I think you need to actually be listening to hear it. Sorry you and I seem to be talking past each other. I truly wish you - and others here - all the best. I hope I’m absolutely wrong about the slow walk into fascism that the Republicans seem to be taking this country. And while you - and others here - may be fully cognizant of that - I fear not enough are.
1 Like
That is my concern for things such as this, which is ironic, because the book is actually (if they understood it) one they’d likely take issue with themselves. But they will hear “diversity” and get triggered immediately.
To say “we don’t need to read Shakespeare, Shakespeare has nothing to say to us ” is to show just how little you understand about relating literature to real life. Because otherwise, there would be no value in my reading books that weren’t about middle aged white women. Plenty of the current reading lists do need reexamination, but this student was engaging in the hyperbole of youth.
Could not agree more. People keep overlooking the part that age/gender/race of the author/protagonists matter a whole lot less than the universal experiences of being human…
So, all lives matter?
10 Likes
No such thing. Context actually matters.
10 Likes
6 Likes
You seem to have fallen for an news article that could have come straight from a British tabloid though. I remember all the bullshit headlines about how some school or another had banned Baa Baa Black Sheep or Mary Had A Little Lamb, when it turned out to be nothing of the sort. Usually it was just children switching colours for fun, or a creative thinking class.
This is no different. You have been played by right wing media who are upset that someone asked for more diversity than the same books I was expected to read thirty years ago, and which failed to hold my attention. That process was exhausting, I think I stopped reading fiction for a year after my exams because all the joy had been sucked out of it, and I actually had a good English teacher. The last book I enjoyed reading that was assigned by my school was The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler when I was 11, and that was partly because the main character was about as close to transgender as a school could get away with in Section 28 Britain. After that it was a five year diet of straight white men and it got boring. We had at least two books assigned a year (as well as one hour long “lesson” of silent reading each week, of whatever books we chose) and I can only remember four of them.
14 Likes
You know there are other things to read, right? And that that’s a good thing?
11 Likes
Thanks for that!
7 Likes
Tell me that you are a cis-het abled bodied White male with privilege without actually using any of those words.
14 Likes
This. So much this. The book was assigned to our 6th grade class. I hated the book, and even as a kid thought “They assigned this to us because their are kids in it, but it’s not for kids.”
7 Likes
I read it in the early 80s in English class and immediately didn’t understand it because it was very much about English schools, which I knew nothing at all about until Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” album came out a few years later. And those were some way more fucked-up kids than most of those I knew anyway. It never rang true to me, but I’m more of an optimist, or at least not as messed up as this author, haha…
2 Likes
7 Likes
Does Falkland islands count?
released on 30 November 1979
8 Likes
I am still trying to figure out how “Lord of the Flies” can be construed to be about universal experiences of being human when it is literally a story about a very similar but highly unusual group of people in a provocative and horrific situation and handling it in basically the worst way possible and is therefore basically completely a not-universal kind of story in the first place.
I’m not really against it being taught, and it looks like almost no one really is anyway. However, it’s definitely not a book I would think “ah… yes… something we ALL can relate to” about.
Like doesn’t everyone have those feelings of being an isolated group of white English public school boys with nothing but your childish impressions of your own damaged society to sustain you after being stranded on an island?
Nah… it’s an interesting story… but no, it’s not uh… relatable.
9 Likes
I think the assumption is that ALL people would act the way it is assumed rich white boys from the UK would act, since they are assumed to be the default humans acting as all of us would act.
I think it’s certainly trying to be a book understood in that way.
5 Likes
I would have enjoyed middle school English a lot more if it had more Bloodchild and less Outsiders…
1 Like
I wish I had more context by knowing what the list previously included and if there was a book being proposed to replace it. Like if the idea is, “We will just make the kids read one less book this year.” then it seems like a bad idea. If the proposal is, “We are going to take this book out and replace it with Beloved because we don’t have time in the school year to teach both.”, then it seems like a good idea.
2 Likes
Psst hey. Dig far from the fishes. [Fascists.] -Then- deep.
9 Likes
