I agree that a lot of what I didn't like about Animal Farm could have been fixed in a different context (deep dive into the theory of socialism as a classless society, overloading of the word communism, actual history of Russia and how it didn't achieve a classless society, history of Orwell as a person and his own political beliefs, exploration of Animal Farm as polemic tool and analysis of its effectiveness as a tool, analysis of how it's misunderstood today as a criticism of the idea of communism, McCarthyism and how Animal Farm was introduced to classroom during the coldwar)
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).
My favorite book reading experience was one teacher that would just bring many of his books to the class and let us browse the collection and pick one by ourselves.
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.
Comments
I agree that a lot of what I didn't like about Animal Farm could have been fixed in a different context (deep dive into the theory of socialism as a classless society, overloading of the word communism, actual history of Russia and how it didn't achieve a classless society, history of Orwell as a person and his own political beliefs, exploration of Animal Farm as polemic tool and analysis of its effectiveness as a tool, analysis of how it's misunderstood today as a criticism of the idea of communism, McCarthyism and how Animal Farm was introduced to classroom during the coldwar)
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).
My favorite book reading experience was one teacher that would just bring many of his books to the class and let us browse the collection and pick one by ourselves.
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.