this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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The only subject that was required for all four years when I was in high school was English, and senior year English was all British literature, so we got Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bronte's, shit like that.
Honestly I think later high school English classes do more to beat any love of reading teenagers have out of them by force feeding them dire dour old ugly hateful and just plain obsolete shit written by damaged people who lived in a world before the invention of epidemiology so sometimes your neighborhood would die of cholera because someone's pit toilet leaked into the ground water.
Make English 4 if not English 3 electives rather than required. Replace them with a semester of driver's ed, taxes, fire safety, how to safely refrigerate chicken, I can think of a lot of shit that would benefit the world more than having teenagers read a Skakespeare play they don't get aloud.
When Americans already can't read, you're seriously suggesting doing away with requiring English for all 4 years? I understand wanting to change the material, but that just seems really heavy-handed and counterproductive.
If they can't read by junior year of highschool I very much adoubt fucking Shakespeare is going to be the aha moment
Again, material choice is not the issue at hand.
Again (don't know why you said again but ill add it too), if they cant read by junior year I doubt two more years of the same shit is going to help. Is illiteracy an issue? Sure. Should junior and senior year english be mandatory for every student because some of them struggle with reading? No, just make a class to help those kids.
Without a tailored class your just sticking kids who cant read well with more advanced kids in the same class and by senior year that gap has probably grown substantially. How do you make a single class that can challenge good English students and also nurture people struggling with the fundamentals? You don't. The high functioning kids are bored and unengaged and the struggling kids are stressed by how far behind they are, it doesn't help anyone.
Yes it very specifically is. The origin of this thread was someone asking me what I would cut out of the curriculum. Are you always this dishonest?
If it's that bad the problem is earlier than 12th grade and needs to be fixed there. I started flight school in 9th grade, I had no problem reading textbooks that said things like "Aerodynamics of maneuvering flight" in them.
For clarity, are you saying that you don't think that it should be mandatory that English, or any of its derivatives, be taught as a course to children?
I'm questioning the importance of literature class as I remember it taught in late high school.
So, other than literature, are there some English-derived classes that you think would be good to teach?
How are you defining "obsolete" in this context?
Much of the language Shakespeare uses is obsolete to a modern English speaker. Let's start with his use of the archaic second person singular thee thy thou and move on from there to words we don't use anymore like "contumely" or "orisons" and then arrive at metaphors that haven't made sense since the industrial revolution. Shakespeare wrote in English v. 2.3.1, here in the 21st century we speak English v. 6.13.2.
More what I'm getting at, regardless of language used in Shakespeare is whether you think Shakespeare, as a whole, is obsolete. So, iiuc, you aren't saying that you think that Shakespeare, as a whole, is obsolete, but that that the language used within it is, which makes it difficult to read?
I don't think it's possible for the stories Shakespeare told to become obsolete because he wasn't the first or last to tell them. It is my understanding that not a single one of Shakespeare's plays were original works, he retold folk tales, legends, historical events etc. (Hamlet is a Danish legend, Henry V was his attempt at a documentary...) and his versions were good enough and written down enough to become canonized as classics.
But, to a modern audience, Shakespeare's language is 400 years out of date, and not only is it obsolete language, but it's Whedonesque obsolete language. Shakespeare wrote in quippy punny poetry and the bases for a lot of his puns, a lot of the cultural references he makes, we just don't get anymore. Because of all that, I think it's a similar task as reading Chaucer in the original middle English, you can kind of muddle through but you have to keep stopping and figuring out what the hell you just read.
I'm not saying Shakespeare's plays are worthless and should be discarded, but I don't think an average teenager should be expected to read and understand it the way he might a 20th century novel. I think we owe it to students to, the way we do with Chaucer, offer the original and a more modern translation.
If it's used as a reading comprehension exercise I would recommend the script for Ten Things I Hate About You instead of The Taming Of The Shrew, for pretty much exactly this reason.
Really interesting your solution is exactly how I was taught Shakespeare and Beowulf in 10th grade. We read beofulf in the bilingual version, and then read Grendel, a modern retelling (which was hella trippy). We read Hamlet with all the commentary to understand the early English, and then had assignments to "translate" it to modern usage. We watched the Romeo + Juliet with the guns. We watched 10 things I hate about you.
For me there was something valuable about working to understand this person from across the gulf of centuries, and realize that what he was writing about wasn't so different than what we experienced. Hamlet's ambivalence. Romeo's horniness. John Donne's sexy mindfucks... What were we talking about again ?
I disagree that this should be in some form of course. I think that this can be taught in a short afternoon visit by a fire department — it may even be already.
I am convinced beyond internet argument that you wouldn't be better off eliminating a semester of English Literature class from the end of high school and replace it with a semester of "living in the world" lessons that might just be a week of driver's ed, that field trip to the fire department, some first aid, just cram a semester full of basic adulting skills.
We used to call this "Home Economics" but that got stigmatized as the cake baking class girls took while the boys were in shop class, and then women doing housework became a politically charged issue so we deprecated even that.
But give it four years and we won't have a public education system in this country at all anyway, so all this does is vindicate my decision to not have children.
Okay, but that isn't what you said prior — that's shifting the goalpoasts. You specifically said
Imo, this is something that can be taught in a basic foods/cooking class, or a home economics class (which has at least been taught in the past ^[1]^ — I haven't found any current data).
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I disagree. Imo, there isn't any point to teaching driving skills to students. Imo, I also don't believe that it would be entirely ethical.
How many hours of the average American's life will be spent behind the wheel of a car?
How many hours of the average American's life will be spent examining 400 year old stage plays?
If they get something wrong behind the wheel of a car, what's the worst that can happen?
If they get something wrong examining a 400 year old stage play, what's the worst that can happen?
I propose that teaching Shakespeare instead of more in depth driver's ed isn't entirely ethical.
Out of curiosity, do you live in an area that doesn't require a driver's license in order to be legally allowed to drive on a public road?
No, I do live in an area where drivers' ed is pathetically short and simple though.
Instead of adding it to a mandatory school curriculum, would you be satisfied with a more strict licensing process?
Would it be a goal of yours to reduce the amount of time that one spends driving in their life? If so, do you think that teaching drivers ed in school will achieve that end?
Reducing but not eliminating the amount of time people drive would mean less practical experience which means rusty drivers. I recommend recurring training.
For clarity, do you mean, for example, being required to re-pass a drivers test to renew one's license?
I think you misunderstood me. To be completely fair, I was rather vague. I wasn't arguing that one was more ethical than the other. My argument about ethics was from the perspective of further subsidizing something that already receives enormous subsidies — ie driving and cars (this is conjecture at the moment, but I can go into more detail if you'd like).