Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I guess it depends what you consider the purpose of English Lit. classes to be. Personally I regard their purpose to be what their name says: to teach at least some of the great works of literature that are our cultural heritage. To my mind it's a parent's job to instil a love of reading in their children, not the school's.
Reading for pleasure does not necessarily have the same purpose as reading to learn. If you want to read SF for pleasure (as I did as a teenager, and still do today) that has a different purpose to reading the classics.
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That's kind of what I thinking. I don't really consider it English Lit's "job" to instill a love of reading. It can certainly happen that way, though. Just like an exceptional teacher can instill a love of mathematics, or science, without having to "modernize" the curriculum. Hell, my Latin teacher did more to shape my reading habits than any Literature teacher I ever had. And although I was always a fairly avid reader, it was my 5th grade science teacher that really kickstarted my love of reading-for-pure-pleasure.
I've always been a little confused by the "
Literature class should equal teaching-children-to-love-reading class" notion that so many seem to hold. In my opinion, the love for reading is usually instilled long before children start getting graded on what they get out of "boring" books they don't want to read. And even if they never learn to appreciate the "out of date" classics (though many still do), the experience rarely results in their love of reading being quashed (once that spark is lit). They just get a little frustrated by classwork getting in the way of reading their
favorite books.
