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