[StillBored]

And yet, this book, along with The Count of Monte Cristo, Grapes of Wrath, and quite a number of other tomes are assigned in high schools by teachers/school districts. Those educators think they are providing some kind of service by trying to force feed young people books that cannot really be understood in a meaningful way by the vast majority of people with ~15 years of life.

It wasn't until a decade after college that I picked up another Steinbeck novel. and after finishing Cannery Row, the only question i could ask myself was, WTF were my teachers thinking assigning Grapes of Wrath vs some of his much shorter, less complex works that could be read in a couple days. The whole book is shorter than the section of Grapes that most people describe as being the slog you have to get through to enjoy the rest of the novel.

I read a lot, and I can say with a fair bit of confidence the one long lasting result of assigning these books in HS is to guarantee most people have a life long repulsion for long "classics".

[BeFlatXIII]

> HS literature cirriculum having zero relatability to students so they're unable to comprehend why the books are "great"

I've called it "an overdose of Dead Poet's Society" before. Shakespeare plays, Steinbeck, Moby-Dick: they'll all make the majority of the class tune out if they're presented as a treatise on the human condition. Shakespeare is meant to be performed on a stage, not read from a book. Discuss his codification of character archetypes and plot tropes, perhaps even some wordplay choices. At 16 years old, "a treatise on the human condition" is pretentious puffery. Even those teacher's pets who take it seriously are merely LARPing as well-rounded individuals.

[not2b]

You're lumping in Steinbeck with Shakespeare and Moby-Dick? His topics are much more relevant to what is going on for many students today and the language is much less dated.

[BeFlatXIII]

In my specific case, it was due to going to one of the better-off suburban school districts. Even though it was obvious that the characters were stuck in a Dickensean world at the intellectual level, none of us had the real-world experience to get what it's like to be a migrant farm worker at the gut level or even to suddenly have perspective of our less-affluent classmates.

My dislike of how Shakespeare was taught in HS is from a different angle. The problem wasn't that the stories were unrelatable: that was during the peak of my fantasy-reading years. I disliked how much focus was put on the iambic pentameter as some special sauce for "understanding what it means to be human" and other overdoses of the Dead Poet Society ethos.

[nineplay]

The local schools have gotten a lot more into contemporary novels and I'm all for it. I see occasional grumblings on the FB groups but no one has managed to change the curriculum.

I love classics and every time I read one there's a moment when I think to myself "I'm so glad no one is going to make me write an essay on this." I don't have to try to pull out the major themes, I don't have to discuss about the character's motivations, I don't have to consider the novel in the context of what was going on in the writer's life time. I can just let it wash over me, I can just enjoy it.

It's a miserable and joy-killing way to approach reading. Even as I look back to the books I read in High School I don't think any every became my favorites. The Great Gatsby is a fine book but when I look back on it I remember all the sections where we had to point out 'symbolism'. What a drag.

[zokier]

Of the many possible "classics" to throw at teenagers I feel Moby Dick is far from the worst option. At least it has some humor to it, and on one layer it is just an adventure at sea; its not just pure pathos. And compared to many others its relatively short novel, especially if you skip some of the non-essential whaling chapters.

[emodendroket]

I imagine the goal was to expose students to something they'd otherwise perhaps never read. My school favored shorter stuff like the Old Man and the Sea... which I did love regardless, but I guess can have the same problem of not connecting with younger readers.

[gm3dmo]

Wherever there's a geek beating on a book. I'll be there :)