Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
I think literature and classics are soured for many people, when they have to read stuff like Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens between 15 and 18 year old. Most are just not interested in it at that age. I'm more of an advocate to let them read what they want. OK, they'll have less classic education, but there's a bigger chance they'll become readers. They'll grow into the classics over time.
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I disagree. I think one of the reasons that we see so much functional illiteracy today, and a marked inability for people to think and reason is because they never learned the discipline of having to read longer, more complex works as younger persons, whether "tweens" or teens. I can't speak for anyone outside of the US, nor would I be so presumptuous, but here, people have patently lost the inability to discern fact from opinion--they literally don't understand the difference. They don't study Logic and Language in school any longer, don't have to engage in intellectual debate, etc. They haven't developed the intellectual discipline garnered from reading those "difficult" books, haven't developed the ability to focus and reason that comes from that type of schoolwork exercise.
I'm all for letting twitlets read "Twilight" or whatever, to engage a reader's interest, but a
teen's disinclination to read isn't going to be cured by giving him comic books at that age--that should have been addressed many years earlier. A kid should be reading pretty avidly by the time s/he's 8 or so, I'd say, and fluidly. There's no reason a teenage brain can't process Dickens or any of the other classics. Many of us who suffered at the hands of private schools (Catholic or other) managed to live through Chaucer (not "modernized"), et al, and ended up the better for it.
I'd concur that most classics (Homer, Chaucer, Dickens, et al) aren't for "kids," but most reasonably-educated teens of 16-18 can CERTAINLY read and process those, and
should. Increasingly moving toward easier reading material isn't helping them. Just my opinion, and worth what you've paid for it, but given that the average SAT scores have
plummeted over the past half-century into figures that are un-freaking-believable, I think that the facts speak for themselves.
Hitch