Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Personally, I blame schools, and the method of teaching English. Yes, there are many people who will never want to read for pleasure no matter what. We are all different. But IMHO there is no better or surer way to kill a potential love of reading than to force High School students to read hundreds of pages, then discuss the book minutely and dissect it painfully, often extracting meanings that the author never intended and that may or may not in fact be there. Then follow this up with an examination or two. And the treatment of poems is even worse. Except for the few kids who love this, it is an excruciating experience and I think drives many off reading for life, though fortunately there do seem to be a few who do recover and often discover a love of reading later in life.
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I agree with this. Schools should lay off the classics. The Illiad, The Odyssey, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens... This stuff is not for 14-15 year olds.
Let them read ghost stories and horror such as Stephen King if they want to. Then make them tell about the books they read; not the story, but what they liked in the writing, what scared them and why, what didn't and why not... and THEN point them to classics that cover those same themes: H.P. Lovecraft, Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce.
If there are kids who read fantasy, point those to Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Beowulf. Some kids will read travel and adventure; you point them to The Odyssey, Jules Verne.... and the ones who read crimes and detectives get pointed to Sherlock Holmes, maybe Hercule Poirot, and Auguste Dupin.
Some of them will try one or more of those classics and like it... or not.
So I think reading is handled the wrong way around.
The same goes for teaching piano. After the basics, start with current things the kids know; simplified movie scores of movies they like, for example, and throw in a classic piece if one is used as the basis for a score.
Why does readhing and teaching instruments always have to be done with material that's at least a hundred years old, and the warning that most of the newer material is not 'it' ?
In my opinion, that devalues reading too; as if all the good stuff was written before 1925 and nothing else noteworthy has been done since then.