pearl clutchers. That is not the point. My point is that if even my kid from a supportive, educated, middle class family can't get used books or epubs, it's absurd to present it as a solution to banned books from school libraries.

And my point is that if you're that certain your 14 yo isn't accessing things you're not aware of, then you must be watching them very close indeed.

I very much hope my 14 year old is accessing things I'm not aware of. I consider it a rite of passage.

I'm not solving for my 14 year old. I'm solving for the other 11 million middle school students in the US who don't have access to used book stores and epubs and are very definitely impacted by school library censorship.

The question is what “banned” books, if any, would you willingly expose your children to? You already curate their access to the Internet, what difference is there in the school or even state doing the same?

What is the difference between the state curating media for my child and me curating media for my child -is that a serious question? I trust myself, I don't trust the state. I'm not sure I've ever seen any poster anywhere on HN that trusts the state.

With regards to "book banning" every example I've seen has been referring to a government library, so the state is involved either way. What is going on is that one arm of the state (elected officials) is fighting another arm of the state (civil service selected librarians).

Right, and the point of banned book weed is to highlight books that have been 'curated' from school libraries so that members of the community can review the works and give feedback.

If a middle school decided to curate away the Holy Bible, I'm sure many parents would want to be informed.

Some schools ban simple classics like Mark Twain or To Kill A Mocking Bird. They can F right off.

The statement is about school libraries. Those alternative sources are not very accessible to children.

As far as I can tell, book banning means "Republican elected officials enacting imprecise rules to override to the curation decisions of tax-payer funded school librarians." Personally, I think that many school and city librarians have made egregiously bad curation decisions, but I think trying to legislate better curation decisions through broad guidelines is not the best way to go about fixing things.

> How true are these allegations?

You provide a source yourself that book banning occurs.

The problem with making books less accessible is that less people have a chance to read them.

Banning books is an effort to control the ideas other people are exposed to. That certain specific efforts aren't 100% successful doesn't make it unproblematic.

The question is one of magnitude, not of simple occurrence.

My argument is that de facto banning has little or no effect on accessibility. I'm sure the described book bans have decreased the probability of certain books being read, but again, what is the magnitude of the change? If I were to guess, it's so small as to be almost unmeasurable.

Everyone's welcome to their own opinion, but ones based on nothing are worth just that.

If I understand the logic of your argument, why then have libraries at all?

You misunderstand my argument but I'm not sure which part of it is confusing.

> book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.

You seem to be arguing that library book bans are innocuous, because one can simply find the books elsewhere.

Is that correct?

Yes. To elaborate, I think the effect of bans is so small that it's probably not even measurable because we have become amazingly good at distributing textual information.

That does not argue for shutting down libraries. It doesn't make an argument for what to do with libraries at all.

> because we have become amazingly good at distributing textual information.

Have we?

The costs to doing so have certainly gone down, but the entire de facto system is much more centralized than its physical-based precursor was.

Once a physical book was created, it existed until it was destroyed.

In contrast, all digital destruction takes is a takedown notice to the centralized host and ambivalence on the part of anyone else having archived it.

Physical books were persistent by default.

Book “bans” are indeed innocuous because they’re not bans at all unless it is legally codified into law. Any and all decisions to remove books from a library is called curation and is in fact perfectly reasonable.

Book publishers seem to find fault with your argument, as the book bans appear to be rooted in law.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93pe9p5479o

"Banned books" has always been an indulgent title put on books that have been banned from a handful of school libraries by busybodies, but never used for books so controversial that copies of them might as well be unobtainable.

> But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.

Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic. Parents have been thrown out of school board meetings for reading their content out loud.

>Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic.

Where are you getting the data that most books are pornographic?

Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content. The definition of sexual content includes things like "informational books about puberty" (i.e. sexual content != pornographic).

Fine, you want precision? 22% of books curated out of public schools included sexual content such as statutory rape, drawn CSAM, and various other topics not appropriate for public education.

See, I would say that both of those things are important topics to cover in school. Children need to know about statutory rape, so they (a) don't ignorantly commit it / participate in it; (b) can be protected by those laws, in the event they need to seek such protection; (c) understand why those laws are there, so they don't stay in an abusive situation just because “I'll go to prison if you tell anyone!”.

The laws around drawn CSAM are strict. You don't get a free pass for drawing a 14-year-old having sex with another 14-year-old, merely because you're also a 14-year-old. (There's a good reason the law works that way, as ridiculous as it might seem.) Children need to be aware of such things, especially in jurisdictions where children can get tried as adults for taking naked photographs of themselves (which is just about the worst possible way to address that problem).

https://www.nominet.uk/shifting-the-dial-how-internet-matter... says:

> Girls said they wanted more information earlier in secondary schools – for example in Year 7 – if not in primary school. They felt that currently, the lessons they do receive are delivered too late.

> Strikingly, boys saw huge value in messages which tackle ‘perpetrator’ behaviour with unequivocal and un-sensationalised information about the consequences and legality of this behaviour.

> Girls were generally negative about “consequences of sharing” messaging or any messaging they felt was simplistic and failed to address the underlying causes of sexual image-sharing.

> Children said that currently, they typically learn more about sexual image-sharing from sources outside of school such as friends and family, or informally in school from gossip around certain incidents, as well as from TV and social media. In many cases this information tends to minimise or normalise sexual image sharing.

The content of the curriculum is a separate issue to the content of school libraries, but similar attitudes motivate decision-making in both cases. Censorship of information about sex has concrete harms, and especially censorship of information about child abuse.

I looked for myself once. The "most banned book" was, according to Google search (and DDG, many listings for it), the one by Maia Kobabe. This book is available on archive.org, you can find it yourself. And it is indeed pornographic by any meaningful standard.

> Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content.

Well gee, as long as it's not 98% what's the big deal. Frankly, I think everyone should be just fine with any number below about 80% pornographic. Wouldn't want to get carried away.

> The definition of sexual content includes things like "informational books about puberty" (i.e. sexual content != pornographic).

This is another absurd claim. When you go to look at the books themselves, this isn't some little cartoon of "how to roll the rubber down over the penis"... which while I might agree would disturb some people, it wouldn't much bother me. It's strapons and cock-sucking, and all the things that at least 20 or 30 years ago would have had something categorized as hardcore porn.

The people who want to claim it is "informational books about puberty" don't have the same definition of "informational books about puberty" and "sexual education" as the rest of us, and they like to take advantage of people being too lazy to check for themselves.

>Well gee, as long as it's not 98% what's the big deal. Frankly, I think everyone should be just fine with any number below about 80% pornographic. Wouldn't want to get carried away.

Are you perhaps misunderstanding what the statistic I quoted means? Because it doesn't mean that every banned book is 22% sexual, which I think is what you read it as?

If I rephrase it as "78% of banned books contain nothing sexual", does that help?

Otherwise I have literally no idea what you are trying to say here.

> Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content

Citation needed. That's a very narrow take on sexual content.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-...

As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for merely reading out loud (to adults!) their content, this is well documented:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD1GdCb-gII

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cyjjWuZoK8

https://youtu.be/Oe098d5iIW0

https://pen.org/book-bans/banned-book-list-2021-2022/

>As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for their content, this is well documented:

Neat, I didn't dispute that.

Where's your citation that most are pornographic?

> Where's your citation that most are pornographic?

I used an imprecise term for the high percentage that have sexual content. If you prefer, I'll rename it to "books grossly inappropriate for minors."

As for PEN.org, I do not trust their honesty, point blank. They have every incentive to be dishonest or to define the issue as narrowly as possible. I might as well quote Exxon about the harms of CO2.

Anyone under the age of 21 is a minor in the US. There's a wide range of "minors" who are well into/past puberty. You can have age restrictions without having blanket bans or arbitrary and poorly defined categories of content.

You're also conflating everything that describes or mentions sexuality as "pornographic". Pornography is specifically defined as something designed to sexually arouse the consumer. That's not the same thing at all.

So, no citation.

Got it.

I'm pretty sure they'd also get thrown out of those meetings for "merely reading out loud (to adults!)" the content of certain sections of the Bible.

Also that sounds more like an argument for age restrictions. The kind of content most people would find acceptable for their 6-year-old to read is quite different from that of a 16-year-old.

If anyone has good data/analysis of banned books, please share it. While looking, I only found PEN's dataset: https://pen.org/book-bans/2023-banned-book-list/

And the only comprehensive analysis I found was their analysis of that dataset: https://pen.org/report/book-bans-pressure-to-censor/

Any other analyses I found used that dataset. I don't distrust PEN, but they surely have some bias, and more sources is always better.

Unfortunately, unless I'm missing something, they don't look at the grade levels that books were banned at, which seems very important. Banning a book is very different if it's for grade, middle, or high school. Middle and high schoolers are thinking about sex, talking about sex, and having sex, so the standards for what is appropriate should change substantially based on the age of the students.

And of course, it's very difficult to do a comprehensive analysis of "how sexual" a book is. There are books with lots of literary value that have a few paragraphs that are very explicit, but the rest of the book is not. If you only read the explicit paragraphs, you would not have the context or know what the rest of the book is like. The context of a whole novel around explicit content makes it very different than when the explicit part is considered in isolation.

It doesn't help that it's hard to make our own judgements about how graphic something banned for "sexual content" is, because the offending content can't be posted online for copyright reasons.

> As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for merely reading out loud (to adults!) their content, this is well documented

One of those videos is not about books at all, it is about someone wanting to quote one of the school board members who said something sexual. This doesn't invalidate everything you said, but I point this out to demonstrate to you that you are not thinking about or analyzing this clearly or with rigor.

Yes, of course there are instances of age-inappropriate books with little literary value that are sensibly banned, but pointing to a few such instances and extrapolating that to "most banned books are pornographic" is obviously bad methodology.

I'd sure love to use an LLM to analyze the banned book data along with the full text of the books, but that would take quite a bit of time and money.

Three youtube videos is not 'well documented'. I am skeptical that this is a widespread phenomena.

There's a difference between “talking about sex” and “pornography”.

> So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father. He did not know when she lay down or when she arose. The next day, the firstborn said to the younger, “Behold, I lay last night with my father. Let us make him drink wine tonight also. Then you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve offspring from our father.” So they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger arose and lay with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. (Genesis 19:33–36)

> Your lips drip nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue; the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon. A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a spring locked, a fountain sealed. Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, […] Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden, let its spices flow. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits. I came to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gathered my myrrh with my spice, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, I drank my wine with my milk. Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love! (Song of Solomon 4:11–13, 4:16–5:1)

> How beautiful and pleasant you are, O loved one, with all your delights! Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine. It goes down smoothly for my beloved, gliding over lips and teeth. (Song of Solomon 7:6–9)

> Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts. (Ezekiel 23:19–21)

— The Holy Bible (ESV) (famously not pornography)

And a honourable mention to the KJV translators, who – when faced with a double-meaning – took the literal translation:

> My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. (Song of Solomon 5:4–5)

Idiomatically, “my bowels were moved” in the original Hebrew refers to a strong emotional response (ESV translates it as “my heart was thrilled”) – but considering the rest of this book, I have no doubt that the wordplay is intentional.

A book doesn't become pornography, just because the authors chose not to censor all references to / descriptions of sexuality. I understand keeping these books out of the hands of 6-year-olds, but by the time they've reached the age where their own minds are generating sexual material, I don't see the benefit of denying them a safe environment to explore such ideas (i.e., books). Most teenagers have more pressure (from their peers) to engage in actual sex than to read a particular library book. So… what happens when they're not aware of sexual consent, safe sex practices (e.g. condoms aren't just for contraception), or any kind of role model? (Hint: some effects are visible in the statistical tables.) I'm not sure what these bans are supposed to accomplish, other than make parents feel better.

are you equating all sex with porn here?

They certainly are. It's the American way.

> a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system

I'd enroll in that class

Same. But then, my favorite part of Moby Dick is the boots-on-the-ground overview of whaling, a whole industry I'd have no concept of otherwise.

Why?

Because I enjoy historical factoids, geography, history,... same reason people watch history channel.

Also, when authors go on these tangents, it can inspire a passion, and it will move worlds. The hunchback of the notre dame saved the church from demolition and became a totem, and it was precisely because of Hugo waxing lyrically for hundreds of pages on end about the atmosphere and architecture of medieval paris. If he had stuck to just the plot, the novel would've been, maybe more readable sure, but nonetheless poorer for it.

And lastly, because if you're in a class on western literature these long winded 19th century reads are a rite of passage. you have to do your part to carry forward a shared reference, one that transcends time and space. school is as good a time as any to make that effort, unwillingly even.

This is a well written criticism, but it should be noted that the author doesn't appear anywhere in the article she is criticizing.

> Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system

This is entirely the reason to read them. Literature is partly about opening up and expanding your perspectives, and challenging the reader. If you simply surround yourself in what’s comfortable and familiar you’re not exploring the depth of the human experience.

And Hugo’s whole theme is about injustice and inequality. What it means to live in a society without sanitation, something that still exists in large swathes of the world. These are themes that continue to resonate. Just because he was a “old white man” does not negate the value of his literature. Instead this article reads as racists and ageist.

So thanks to the Atlantic for continuing to bring up difficult subjects that make certain groups unhappy because they need to be pried from their insulated and privileged perspectives.

As Hugo so eloquently writes:

    As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century — man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness — are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.

It feels inappropriate for a teacher of English literature to be dismissing the western canon as a bunch of old white men droning on about shit no one cares about. If that's her attitude, her students are either going to pick it up themselves, or worse, if they've been reading from a young age and happen to actually love and enjoy the classics, they'll feel dismissed themselves as if their tastes are invalid in the modern era.

A curriculum should update over time, but there's plenty of value in having a canon. It's a shared point of reference to create a common culture. Fashions, music, television to streaming video or whatever, might all change rapidly, but at least give parents and children something they're both familiar with. Beyond that, it can in and of itself create the kind of urbane cosmopolitan widening of one's circle of appreciation and belonging she seems to want kids to experience. Reading old material teaches you that there actually are common elements to all human experience. Even old white guys from hundreds of years ago had the same hopes, fears, desires, and bodily experiences you have. We're not so different from each other, let alone fully defined by our skin color and century of origin to the point that alien cultures can never have any hope of appreciating and empathizing with each other. Les Miserables is about inequality, poverty, abuses of law enforcement, overcoming modest beginnings to achieve great things, giving back to the less fortunate. How the fuck are these not relevant modern topics you'd want children to read about? Let them know these are not new concerns and even old white men might be more progressive and empathetic than you assume based purely on their age and skin color.

> It's a shared point of reference to create a common culture.

Sure but if we're talking about the US why does that canon have to almost exclusively consist of European and white American authors? Modern America has a diversity of family histories so I'd expect its schools to cover a diversity of literary sources that reflect this. If it were just American authors, you might have a point, but _Les Mis_ is neither integral to American culture as it exists today nor to anything it was before. Something also tells me the kids don't need _Les Mis_ to learn to embrace social justice and oppose abuses of power.

Speaking as a (not quite but getting there) old white man: if the kids need books to understand we might be progressive and empathetic, we've failed at being progressive and empathetic and they're right to think otherwise.

> Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on.

This is an absurd dismissal.

I have to say that I'm delighted to see that so many readers on HN picked up on the dodgy argumentation and non-sequiturs in this blogpiece.

Little by little it feels as though some sanity is creeping back into the world.

My very uncharitable take, but one that I have to entertain as potentially true, is that this is the exact skill some teachers want to deprive their students of.

It can get tiresome—but, reading as an adult, may have been one of the more interesting parts of the book as I was familiar with the Ahab thread 100x over.

Unfortunately it also feels like our tiny bubble of sanity and reason is rapidly shrinking (witness the current conspiracy laden reaction to hurricane Helene)

The author clearly needed to write the article they pitched, even if that wasn't supported by this source.

There's a thing with The Atlantic and some other high-prestige publications (The New York Times comes to mind) where, among really high quality journalism, they regularly publish articles that are trying to make a case for an understanding that isn't supported by basically any of their sources. The Times' work on trans issues comes to mind for this as well - they interview a bunch of people on both sides and end up making a case for an understanding that none of their sources agree with and basically everyone is mad about. It feels like a combination of the personal opinions of the journalists involved, but justified and presented in a way to fit as well as possible with expert interviews. This is super normal and human, but isn't what I would call journalism.

It's too bad because I think these institutions do a lot of high quality work, but it seems to me that they pretty regularly do this kind of thing. Perhaps this is a universal flaw of all publications, but there have been efforts to criticize this in specific instances[1] which seem to have little impact and generate little reflection and it's a shame.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157181127/nyt-letter-trans

I think it's a case where modern journalists (and in many other parts of society) find a hypothesis they think will do well and hunt for leads/studies/data that fit the hypothesis. It's easier to do because you only need to do as much research as to prove the outcome demands, and does better with the readers because they're interested in the result less with how they got there. It's like going out as a hunter knowing your only goal is to hunt a buck. You know what you're hunting, so you can prep accordingly with the deer call horns and other paraphernalia.

Good journalism - something I believe was done more by the journalists of the past - go out to interesting places and talk to interesting people to gather whatever they can, and find a good story within that. In terms of the hunter analogy, it's more like laying a whole bunch of traps, be it fish, bird, beaver or bear, and seeing what you end up with at the end of the day. You might not always get what your readers want, but it's also more fulfilling and often important when you land a prize catch.

I suspect a lot of it is driven by the decline of the financial health of journalism as well. I think this sort of story is often one that fits the prejudices of a lot of readers (certainly the author of this article is arguing their perspective was omitted because it did not fit expectations) and is likely to be popular. That lines up with a lot of research about how peoples like having their existing beliefs confirmed and are resistant to being challenged.

I imagine that, if you are a journalist who won't do this kind of piece on occasion, your numbers suffer and you either need to be very good at your job, or you suffer professionally and are more likely to leave. So a lot of the journalists who stay are ones who often can do good work, but also do some hack work sometimes on some topics.

I think a reason this seemed less common in the past (or maybe just less obvious) was we had a very different media climate with less immediate feedback. Internal opinions on the quality of work probably mattered more - and you had less opportunity to see how many people were clicking on your colleague's story an hour after being published.

I'd argue that my biggest criticism of journalism as it is practiced is that many practitioners aren't even trying to be scientific. The pressure of deadline for regular publication creates huge incentive to publish not discovered truth, but a pre-ordained thesis that then lends itself to cherry-picked fact-hunting to bolster that thesis (and discarding of counter-evidence that would cast doubt upon the thesis).

I've been close enough on-the-ground to multiple reported stories to bear witness to this happening: quotes that I was present when they were given taken madly out of context because they one-fifth supported the reporter's idea and four-fifths refuted it. It's not a great way to find truth (not bad for concocting digestible stories though).

Regarding the article you linked, NPR is very biased in favor towards the current progressive stance on trans, and they present that perspective as if it's true and correct, without substantial coverage of opposing views.

For example, here's an interview transcript on the topic of whether male athletes with a trans identity have an unfair advantage over female athletes in sport: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/09/1168858094/arguments-that-tra.... This was from last year. There is a considerable body of sports science research that demonstrates male physical advantage across a range of sports, and how even with long-term testosterone suppression this isn't mitigated. None of this is even mentioned. In fact the interviewee just brushes over all of this, claiming there is no good evidence, without being challenged on this.

That sort of bias is unfortunately quite typical of NPR, not just on trans but many topics.

I linked a progressive source report on a progressive critique of the Times. I didn't even characterize the content of the article or letter, other than the latter is critical of the Times, which I believe is true. If you have a conservative report on the same letter - or conservative critique of the NYT reporting on trans issues, feel free to add it!

That said, otherwise your comment feels like the sort of thing I was complaining about - albeit not published by an elite journalistic organization. You took an opportunity to jump from one subject (issue-specific flaws in reporting) to another one (that NPR has bias, and you think they report poorly on trans issues among others). I have my own thoughts on how media orgs report on trans people (I imagine our views differ) but that wasn't really what I was talking about. I don't even really know how this post relates to what I was talking about - maybe you like the reporting I am critiquing? Tho if you don't like NPR's reporting on trans issues you probably also have critiques of the NYT.

15 day old account. It's always relatively fresh accounts bringing up "the trans issue".

> Rather, my experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they’re rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made.

There's never been a time when kids didn't demand things that are "relevant" to them. Soul on Ice and The Teachings of Don Juan certainly seemed more relevant than Macbeth 50 years ago.

The fact is, they're not capable of deciding that. That's why they're in school. The teacher's job, which this person refuses to do, is to make the classics relevant.

If you're one of the people repeating the facile, shallow, and dumb cliche that "the older generation has always been critical of the younger generation" then you are, ironically, part of the problem. You have no insights that younger people value, so of course they're going to ignore you.

“The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences.”

Gazing into a mirror is not generally a recipe for the growth we want in students.

Kids are strongly influenced by the people around them, especially authority figures. I wonder how much her own views about long books written by old white men shape the views of her students.

> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.

Yikes! Homer and Dostoevsky were both (presumably) white men so they obviously have the exact same experiences. Diversity is more than skin color or genitalia- what a shallow take.

We have no reliable information about the identity of Homer. All we have are a variety of legends. But there are some decent arguments for thinking that Homer might have been a woman. We just don't know.

They were both people of relative privilege within their own societies (in Dostoevsky’s case, at least in his youth). I have a strong feeling the author isn’t arguing any sort of racial or gendered essentialism - there is merit in acknowledging that media produced by those of privileged classes may carry certain attitudes or opinions that don’t necessarily speak effectively to different audiences.

No, this is just plain and simple racism and sexism on the author's part.

This seems a gross misreading of the authors intent.

Id be upset too.

I haven’t read Horowitch’s piece, but the section where the author realizes “I am the problem” appears compelling, where her experience as an educator no longer fits the mold of story in flight.

I’ll be following this thread specifically for feedback from people who “value reading enough” to asses the Atlantic piece as well.

She doth protest too much. A major purpose of education is connecting the past and the present. There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024.

And yet she seems resigned to students maintaining “dialects” that make it difficult to talk to grandparents, and impossible to read the “old white men,” while she cites the phone as a reason:

> Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects.

It's almost as if there are beautiful, deep lessons being passed down by people who lived before us.

I find the authors argument unpersuasive. I was one of those rebellious teenagers growing up and it was exactly in Dostoyevsky and Arthur Koestler and Umberto Eco that I found refuge and companionship. Maybe because they were so different than me and my peers, they offered me a glimpse into different ways of thinking and seeing.

that's not the case The Atlantic was making though, they were specifically pointing to technology's impact on attention span rather than language

> There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024.

It’s this very connection that is at question, however. There is an explicit ideological agenda explicitly focused on severing this connection. The types of people who complain that classic literature was written by “old white men” have never been coy about it.

> Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.

This is ridiculous. Is the book less important, less valuable, because of who wrote it? Did the Odyssey last so long because it has little value. It was a “very old” book even in the 1500s.

This essay reads like someone who argues with the teacher about the value of algebra. And speaking of math, most mathematical concepts are “very old” as well — doesn’t make them less valuable.

Who wrote something is less important than what it says. Sounds to me like this essay writer is still young enough to think they know everything.

> Is the book less important, less valuable, because of who wrote it?

That is the underlying thesis of their protest: old white man bad.

> sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system

I'm sorry, but if gen Z isn't interested in the Parisian sewer system from 1830, then I think there is little hope for them. I remember being told to read the abridged version of Les Miserables so you wouldn't need to hear Hugo ramble about Waterloo, sewers, and fertilizer, but I just thought "can I read just the parts taken out of the abridged version?"

On the other hand, I’d be very happy to take the side that assigning a 1500 page 19th century novel in high school is a really heavy lift. You might as well beg students to read the online equivalent of the Cliff Notes.

Nowhere in the Atlantic article does it mention students being asked to read all of Les Miserables, either in high school or college. I think the OP brought it up as a strawman because it is notoriously digressive, and has few fans these days. The books actually mentioned in the Atlantic article include My Antonia, Great Expectations, The Illiad, the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice.

That's because I'm responding to her substack post, not the article. The substack post references Les Miserables and that professors are sounding the alarm for students not finishing it. Presumably, if professors are upset that students aren't finishing it, they are assigning it to be read.

I’m not sure Crime and Punishment or Moby Dick would be a lot better in that context.

It's a submarine story pushing the "lack of diversity patriarchy is to blame" trope.

I have to agree with one of the points here that reading curricula has become mired in the archaic past. I would prefer that school cultivate a love for reading in general. Only good can come from young people reading and developing better reading comprehension skills. Offering them more modern reading material that they can connect with seems like the way to go.

The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences....Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Equally frustrating is that her article implies that I was forced into that decision in order to pacify floundering students or submit to the demands of standardized testing.

I found two of these three books on Lexile Hub and it looks like they are written at the level of Nancy Drew (Zoboi) and Harry Potter (Beah). So maybe they do like them better because they are much easier.

I'm a little skeptical of the claim these books "reflect their lives and experiences" because they are about three different demographics, so at most, only one of the books could be speaking to the experiences of any given student. And frankly, I hated these kinds of books in school. Dickens and Vonnegut was the fun stuff. But at any rate, the traditional point of an education was not exactly relevancy, it was 1) to seem the commonalities of human nature even in very different circumstances and 2) to teach the texts that create a common culture.

In a move as cliché as blaming standardized testing, Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. It seems too easy of a target to take seriously in the context of a major American journal like The Atlantic, but here we are.

But she then she admits it is true:

Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school.

Creating space for the joy and curiosity of reading is important work that high school teachers step up to every day, designing lessons to teach what once came naturally. Previous generations turned to reading as a leisure activity, so they had an innate sense for how to read in school and how to read sneakily under the covers way past bedtime.

To summarize: Students are no longer reading for fun, they are using more casual language on social media, so instead of teaching kids challenging texts in school they have to focus on simply being able to read anything.

A lot of this comes down to this teacher not believing that traditional Anglo-American civilization, or more broadly the Latin Christendom civilization, is worth teaching and preserving:

From a similarly stodgy perspective, Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.

My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. ... As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate students’ identities.

It used to be the point of a public education was to "melt" all the immigrant communities into one American identity. That meant enforcing a standard dialect. (And the same thing happened in many other countries, such as France). It is notable that the teacher no longer thinks this is a good thing.

This really is a basic difference in values. It has been said about public policy, "We all want the same thing, we just have different ideas about how to get there." But in this case, we simply do not want all the same thing and there is no getting around that.

Victimhood supremacy combined with provincial identity reinforcement discourages well-rounded education, liberal values, and dismisses classics as "old white patriarchy". The author fails to realize they are no longer a liberal nor that they are racist, sexist, and ageist.

> books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom

This is the change that has left a reader like me stranded on an alien shore. I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read. It never occurred to me that any book would be about someone like me and I never sought it out. Ironically this change means it is hard for me to relate to modern readers which is something I do sometimes hope to do.

Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" speaks of how one of the things that enabled the formation of modern nations was the expansion of literacy coupled to the writing of precisely such stories.

While stories of kings and heroes had been everpresent, the "pesasant's tale" was relatively rare and almost never given the treatment of written work. But the lowering of the cost, the increase in literacy globally, and the proliferation of control over the art of writing from an elite caste to the public at large led to the writing of "man on the street" and "day in the life of" stories that were one of the ingredients that catalyzed people's ability to think of themselves not as vassals of a king or supplicants to a god, but fellow humans in a nation.

When you could identify with the tribulations of a man in Mumbai from your flat in London because he happened to write his tale in the language you could read, a global British Empire began to knit together in a way that it wasn't consolidated under the simple idea "This is all the King's lands." Empathy glued your life to his life, even though you were on opposite ends of the globe and would never meet each other.

Is this really a change among modern readers?

As a young reader many years ago, I gravitated towards stories that were the most alien -- not just science fiction, but history, cultures, and experiences that were completely different from my own, populated with characters that thought and interacted with the world in ways I would never have considered. I typically found books about suburban kids "just like me" boring. And I rarely stuck with a series for more than a handful of books because even the most inventive premise and characters often become repetitive after more than a few books.

But many equally voracious friends prefered reading stories set in the countries and cultures with which they already felt comfortable, populated with protagonists who were stand-ins for themselves encountering situations that they themselves had dealt with.

The lovely thing about the world is that we have an effectively infinite supply of good literature of both types and indeed anywhere on that spectrum, so both types of readers will continue to be well supported.

Yes. Classics are so because they are atemporal. The protagonist’s “environment” is irrelevant, it is their personality and the narrative, the plot. The “felt life”…

Noone reads Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because they feel their environment and kind of lif is “similar” to one’s.

This is funny to me because I recently re-read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and I found the general vibe very appealing. I'm not currently immersed in a world of well-spoken high-status gentlemen-scientists who carry out their own experiments and enforce the law themselves without any bureaucracy -- but it sure does seem appealing to me!

I won't make any presumptions about your background. I can tell you that for me, there was a definite point where I realized that all my favorite characters were male, and I though it sucked. Were women really incapable of having great adventures? Was there something wrong with me or something wrong with everyone else?

You can't imagine what Princess Leia meant to me.

Agreed. When I was growing up, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I was equally interested in books about boys, girls, black people, white people, you name it. I read Goosebumps with equal interest as The Babysitters' Club. Having such a wide variety of topics that I read (and consumed in other media) made me a better, more well rounded person.

The idea that people must see things that look like them is toxic. We need to raise children who learn to look past superficial characteristics to see the deep human similarities beneath them, not children who uphold race (etc) as the most important thing you can know about a person.

Unfortunately, there are too many people now who believe they are liberal and tolerant but don't know what it means since they preach and practice exactly the opposite values. It's sad because they spit on gains of the sexual, gender, and cultural revolutions up until about the 1970's and instead behave like hypocritical, ignorant fascists similar to the ones who were worth resisting centuries previously. I think the core problems are a lack of mentors and lack of pushback from previous generations of academic and cultural thought leaders to say "that's absurd". Instead, academically weak and immature instructors in academia are inculcating subsequent generations with misguided and absurd ideas about as equally insane as the MAGA movement. The result expressed on the greater society is we now have these 2 extremist cults who are doppelgängers of each other who suck the oxygen out of public policy and discourse.

>I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read

If you pay attention to contemporary social dialogues, it makes total sense why the author would say that.

I can't understand what you mean by this.

This whole thread I feel like I'm another world, everyone is using all these euphemisms that I can't figure out the referent to. What is "prevailing orthodoxy" what is "contemporary social dialogues" what are y'all talking about. I'm serious I just cannot tell.

The translation is: kids are self-obsessed and self-absorbed, inclusive of identity progressivism like pronouns and under-represented representation.

The selfie generation(s). 2006 Time's Person of the Year: You.

For my taste, that seems to well be true, but all generations have their thing and those that don't agree with the positions will of course conclude these "new things" are very very bad things.

On the selfie obsession: social media is poison but that's hardly unique to the kids. The adults are doing all the damage.

2006 is 18 years ago, those kids are the adults now....

Perhaps that was your point.

Well yes in the sense that "kids these days" is a moving goal post.

My sense is that millennials are split: the older half fatigued and eyerolly regarding "too much wokeness" and the younger still thinking themselves young and leaning into whatever the socials are on about.

This isn't a moral judgement. Just one millennial's observation.

The kids being talked about in this submission must surely be Gen Z if they are college students. The youngest Millenial would be older graduate students, segregated from the freshmen and whatnot.

But of course the whole generations business is arbitrary. People would be just as insistent about the realness of this and that generation if they switched the years up or down five years.

There's a widespread social movement in the US which posits that your race and gender identity are very important and you ought to frame everything you do in terms of them, and this movement seems to be influencing the author.

The reason people are using euphemisms is that naming the movement is intensely controversial. The most common term used by its opponents is "woke", but proponents near-universally consider this to be rude; there's no consensus alternative, because many proponents think it's just true and thus giving it a name at all is argumentative. (What do you call the movement of people who think the sky is blue?)

Oh I see, thanks. So this is just the standard grievance farming culture war moral panic on HN? That's what it felt like but I didn't want to jump to conclusions.

I'm sure you can see that the reason people use euphemisms is to fend off precisely this kind of comment.

It's because they're cowards yes.

It's odd. I'm an anarchist. I'm socially progressive, yes, but more often than not I find myself outnumbered in conversations by people disagreeing with me or even diametrically opposed to me. This is even more so the case online and especially not exclusively here on HN where the cultural bias in any sense that it exists at all is in favor of a vague sense of Peter Thiel style right-libertarianism with streaks of ineffective liberalism - you're more likely to find someone referring to themselves as "Georgist" than "socialist". I consistently get downvoted in political threads on HN.

However I don't have any reason to use euphemisms and I don't need to use vaguery and colorful language and appeals to fringe scientists to express my opinion. In my experience this is because my ideology is very hard to object to on moral grounds: I want you (yes, you too) to have more control over your life and for us (yes, that also means you and me) to be allowed and able to support each other better. I want you (yes, you too) to be able to be able to express yourself and have your consent or lack thereof respected. I don't want us to be suppressed by a state, a religion or an arbitrary often hereditary elite who have amassed disproportionate claims to wealth they can enforce using the physical violence of others. This even applies when I criticize Israel or Zionism - because when I do that, I say what I mean and I don't use my words as proxies for some kind of anti-semitism.

I get laughed at sometimes, I get called names sometimes, I upset people sometimes. But never do I feel the need to obfuscate my ideals except if I were literally surrounded by a violent mob seeking to exterminate the people I'm arguing for the protection of.

But any time someone hides behind euphemisms and vaguery, if you chip away at it, it's never just conservatism or some modest but insufferable reactionary views - it almost always ends up being some blend of race realism or scientific racism, belief in conspiracy theories (which always turn out to be about Jews in the end, knowingly or not), deep hatred and disgust towards trans or queer people, hatred towards women, hatred towards foreign cultures in general, hatred and disgust towards people with disabilities or marginalized people "speaking out of turn" and deeply rooted, integral, vitriolic obsession with social hierarchies and their enforcement against the "undeservering" and "degenerates".

I just don't think that's true. As you say, you get called names sometimes - I think most people who hide behind euphemisms and vaguery just find it tedious or exhausting to get called names when discussing their views. There's multiple topics like education where I can be 100% confident that people are going to accuse me of something like "grievance farming culture war moral panic" if I share my views. I don't personally see the appeal of vagueposting, so I try to either engage and accept the insults or move on, but I understand why other people make different calls.

And if we look at the current social trend of everyone feeling more and more alienated from each other, perhaps we should push back on the social dialogue.

The idea that you need a story written by(or about) someone of your race&gender&orientation in order to connect to it is just wrong.

Do I need to be an 81 year old farmer or a playwright in order to understand Giles Cory's plight?

Do I need to be a woman, a puritan or a novelist in order to understand the trials of Hester Prynne?

Nor do I need to be a Frenchman to understand that people can change and that we should not hound them to the ends of the earth because they once committed crimes?

These stories and more are read to lay a foundation of understanding about the society that we live in and why/how we have the laws and morals that we do.

They also show how close we are to our past and how things would be if we regressed as well as letting us look at how we may want to extend these lessons into the laws and culture we create in the future.

Same here. Part of my love for books is precisely due to the foreign in them, the otherness, the discovery, the exploration.

It's just a line. There is very little truth to it but the line works, and it helps people with doing things like changing the curriculum away from longstanding classics to books that will be forgotten in a decade.

> It never occurred to me that any book would be about someone like me

I don't know quite how you feel about it but you could easily consider this a personal tragedy and rejoice that a new generation doesn't have to experience it. Never reading a book about people like you doesn't make you strong or wise, and no one is weak for wanting to see themselves in one either.

If my life was interesting enough to write a book about, it would entail a lot more conflict and suffering than I would actually want in my life. That’s sort of a limiting factor. If someone wrote a book about my life, most of it would be extremely boring and the rest would cover parts of my life that I would rather not spend too much time dwelling on.

Well I'm not assigning any moral value to either situation. I'm maybe more just commenting on my own obsolescence.

> Never reading a book about people like you doesn't make you strong or wise, and no one is weak for wanting to see themselves in one either.

On the contrary. If one cannot appreciate a work of art unless it reflects them on the surface, that is a character flaw. We must discourage such things, not give into it as the current establishment does.

>you could easily consider this a personal tragedy

How so?

Post-modernity caused a fracture of identity into ever smaller fragments and communities. (Century of the Self, even though that was about the previous century)

EDIT: The Culture of Narcissism is also relevant. Although I still don’t understand what narcissism is. And don’t read it if you are running a presidential campaign.

A more accurate title might be "Issues with The Atlantic's framing of student difficulty with lengthy assigned reading"

Relevant gripes:

>> These are all points I made in speaking to and emailing with Horowitch and her fact checkers throughout the summer. [...] Perhaps the most disappointing defeat I observed in the final article was that although I shared my observations of the tireless work of colleagues at the state and national level advocating for intellectual freedom, Horowitch does not acknowledge that culturally, we do not value reading. We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers. We pay lip service to the importance of literacy, requiring four years of English and regularly testing literacy skills, but when push comes to shove, we don’t make space for the curiosity and joy that are the foundations of lifelong literacy habits. In truth, we seem to be doggedly fighting against the best interest of a literate populace.

It sure would be a more accurate title, but it wouldn’t be a better one.

The title is a let down. I was earnestly anticipating a sensationalist portrayal of the author's experience, irrespective of its nature.

I have certain expectations when I hear about someone being "done dirty". Now I have to read what looks like a modest and respectable account...about reading...and stuff like that.

Fine.

I think the title intentionally plays into the "we just skim summaries" stereotype

indeed. somewhere the world's tiniest violin must be playing a very sad song for her

perhaps, and maybe i'm just spitballing here, the author of the article didn't agree with her take on things does she really think that if you are interviewed by a journalist, that they are compelled to agree with you and take your side? and if they don't they "did you dirty"?

ugh. this is the kind of self-important english teacher i'm very happy to despise.

having eagerly digested all those great literary works and wisdom of the ages, and trendy modern ones too, i wonder how long it will be before she discovers the source of her feelings of "demoralization" (and it's not some hack journalist at the atlantic)

The title does a disservice to the content.

If you scroll about halfway down, she gets to the meat of her contention with the article (and therefore the incorrectness of the popular take on how current literature education is failing students).

Perhaps intentionally ironically that she would bury the lede of a piece about how people are incapable of reading at length...

The Atlantic is the mouthpiece of the imperial Borg, and the editor-in-chief got his position there by writing dishonest drivel in 2002 about Saddam's WMDs and Saddam's links to Al Qaeda in order to whip up popular support for the invasion of Iraq. Here's the damning evidence (note in particular the failure to discuss Saddam's deployment of chemical weapons against Iranian troops with the active support of Reagan and Thatcher):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terr...

As far as the Atlantic's take on the limits of acceptable literature at the high school level, it's not hard to understand if one can accept that their ideological grandfather was Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). His idea that 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' leads to the conclustion that, in an authoritarian state, education would be a continuation of the state’s political ideology. and the fundamental rationale of education would be to serve the state’s objectives. Thus, the Atlantic supports teaching a version of history, politics, and culture that aims to create loyalty to the state and its leadership as the primary goal of high school level education. From this viewpoint, 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' by James Loewen is heretical blasphemy.

The alternative to rigid indoctination of students is to present them with multiple works with differing viewpoints and have them debate them on the merits - e.g. have them read Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' as well as Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' and let them come to their own conclusions. Also, stop excluding fantasy and science fiction literature from the academic curriculum! The Three-Body Problem is highly suitable for a high school literature course, for example.

The challenge in today's environment is convincing people in elite institutions that liberal authoritarian ideology and censorship - e.g. banning Conrad because they see him as an old white racist - is as much of a threat to a free and open society as conservative authoritarian ideology is.

"The novel" is a relatively recent invention and a large part of its popularity had to do with the economics of book printing. Most people do not consume text (or information in general) through printed books any more, and it makes no sense to cling to the form or to privilege it over other kinds of media consumption. Reading and literacy is important, but I don't think that tying it to reading novels makes sense.

I'm not sure the author actually disagrees with the point of the Atlantic article. She just takes it for granted that her students struggle to read things outside their native vernacular, can't do a close reading of anything longer than a short story, and refuse to read things that they don't find relevant to their personal lives. I'm glad that she's found a way to get her students reading the Odyssey anyway, but that's a bad set of constraints to be working with and it's unsurprising if other teachers have been less successful.

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