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Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."

And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."

Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.

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>This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history

You've misunderstood the purpose.

Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.

You need the question before you can find the answer.

I've looked up animal farm in more detail, and it seems like you're fundamentally undereducated on the topic.

Animal Farm entered Anglo-American classrooms in the late 1950s, and its adoption was heavily influenced by the Cold War political climate . The book was seen as "useful" for teaching, but its political utility was part of the appeal—it provided "an easy use... as an anti-Communist and anti-revolutionary lesson" . This wasn't just a grassroots phenomenon; it was actively encouraged by intelligence agencies.

Both British and American intelligence services promoted the book as an anti-socialist message and supported its distribution . The CIA even arranged for a 1954 animated film adaptation that altered Orwell's story—emphasizing that animals on neighboring farms were content and changing the ending to have the animals overthrow the pigs . This film was widely shown in US and UK classrooms, embedding a distorted version of the story in the educational system for years

Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans in general that it is hard to take any questions it provokes seriously.

I can accept the impossible for the fun of it, but when something is impossible I don't take is serious. And it wasn't a good book in general.

> Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans

Which parts specifically of Animal Farm are untrue? Greed, hypocrisy, cruelty, avarice? Or the talking animals?

Animal Farm is interesting partially because its satire is actually extremely poignant and directed; the characters are meant to represent the important actors in the Russian Revolution.

Old Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin Snowball is Trotsky, etc. Regardless of ones nationality or politics, the story of Russia in 1917 remains one of the most fascinating in our worlds history. For a lot of people, myself included, Animal Farm served as a nice way of being introduced to the tale without getting bogged down by the specifics.

Sounds like a problem of unrealistic expectations. I read Animal Farm when I was a kid and enjoyed it. No-one told me that it was going to profoundly change my life, and it didn't. Neither did my chemistry class, or my math textbooks, or most of the other stuff I learned in school. There's value in reading significant works of literature, both inherently and because it increases your ability to engage with long and complex texts. Obviously, reading Vanity Fair is not going to confer some kind of profound knowledge, or enable you to do anything in particular that you couldn't do before.

I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.

It’s just the context. I grew up in a different culture and we all hated being forced to read at school, just different books.

I enjoyed reading Animal Farm but it was something I picked up by myself, and read on my own terms.

I agree that a lot of what I didn't like about Animal Farm could have been fixed in a different context (deep dive into the theory of socialism as a classless society, overloading of the word communism, actual history of Russia and how it didn't achieve a classless society, history of Orwell as a person and his own political beliefs, exploration of Animal Farm as polemic tool and analysis of its effectiveness as a tool, analysis of how it's misunderstood today as a criticism of the idea of communism, McCarthyism and how Animal Farm was introduced to classroom during the coldwar)

But here's my main thesis -- we have a situation where not-reading books is incentivized:

In an information-rich environment, I just learned more about animal farm in 10 minutes by asking AI all of the above questions than I did in 10 hours of reading without proper context back in highschool.

If reading itself (and not shaping the values of youth) is really just the goal, then we could solve this by assigning materials to kids that are likely to match their interests (I don't know slenderman, twilight, harry potter, ender's game, whatever).

My favorite book reading experience was one teacher that would just bring many of his books to the class and let us browse the collection and pick one by ourselves.

Most classmates were competing for the ones with fewer pages, but I remember in one of these I took the thickest book as a personal challenge, and it was a bit more mature in content than I was used to. I was embarrassed when writing the report and purposefully did not mentioned the sex scenes, but it was very educational at my age.

I also read Harry Potter before the first movie was released. Props to the informed teacher that included that one in the reading options before it became well known. Some parents forbid their kids from reading it for religious reasons, so I became immediately very curious.

I think Harry Potter and the likes at school is a great idea, rarely seen in my country because they tried to push the classics on our local language, but that does not work well with the kids.

Every human organization degrades into Animal Farm. It is just most obvious in communism.

Every software developer above 35 has been in an org run by the pigs. You don't need a study. It is literally a profound lesson about life.

Funnily enough most takes on the book misunderstand the point that was being made (probably due to Death of the author) . In his unpublished preface and subsequent analysis the view by Orwell , who was had Trotskyist leanings, his main critique is that they weren’t communisty enough but sellouts to capitalist tendancies, hence the analysis

"Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.");"[1]

Obviously once a work is in the public’s hands , interpretations may supersede even the authors original themes.Leaving it as a matter of interpretation/comprehension and generally accepted consensus. Incidentally a good measure of reading comprehension and analysis for the students studying he text.

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm

Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.

It's also a story, and quite an enjoyable and well written one at that. My 8 year old son enjoyed being read it.

As I recall about half my class enjoyed it, and half hated it. I have nothing wrong with you being in the half that liked it. However I remain in the half that didn't like it.

Is the purpose of school to make you do things that you'll enjoy?

That is one of the 3 purposes of school. The other two are to get a good job, and to make you a better citizen of the world... (there might be more, but those are the 3 I've come up with).

Animal Farm tries to be the last, but the flaws in it mean I can't take it seriously and so it fails. Well maybe it soft of works because nearly everybody has read it, but again, the flaws are so bad I can't take anyone seriously who cites it and so I consider it a failure.

I think you're quite confused about what Animal Farm is. It's a short work of fiction. It's not something that you'd "cite" in support of a particular point, and it wasn't written with the intention of making the reader "a better citizen of the world". Of course it has obvious satirical and allegorical elements, but there's no He-Man-style PSA at the end of it.

The purpose was to make a statement about communism which in turn means it was intended to be the last.

> which in turn means it was intended to be the last.

That's a bold and misguided assertion of authorial intent.

Since you're a fan of the scientific method: you can please cite sources in support of your claim?

Read all the other replies. In particular foldr (sibling to yours) is a very good analysis that makes my point while looking like a rebuttal.

I read it. It's definitely a rebuttal.

That's a non sequitur. But you see, this is the exactly kind of thing that a high school literature class could usefully dig into.

We know that Orwell was thinking of the Russian Revolution when he wrote the book. Many events in the story have obvious historical parallels to it.

On the other hand, Orwell was also a political journalist who wrote political essays. If his primary aim in writing the book was to make a specific critique of communism, why did he decide to express that critique as a work of fiction with talking animals? He would certainly have been aware that such a work is inherently open to wider interpretation.

Do you really think that a class of reasonably intelligent high school students couldn't find any moral in the story that's not inherently tied to communism? There are clearly all sorts of analogies that can be drawn between the story and historical or current events. And there are all sorts of conclusions you can draw. Maybe the animals should never have had a revolution in the first place; maybe they should have, but they went about it the wrong way, etc. etc.

>Is the purpose of school to make you do things that you'll enjoy?

ideally, yes, enjoyment should be one purpose of school. it's much easier to teach when students are enjoying learning.

learning to engage with something that you don't enjoy is also important, though, and why i think some of "the classics" should still be required reading.

You know that's not the chief goal -- if that's the chief goal, we'd all be assigned to watch Babe rather than read animal farm.

look up allegory

> Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.

So, we shouldn't learn about history until we experience it ourselves? Seems like that would eliminate, uh, most of history.

I haven't experienced the harsh realities of the Cretaceous period but I still like reading about dinosaurs.

usual disingeous HN response. Nobody except you is talking about history.

Today, the obvious communist societies are China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba perhaps the lesser-known of the bunch.

> Nobody except you is talking about history.

You're kind of missing the point of my comment. You said, in essence, that it's impossible to learn about Communism unless you've experienced it personally.

> China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba

Of those countries, how many have you experienced personally, and thus, by your standard, are qualified to comment on?

To what extent is modern China actually Communist, as opposed capitalist-authoritarian?

One of the main reasons to encourage kids to read fiction is to expose them to stories outside their current experience. We don't get kids to read Treasure Island because they can inherently relate to a story about 18th century pirates.

While it's true that the finer political nuances of Animal Farm are likely to be lost on most children, it's a perfectly comprehensible story in its own right, and it needn't be read narrowly as an allegory about Communism per se.

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