this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Sheesh, it's not even a hundred years old yet.
So there you have your answer why we can't all collectively agree that it's boring. Some people like it and/or get something out of reading it.
You could say the same about anything that requires effort, like learning a programming language for example. Of course a lot of people are going to find it boring and obtuse - but no one questions why it's sometimes a requirement to learn it. That being said, I doubt aspiring marine biologists are being forced to read Finnegans Wake in particular.
Not Finnegans Wake in particular, but something boring and slow with old labyrinthyian language that gives people a headache to follow.
Most people take programming as an elective whereas as old slow books are generally required for everyone.
Well, let me put it this way then: with your strategy, in 50 years there will be no one left alive who would be able to use or understand the word labyrinthine.
That's not true. People who like language will naturally gravitate towards learning weird words
Just like people who like using their hands will gravitate toward air conditiioning repair and woodworking over time
Why does EVERYONE need to be bored right now?
This is a naive position. In a class society, the upper classes see to it that their kids get educated. If you're the daughter of an AC repairman, and you like books with weird words in them, your chances to have a career in the field where you would thrive are slim to none. The best way to counter this is to offer a lot of education, to everyone, not just to the people "with a good head for reading" that just happens to also all have rich parents. For this noble cause, taking the risk that a few kids might be bored for a few hours seems like a reasonable prize to pay. You never know what kid is going to respond to what subject, this is why a broad education is important.
It's SO boring to people who don't like it.
If we ensure everyone is able to have functional literacy, people begin to know.pretty quickly whether they do or do not like reading.
People have limitied time and the daughter of the AC repairman may be better served by being able take "easy" physics courses as a freshman and take a two year mechanical engineering course after to see if she likes that. She may not want to spend 80 hours on Finnegan's Wake or expend effort having to pretend to like that incoherent diatribe. Grade school and high school take a long time and the idea that intelligent people of all classes couldn't start learning more advanced topics and no one shouod specialize in what they learn is a Polyannaish attitude towards time and resource management that has lead to our clusterfuck society of "everyone needs a college degree just to work at enterprise rent a car" and results in people putting off child birth towards ages at which they are less likely to be fertile and have babies with fewer genetic defects. (That is not eugenicism. Everyone has genetic defects and most people have 6-7.) In an Internet age in which information is readily available, strategies, strategies for educating the populace should change and try to.reduce student apathy and disengagement, which ca nbe caused by teaching boring things students don't like. I am not against a semester or two of high school English, but 4 years is 3 too many at least for those uninterested.
Tl;dr we should stop providing well-rounded educations and once it becomes obvious that a child is uninterested in more intellectual pursuits they should be put in a trade school.
Pretty much, but I think it should be a bit less limiting. Trade classes, not trade schools, but also specialized classes for different interests, without AP and Honors classes wrighted to penalize specialized courses lacking those designations.
Those sure are some labyrinthine sentences you managed to conjure up there. Now, if only I didn't find the task so boring, perhaps I might be able to untangle a coherent thought or two, who knows?
I never claimed to be well at english
Well, if you mean literally, a little boredom is good for the brain.
If you mean why should we strive to make kids have a good vocabulary, it's so that they can communicate with others and be able to understand the world better.
If you mean why should we strive to make kids appreciate art, it's because art is good for kids' brains, for everyone's brains.
If you just mean you can't force all kids to be into the same things, yes, I agree. But all should learn math, reading at an adult level, comfortably, sciences, art of some sort, and physical education of some sort.
You aren't better off just always doing what comes easy to you. Forcing your mind and body to do things that are difficult is what makes you stronger and smarter. The learning difficult books that you disdain so thoroughly will make it both easier and more fun to read, eventually, but also just trains your mind to handle language better.
I read plenty of books in school, well over 5 cover to cover, and I still hate reading.
There is no truth in any book that I can't learn from a good Sean Cody film.
I think your platitudes sound nice, but in a world of limited time, we'd be better off scrapping 1-2 years of English and replacing it with Genetics classes or Ecology classes at the high school level. Fiction books are mostly just an older technology of Netflix, and yet people cling to the idea of books being virtuous for Emeperor's New Clothes-style pretentiousness.
The environmental catastrophy the world seems intent on diving head first into.(without knowing the depth) seems more pressing than some teenager becoming a sesquipidalian via extreme boredom.
5?
OK you have to be trolling.
Why is that trolling? At least 5 but cover to cover. Like that i read all of it, not just like parts and the back cover.
I skimmed many books, well over 10.
I dont get why some people have a hard time believing some people find reading boring?
I stand by everything in the prior post.
I can't imagine a school that would teach only 5 literature books, my kids did more than that EACH year and even the terrible incomplete education I got in K-12 here when we were the bottom of the barrel state in the bottom of the barrel nation in terms of education involved more than 5 books a year.
My kid who dislikes reading and wants to go into trades, even that kid has read more than 5 books voluntarily outside of school, and certainly more than 60 in the course of their education so far. I can't imagine all of them being boring - I read some of them too, if my kids recommended them to me - Brodek's Report was one I remember reading after my kid had to buy it for school, it was so good.
I just thought your " I read books, five of them at least" had to be a joke. If my kids here in the state of Florida have to do more, I can't imagine any educational system requiring only a few.
They required a lot more, probably hundreds. Very few I read cover to cover. Reading is boring to me. I have no reason to waste my tike on things I find boring or increase my sufferring level. I probably skimmed briefly and read the back cover of hundreds of books.
Because a broad educational background is important and people can't know if they'd be into old literature without being exposed to it.
I guess, but broad exposure goes on for a very long and boring time, imho. Couldn't there just be a 1 semester broad exposure class to find out such things instead of years of painful obtuse prose students mostly just pretended to read?
No, that wouldn't actually provide a baseline understanding of a variety of topics. Things like media literacy can only be taught by reading and watching and analyzing a wide range of things, and that takes several years of just one general thing. Basic biology, enough to understand fundamental things like how/why vaccines work or the importance of diet and exercise also builds on many years of learning. Math should be confidently understood at least through algebra in order navigate taxes, bills, budgeting, and other legally important but boring situations.
A lot of stuff doesn't feel important while you're learning about it and partially that's just teachers doing a bad job contextualizing the lessons but yes many topics just aren't intrinsically interesting to everybody. It's still good to have a robust base of understanding because that makes tangentially related things easier to parse.
And that's not even getting into "electives" that would be super useful for most people if they had the time, things like cooking and shop class so folks are more self-reliant, or music or art or crafting because hobbies can also be menaly stimulating and fulfilling, or better or more varied PE types because it's also important to develop some decent health habits early in life. In a perfect world a lot of that would be introduced or reinforced at home by family and friends and neighbors, but that's not the world we have.
It's not a terrible point, but media literacy seems to be quite low no matter what and lessons are easily forgotten. Teaching scientific literacy through ecology courses would have a better impact.
Pretending to read instead of engaging with the lesson is going to do that, yeah.
Ecology is my favorite, and the focus of my secondary education, but it can't come before chemistry and biology and those build on algebraic math and require and understanding of science built from "general science". Should probably also have some statistics. Geology and cartography are going to be in there, as well as the history of conservation, there should be some anthropology... It's all very iterative. Ecology specifically encompasses a ton of disciplines.
I'll add that introductory stuff can happen early. In my state we learn about the salmon life cycle in grade school and that includes a tiny bit about watersheds and streams and clean water. But it's very rudimentary.
So many people don't understand climate science. It's unfortunate these topics couldn't be integrated into a.climate science class. It may be too late anyway to change the impending global destruction trajectory.