I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.
The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
So whatever the problem is, if there even is one, is less to do with school curriculums, english classes, screen time, or the availability of books, and more to do with the culture of many homes not prioritizing reading.
I would not assume this, given that the states with the highest literacy rates are mostly rural and at least half red (NH, MN, ND, VT, SD, NE).
> The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.
Reading the expected books for school is very different from reading a lot privately at home.
I know quite many fellow pupils who read a lot privately, but detested reading the required books for school (they at best got some summaries somewhere, which in my opinion actually prepared you better for the tests since the people who write summaries typically know quite well which parts/topics of the books teachers consider to be important, and thus do quite some explanations on these).
On the other hand, I know fellow pupils who barely read anything in their free time (they had different interests), but for some reason actually liked (and liked reading) the books that you had to read for some classes.
I remember teachers assigning “read chapters 4-6 by Thursday” and then giving a quiz to make sure people read and remembered the details.
This sounds like a bad quiz, unless the story was set in e.g. the American revolution.
I remember doing sections of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth but we never did the whole thing. We did read Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls but that was it for books/plays. Poetry we had a book called Anthology where we had to read and re-read many poems for analysis.
https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/l...
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.
Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted.
For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations.
Others could probably come up with additional examples.
The said education system expected this:
> As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
Yeah, sounds like a very great way to filter out perhaps 20% of good readers and make sure the rest 80% will hate reading for the rest of their lives.
Edit: but insofar as media criticism in education is bound to the book rather than the dominant forms of the day, I think children are being done a disservice.
Books forge you in a way short "content" we consume all day long today will never be able to, there are a few long form podcasts here and there that could be comparable but that's not the bulk of the media kids "consume"
I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
I have been amazed at the number of houses I've been in over the years which didn't appear to contain a single book.
Pride and Prejudice. Last of the Mohicans. A Separate Peace. Tom Jones. Beowulf. Grendel. Crime and Punishment. Waiting for Godot. Tale of Two Cities.
Also, several Shakespeare plays, though I am no longer sure which were read when.
We also had other reading assignments where we chose our own books. The above were assigned to everyone.
Never enjoyed the stuff that got assigned in school though. I’d probably like it now.
I read because I wanted to all the time, but every reading assignment was a chore.
It is that books everyone here is said that kids dont read anymore or brags they read ... are just not interesting books for a kid.
Now with the internet there’s an unlimited stream of zero investment snippets of entertainment. People naturally dive into that because it’s more rational in the short term to do that.
Schools stopped reading but it’s as a result of the way students behave. The causal driver is student behavior.
The problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.
Being able to perform critical analysis of text is an essential skill today. It might be more essential now than any other moment in history. Understanding how narrative writing uses symbols translates cleanly into understanding how political messaging or any persuasive writing uses symbols.
If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.
I can read a 1000 page history book but after 50 pages of Dutch literature I want to throw it in the garbage bin. High school KILLS reading. Few survive.
Or even figuring out if it was created with the intent to have any utility at all for the reader.
Other than avoiding any written works made after 2020, I am not sure what to tell my kids. Even trusting the claim that something was written after 2020 seems difficult, unless you have a physical print showing its age.
From what I understand, if parents read to kids when they are little, they become readers who enjoy it.
I nearly did to me, or atleast the continual assignments did. It took a long time for me to pick up a fiction book again. School never assigned me technical writing and encyclopedias, so I continued to enjoy those, thankfully.
It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.
Maybe if I wasn't forced to read a book in an outdated language about some Christian farmer 300 years ago while I was not in school, and if I could access a succinct version 1/10th of the length of the book, I'd read it.
Maybe if I wasn't asked to describe minor details to prove I read the book, I'd actually focus on the story and not on every irrelevant detail.
Maybe if my teacher didn't force their religious holier-than-thou attitude and allowed us to form our own opinions, I'd be more engaged.
What school taught me was how to get away with not reading the books. I skimmed books by skipping tens of pages at a time or asked friends for the TL;DR or just got an F.
Now I have a feeling of uneasiness and dread when I try to read fiction for fun. So I don't.
Most 300 page fiction books I had to read could've easily been condensed to 30 pages without any loss of information.
Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit. A lot of people won't care about poetry no matter how hard you try to force them to like it. And half of it was propaganda - how $nation survived $struggle, how $nation is so great or beautiful or how $hero did $ethical_thing.
I imagine it would be interesting to read early texts in other proto languages too. Sadly, I'm not a polyglot and can't really access that experience first-hand.
Opera? Ballet? Literature? Poetry? Classical music? Modern art?
Do the numbers it seems most people can do without them and still be functional.
no cap Mr Darcy ur parties are bussin fr fr
Is the complaint about the dictionary at the end because it wasn't comprehensive? I'm unreasonably curious about the book and which phrases were included and which were not.
I think all written works occur in a context that should be taken into account when thinking critically about them. That context is temporal and linguistic and is more apparent when you consider something like Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Understanding it requires either a modern reinterpretation or consideration given to the sociolinguistic context in which it was written.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/180823.Novels_with_Gloss...
Are you people for real?
I think there's a trivial answer which is that all things you encounter are fundamentally from an alien context. The degree of alien and intention of the action are the things to consider before proceeding.
For example, why would one choose to read the account of a survivor of tragedy? To develop some amount of (emotional or cognitive) empathy? To learn a broader way of thinking that could apply to a future situation? Most simply: to learn from the past.
If the goal is entertainment, evaluate your participation such that you maximize your utility. If the goal is learning, one should be wary of premature rejection without sufficient context to avoid missing the lesson. And there is an annoying reality in which most situations can teach something.
Meanwhile my grandma still knew how to speak Latin at 70+, which she learned in school as a teenager
If they read 10 interesting books a year adding one like that to the mix or offer them the option is great. If they did not encountered interesting bool after agw of 7 when parents stopped reading them, no.
And interesting books for kids are there. Plenty of them of all kind, including pure action/adventure stuff. Including those related to movies or games they play. It is not lack of resources.
Yes and no. I used to start reading at 4 years old, but I forcedly used to memorize some rhymes at 3 years old. Most folk don't believe it is possible to read so early (though Eliezer Yudkowsky has reported about similar age). But my point is - how would I learn reading so early without that poetry?
I don't really like poetry exactly as rest of the fiction genre. And I am still sure it is not shit even for those who are struggling of doing that. I consider poetry exercises as sport exercises: today you claim that some specific muscle is not important for you, but tomorrow you get some injury which happened because of some weak muscle.
But you have also said one important word - propaganda. This is what really shitting any education and propaganda seems like the monster from the Nitzsche's quote "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster".
My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.
Not surprisingly, when you're rate-limited by read-aloud speed, you can't get through that many books and excerpts are a natural response.
I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules. This did not have good outcomes, and last I checked, there was a movement of schools going back to phonics.
I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.
I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
Required reading in school killed my interest in reading. When I graduated I was very happy that I wouldn't have to read books ever again.
It took me about 5 years or so until anime and manga got me to try another fiction book. That eventually led to reading more books. But when school was done I really did think that I wasn't going to touch a (fiction) book again.
---
It makes me wonder if kids in the future will have "required reading" where they have to play certain old video games. Will that make them hate video games?
The idea is to get them find genres and books they like and find joy reading it, while not taking time out of their free time.
It is a good idea though, as long as they can find things they want to read. I've been sucked into the "bleeding edge" of reading (web novels), so it can be a bit more challenging to find things I really want to read. They are still out there though. Eg The Martian and Project Hail Mary (the former actually started as a web novel) .
I don't know how they sourced respondents, anecdotally all my kids a reading books as I type that. They read much more than I did at their age; and their friends read as well. They'd probably spend all their time on snapshat or brawlstars, were they to have a say.
Isn't that the characteristic of each generation to feel like education of the next generation is decadent?
It doesn't need to be in dead tree format. It doesn't need to be famous authors. Just so long as they read!
For long form original see eg:
* The last angel https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.24420...
* The wandering inn https://wanderinginn.com/2017/03/03/rw1-00/
* Or eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel) which made its way off the net and into print, possibly to the detriment of both. :-P Original location (afaict) (no longer available there) : https://www.galactanet.com/writing.html
Ye gods, that's like saying that youth may not be willing to consume a nutritious, balanced diet but we should rejoice that they are at least consuming vast quantities of sugar and fat. With vanishingly rare exceptions, fanfic is crap in textual form, laden to bursting with literary sins both venal and mortal.
- that nudges readers in interesting (to society) or new (to the reader) directions. Or at least in not in actively harmful ways. Otherwise, OF, livestreaming, or whatever latest social media BS, etc. are king: purposefully designed to create parasocial relationships that trick you thinking you have chance to be noticed.
My main beef with most fan fiction is that in my experience, it unconsciously locks readers into an extremely rigid way of thinking. Of course, this varies from fandom to fandom but woe upon the budding writer who ships the wrong pair or violates the canon.
It mirrors religious dogma, but somehow even worse when compared to all the disputes in Christianity throughout the centuries. (Plus, there's at least a connection between Christianity to modern democracy.)
- an entire novel worth of short texts, beginning to end
- an entire novel worth of short excerpts from longer texts
- an entire novel, beginning to end
are the same things.
* Last angel: A web serial, sure it's chunked into chapters/updates, but paper novels have chapters too.
* The Wandering inn, same as above, it's at 2 million+ words and counting. People read it.
* The Martian: Actually the shortest text of the bunch. Now available as a traditional paper novel.
Is it? I am not sure either way. Do you lose something by only reading chapters of a novel but never the whole story from the beginning to the end, even if you're still reading the same amount?
It's good that you can get people reading, but reading the equivalent of pulp is very different from real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
HPMOR is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky to promote rationalist concepts, and is somewhat influential in startup and AI circles.
Directly: Emmet Shear {co-founder of Twitch (YC S07)} is apparently superfan and gets a cameo.
So for once I get to post something that's almost on-topic for yc. :-P
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/what-does-a-harry-potter-f...
If you find out, let me know. I wish I could.
I've never read such self absorbed drivel in my life. To be fair, I've not read any Ayn Rand, so I might be judging harshly.
https://www.thecut.com/article/milo-youngblut-max-snyder-ziv...
Even without the, you know, murder stuff, I think we can do better for kids than another generation of "rationalists", considering the track record here.
--Sturgeon's law.
(ps. and once you get people reading, they tend to keep doing it and develop taste over time. if it's even just a few who wouldn't have done it before. That's good, right?)
(pps. For example: at 2M words, I think pirateaba might exceed the "first 1M words are practice" threshold)
Most people, for most of history, have only ever enjoyed what might be considered "low quality" entertainment - pulp fiction, shitty plays, etc.
> real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.
Interestingly, even discounting YA and other stuff like that, you are only describing a very small subset of novels.
Nobody considered those high literature back in the day!
I do? Why would I want my kids to be consuming crap when they could be engaging with great works and high art?
They can read Minecraft strategy guides and Yahoo auction fan fics for all I care, since that's a lot better than nothing. I remember not wanting to read what school assigned me and how that killed my desire to read most fiction writing, and would prefer that not happen to more kids.
Art is a matter of taste, and if you go counter to your audience's taste, don't be surprised if they disengage.
Thus it can tend to become limiting; and I say this as someone who actually does enjoy fanfiction.
So the Lord of the Rings series counts as one book? I'd believe diminishing returns, but not one and done.
Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
Then you do not understand writing. If Yudkowski really had more interesting ideas, then he would have been able to do HPMOR as original fiction.
Rowling is actually really good, inventing very charming things, very fun sentences, and there's nothing even close in HPMOR (I have read it myself, and enjoyed it to some degree), but you really underestimate how good Rowling is.
There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.
Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.
Needless to say this trips my crank/cult smell meter.
I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.
I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.
- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.
- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.
- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.
- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.
It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.
He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.
But sorry to clarify I'm still hung up on the "8 handed clock" thing - what does that mean? What information is displayed on the clocks other than hours, minutes, and seconds?
What? They are the same thing.
I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.
I basically had to teach myself all over again. Not much fun.
If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not.
Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting
Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
Anyone using paper + pen? Writing a letter or thank you note?
You know, stuff only people who grew up before the internet was popular still do.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.
For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.
Correct.
> Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
Probably yes to both counts.
However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.
Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.
I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.
I have no idea how to write shorthand. I assume you know how to write cursive, so no I don't think the reasons are the same.
I can't write legible cursive. To do that would take time, effort, and practice. Much like it'd take that to learn shorthand.
That's my point. You and I write the way we do because writing in other ways would take more effort than we want to spend.
Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?
>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
It does make sense to hand write short notes in cursive if you're hand writing short notes at all, but many people never learned it, or are so rusty it would take deliberate practice to restore proficiency.
And again, that doesn't really answer my question - if you don't write in cursive, how do you write?
On a white board or diagram, block letters seem like the most legible choice.
Everything else is typed.
I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.
Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.
Even the "troublesome" ones.
At the end of the day the AP exams didn't test you on your knowledge of The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. The exam tested you on your ability to read an excerpt and answer questions about it as well as your ability to write a multi-paragraph essay from a prompt while a proctor wearing the most hideous smelling blackberry perfume bathed you in an olfactory assault every time they walked by. In-classroom writing assignments were the most effective way to prepare and we did them frequently. As a reward for doing well you got to skip a couple of 100 level English credits in college.
Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today, but it feels like the education system never takes a moment to look inward and acknowledge that The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia are dreadfully boring reads. It took me three tries to finish 1984 because the beginning is such a slog. It is strange to say kids aren't interested in reading (from the article) when a lot of the subject matter is objectively dull. Four of the six books in the article header are books I don't even want to think about let alone read.
Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Reading thick books requires having some device with no distructions. In my young ages all computers and all smartphones used to have no distructions, but now all computers (except some Linux distros) used to be bombarded with distructions in such a way that I can not read a book on any proprietary OS without getting some notification about anti-virus software or some updates or a need to restart, or just some events happening on the Internets.
My point is not just that distractions distract people, but distructions have become inevitable on almost any modern device able to render PDF with formulas.
Literally buy books? What about ereaders? Install adblockers and de-shittify your OS? I don't have the problems you seem to have, and I'm on Windows.
Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
Still accomplishes the goal of allowing kids to read a book.
> Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.
Kids don't usually have these sort of requirements with their reading lists. Also have you looked into KOReader[1], which has support for djvu it looks like?
> Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
Firstly, I wasn't suggesting installing more proprietary code. Not sure where you got that from. Most scripts/guides I've seen that help disable the more intrusive/annoying parts of Windows are FOSS.
Secondly, then install Linux and only use FOSS, for which there are many options to read books with?
More school districts should experiment with contemporary novels that make sense in a modern context.
While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.
There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.
I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."
Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.
I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.
That's why the 2026 remake of Animal Farm in animated form includes a twerking pig[1]. Education with brainrot is the future!
The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare. So who cares what they do with their time.
Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.
> The purpose of English class was to provide a field for interdisciplinary subjects. We learned how to write the standard five paragraph essay. We learned how to detect dishonest and manipulative messaging in advertising. We learned to relate themes in literature to contemporary society.
This is how I remember my English classes. We did not spend much time at all on grammar after the 9th grade. We didn’t study any classic literature besides reading a Shakespeare play every year; you had to take a separate course for that. This is also how the classes are treated in most colleges these days; you’ll get English majors who spent 4 years reading critical theory and bad contemporary novels written by friends of the department head, rather than anything with serious cultural cachet.
This is the only serious criticism of the subject, in my opinion; the applications that grammar has in logical reasoning, composition, interpretation, and foreign language acquisition are too significant to shrug off, but it isn’t being taught particularly rigorously anymore.
I would cut almost every other class from the curriculum before cutting English.
Explains a lot, actually.
This is why I, despite my deep appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge and having spent a significant chunk of my life in the academia after graduating, want my kids to spend as little time as strictly necessary in primary or secondary schools. And the need comes from the fact that I need some of that childcare, not that I need someone else to teach my children anything.
I objectively find myself to be an independent thinker, and I mostly find it distracting. I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships if I spent more time thinking about the kinds of things other people think about, in the way they think about them.
I observe most of the most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns, people look up to them because they understand them, and they develop solutions that are in line with what most people need/want/desire.
> Do you think it’s a competitive advantage
> I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships
> most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns
Don't care, I'm not optimizing for being competitive, being successful, or any of the other things you mentioned.
See, another symptom of being an independent thinker: I've thought about it on my own and I've concluded I'm not interested in your targets.
You know how they say - like in making music - in order to break the rules you have understand them?
I don’t like the take directly, but as a person who makes music, what I realize, and I think this is what they meant, it if you don’t study music, most people are likely to naturally slide into the most simplistic forms of it, because that’s what naturally sounds good, so you’re like naturally more inclined to recreate a 1 4 5 progression, rather than Mozart.
Do you think that you may have accidentally slid into this position, or sort of thinking exactly like a like blase’ counter cultural sameness, copying all the self-defined independent thinkers?, or do you think you have some insight into what makes your perspective unique and clearly in some way spiritually valuable to you?
I would be concerned that purely “thinking about it on your own” would lead to a really narrow set of beliefs. Like no offense, but your answer is a carbon copy of “disaffected youth” I’ve both exhibited and seen exhibited my whole life, with maybe a little less bite, so I’m guessing your not that young. But I’m often wrong.
But I am genuinely curious, what do you think makes you an independent thinker? And what purpose does that serve you?
At this point I can no longer put effort into responding to you. You think that my conception of "thinking for myself" is "listening to people who claim they think for themselves, and repeat what they say"? You know the HN principle of "assume the most generous interpretation"? This is the opposite.
Anyway, FYI, you sound like you're trying to deradicalize an andrew tate fanboy. You're A) really bad at feigning your concern, and B) extremely off target.
This is genuinely a philosophical question I am deeply interested in, what is individual thought?
If you care, go check my comment history and ask about something specific.
A lot of the thinkers I’ve been interested in lately seem to deeply embed their thoughts in a tradition, so I’ve been thinking that in order to have better thinking I should copy more.
> why do you care so much about me?
Sad question, but what is life but a series of attempts to connect to other people. Having a discourse makes it real. Tell me I’m wrong! Maybe having independent thoughts has real value. Usually “think different” is about as deep as an apple ad.
Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
Yes, I got this sense. I'm not what you're looking for.
I very much doubt that, alas, good day to you sir.
it seems like thinking is a form of torture for some... but maybe its our work/lifestyle that makes it so.. idk
And how are you, right now, communicating? You're writing in English. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, all written down, is its own subject that people aren't born knowing or can acquire like they can speak.
In addition, it's English Literature and Language in the same, so yes, about knowing partly a canon, but how how to interpret texts, both nonfictional and fictional and poetic.
> It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear.
I don't know how to explain to you why it's important to educate humanity.
Because they can't read or write, and neither can most adults, including developers.
That said, maths aren't much different. Being bad at maths is a cultural marker of sorts, since many maths classes are very bad indeed at teaching much beyond basic addition and subtraction.
See this very website on people who complain that they can't digest a pretty straightforward article
Out of all of Žižek's writings, that article really isn't that bad. I agree it could do with some headings, but you shouldn't need ChatGPT to summarise it for you, but I'm not surprised some people do.
Nowadays? Yes. And that’s the problem. It used to not be the case in the past.
Because people VASTLY overestimate their ability with their native language or their command of native language literature.
The SAT English Achievement tests used to absolutely obliterate even students who got good AP English scores. This isn't limited to English--even native Japanese speakers struggle with the advanced JLPT levels, for example. Grammar is hard, yo.
If you don't actively study your native language, your working vocabulary is quite small and your grammatical constructs are excessively simple.
As for shared literature, we were in front of what was claimed to be the house of Jonathan Swift with a bus full of tourists from various English-speaking countries, and the tour guide cracked a joke about "A Modest Proposal". I snickered a bit but didn't think much else. The tour guide pulled me aside later that I was the first person to get the joke and it was almost the end of the year--we're talking hundreds to thousands of people from the US, Australia, India, etc.
I mean, just ask someone to name three main characters and what they did in the last book they read. Most people will struggle. You need to spend some discussion time in order to affix a book into your memory.