I was about to downvote you because I read your username as reply to OP’s comment.
To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation.
Everything that was considered fancy and high-culture when I was in my formative years is fancy and high-culture now and everything after that is slop and mind-rot.
But it makes no difference: the older generations die and the newer ones take over either way, and what's acceptable or even high culture changes.
Every generation is worried that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but that gets ignored).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
When someone refers to the Greeks and Romans they are refering to a time long before the medieval period. Things got continued to get better after their most well known thinkers died for a century. (well define better... The there is a lot we would hate about their culture, but they would have considered better)
It is pretty obvious that having "a screen which optimizes itself to keep you hooked for hours while you still have a developing brain, and no previous generation had anything similiar" is not very comparable to being able to throw away paper and have scratchpad because paper became cheap.
And the claim that hippies are doing fine isn't well substantiated[0][1][2]. Maybe we shouldn't claim to have answers for what we don't and exercise caution. Alert but not anxious.
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28008372/ ("... members with regular cannabis use and persistent dependence experienced downward socioeconomic mobility, more financial difficulties, workplace problems, and relationship conflict in early midlife.")
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9552770/ ("long-term cannabis users show accelerated biological ageing in midlife and poorer health preparedness, financial preparedness, and social preparedness for old age.")
Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
One of the main reasons to encourage kids to read fiction is to expose them to stories outside their current experience. We don't get kids to read Treasure Island because they can inherently relate to a story about 18th century pirates.
While it's true that the finer political nuances of Animal Farm are likely to be lost on most children, it's a perfectly comprehensible story in its own right, and it needn't be read narrowly as an allegory about Communism per se.
You're kind of missing the point of my comment. You said, in essence, that it's impossible to learn about Communism unless you've experienced it personally.
> China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba
Of those countries, how many have you experienced personally, and thus, by your standard, are qualified to comment on?
To what extent is modern China actually Communist, as opposed capitalist-authoritarian?
>This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history
You've misunderstood the purpose.
Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.
You need the question before you can find the answer.
Problem is that book is based on so many things that we know are untrue about humans in general that it is hard to take any questions it provokes seriously.
I can accept the impossible for the fun of it, but when something is impossible I don't take is serious. And it wasn't a good book in general.
Animal Farm is interesting partially because its satire is actually extremely poignant and directed; the characters are meant to represent the important actors in the Russian Revolution.
Old Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin Snowball is Trotsky, etc. Regardless of ones nationality or politics, the story of Russia in 1917 remains one of the most fascinating in our worlds history. For a lot of people, myself included, Animal Farm served as a nice way of being introduced to the tale without getting bogged down by the specifics.
I've looked up animal farm in more detail, and it seems like you're fundamentally undereducated on the topic.
Animal Farm entered Anglo-American classrooms in the late 1950s, and its adoption was heavily influenced by the Cold War political climate . The book was seen as "useful" for teaching, but its political utility was part of the appeal—it provided "an easy use... as an anti-Communist and anti-revolutionary lesson" . This wasn't just a grassroots phenomenon; it was actively encouraged by intelligence agencies.
Both British and American intelligence services promoted the book as an anti-socialist message and supported its distribution . The CIA even arranged for a 1954 animated film adaptation that altered Orwell's story—emphasizing that animals on neighboring farms were content and changing the ending to have the animals overthrow the pigs . This film was widely shown in US and UK classrooms, embedding a distorted version of the story in the educational system for years
Sounds like a problem of unrealistic expectations. I read Animal Farm when I was a kid and enjoyed it. No-one told me that it was going to profoundly change my life, and it didn't. Neither did my chemistry class, or my math textbooks, or most of the other stuff I learned in school. There's value in reading significant works of literature, both inherently and because it increases your ability to engage with long and complex texts. Obviously, reading Vanity Fair is not going to confer some kind of profound knowledge, or enable you to do anything in particular that you couldn't do before.
I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
And, ya’know, different stuff hits different for everyone. Just like movies or games. Though, weirdly, people sometimes treat written stories like it’s wrong to dislike them.
I absolutely hated Great Expectations, but loved a bunch of other required reading.
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 is incentivized:
In an information-rich environment, I could learn more about animal farm in 10 minutes by asking AI all of the above questions (Why does anybody care about this book? Did it have any actual affect? Who was Trotsky? Is it trying to say communism can't work ever?) than I did in 10 hours of reading without proper context.
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.
Funnily enough most takes on the book misunderstand the point that was being made (probably due to Death of the author) . In his unpublished preface and subsequent analysis the view by Orwell , who was had Trotskyist leanings, his main critique is that they weren’t communisty enough but sellouts to capitalist tendancies, hence the analysis
"Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.");"[1]
Obviously once a work is in the public’s hands , interpretations may supersede even the authors original themes.Leaving it as a matter of interpretation/comprehension and generally accepted consensus. Incidentally a good measure of reading comprehension and analysis for the students studying he text.
imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.
i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids.
I'm not sure where you see velocity. The last major innovation in arethmetic was the introduction of zero when the hindu-arabic numeral system was adopted by medieval western societies. Likewise english grammar isn't exactly a hotbed of churn.
And sad thing is they will
be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.
To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.
My wife instilled a strong love of reading in all of our children from a young age. They all ask to go to the library, but my oldest became the most voracious reader. If we didn’t limit screen time, he probably wouldn’t sleep, but with unlimited time with books, he’ll easily finish a novel in a day, and sometimes two.
My parents and me are terrible readers, to the point where I thought I might have mild dyslexia. Once in a blue moon I find a book I can’t put down, but in the 80s I already had video games to fill my time.
Having a voracious reader at a reading level 10-years or more beyond his age is its own challenge. Most of the HN crowd thinks kids should have access to all books, but I assure you, there are many books inappropriate for various developmental levels, regardless of reading proficiency. There’s also little support from libraries or the industry (rating systems, content warnings, etc.) to make that easy for parents.
The best memories I have as a child are 'inappropriate' books (especially 'when I was five I killed myself' at ~12yo and 1984 at ~14.). I always had issues (disliked being touched, difficulties to empathize), but those books emotionally shook me, moved me so much, so hard I like to think I became a better version of me after reading them.
Started doing theater at 12 after Buten, started working as after school counselor for 6 to 8 yo kids and help them do their homework after reading 1984, ultimately becoming a youth camp counsellor at 17. Which were terribly outside my comfort zone, but Buten showed me how to improve myself, and Orwell how to improve the world (or at least try my best).
I personally wouldn’t choose 1984 for a 14 year old, but would consider it rather tame compared to modern fiction. Some of it would make the grocery store check out isle romance novels blush but also don’t contain any profound message.
To be fair, I don’t see enough discussion about education since the 2000s. Parents are the only ones who complain and put some pressure, but once they no longer have kids in school, they stop caring about the quality of education. There needs to be a better framework for assessing quality than the student-parent generational comparison.
53 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] threadTo add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
Everything that was considered fancy and high-culture when I was in my formative years is fancy and high-culture now and everything after that is slop and mind-rot.
But it makes no difference: the older generations die and the newer ones take over either way, and what's acceptable or even high culture changes.
So this means that we have decided a priori that life cannot ever get worse in any way? That’s evidently absurd.
Concrete issues (e.g. iPads in the classroom result in worse tested recall) retain plenty of space.
It's the vague repetitive "man yells at cloud" gripes that get auto-terminated, e.g. "is our children learning?"
I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but that gets ignored).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
A.k.a: no trustable source.
And the claim that hippies are doing fine isn't well substantiated[0][1][2]. Maybe we shouldn't claim to have answers for what we don't and exercise caution. Alert but not anxious.
[0]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002204267800800... ("70% abandoned deviance as a way of life" not sure what that exactly means)
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28008372/ ("... members with regular cannabis use and persistent dependence experienced downward socioeconomic mobility, more financial difficulties, workplace problems, and relationship conflict in early midlife.")
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9552770/ ("long-term cannabis users show accelerated biological ageing in midlife and poorer health preparedness, financial preparedness, and social preparedness for old age.")
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
While it's true that the finer political nuances of Animal Farm are likely to be lost on most children, it's a perfectly comprehensible story in its own right, and it needn't be read narrowly as an allegory about Communism per se.
So, we shouldn't learn about history until we experience it ourselves? Seems like that would eliminate, uh, most of history.
I haven't experienced the harsh realities of the Cretaceous period but I still like reading about dinosaurs.
You're kind of missing the point of my comment. You said, in essence, that it's impossible to learn about Communism unless you've experienced it personally.
> China and North Korea, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba
Of those countries, how many have you experienced personally, and thus, by your standard, are qualified to comment on?
To what extent is modern China actually Communist, as opposed capitalist-authoritarian?
You've misunderstood the purpose.
Fiction was not ever intended to achieve scientific goals, i.e. to discover the truth about our universe. It's intended to be thought-provoking, i.e. to inspire questions about our universe.
You need the question before you can find the answer.
I can accept the impossible for the fun of it, but when something is impossible I don't take is serious. And it wasn't a good book in general.
Old Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin Snowball is Trotsky, etc. Regardless of ones nationality or politics, the story of Russia in 1917 remains one of the most fascinating in our worlds history. For a lot of people, myself included, Animal Farm served as a nice way of being introduced to the tale without getting bogged down by the specifics.
Animal Farm entered Anglo-American classrooms in the late 1950s, and its adoption was heavily influenced by the Cold War political climate . The book was seen as "useful" for teaching, but its political utility was part of the appeal—it provided "an easy use... as an anti-Communist and anti-revolutionary lesson" . This wasn't just a grassroots phenomenon; it was actively encouraged by intelligence agencies.
Both British and American intelligence services promoted the book as an anti-socialist message and supported its distribution . The CIA even arranged for a 1954 animated film adaptation that altered Orwell's story—emphasizing that animals on neighboring farms were content and changing the ending to have the animals overthrow the pigs . This film was widely shown in US and UK classrooms, embedding a distorted version of the story in the educational system for years
I think one thing that you do get out of engaging with assigned texts is the ability to decenter your own judgment just a little bit. Instead of reasoning "this novel is boring me to tears, therefore it sucks", you start to think "what is it about me that makes me unable to appreciate this classic novel?" That doesn't mean you have to like the novel, in the final analysis, but it's a useful thought process to go through.
I enjoyed reading Animal Farm but it was something I picked up by myself, and read on my own terms.
I absolutely hated Great Expectations, but loved a bunch of other required reading.
But here's my main thesis -- we have a situation where not-reading is incentivized:
In an information-rich environment, I could learn more about animal farm in 10 minutes by asking AI all of the above questions (Why does anybody care about this book? Did it have any actual affect? Who was Trotsky? Is it trying to say communism can't work ever?) than I did in 10 hours of reading without proper context.
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).
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.
Every software developer above 35 has been in an org run by the pigs. You don't need a study. It is literally a profound lesson about life.
"Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.");"[1]
Obviously once a work is in the public’s hands , interpretations may supersede even the authors original themes.Leaving it as a matter of interpretation/comprehension and generally accepted consensus. Incidentally a good measure of reading comprehension and analysis for the students studying he text.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...
Spoiler alert… they’re not.
I had a 12 year old nephew ask me why I was reading while on vacation. I sent him a link to this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8
Monkey see, monkey do! You have electronics addicted parents who never read wondering why their kids also don't read.
My parents and me are terrible readers, to the point where I thought I might have mild dyslexia. Once in a blue moon I find a book I can’t put down, but in the 80s I already had video games to fill my time.
Having a voracious reader at a reading level 10-years or more beyond his age is its own challenge. Most of the HN crowd thinks kids should have access to all books, but I assure you, there are many books inappropriate for various developmental levels, regardless of reading proficiency. There’s also little support from libraries or the industry (rating systems, content warnings, etc.) to make that easy for parents.
Started doing theater at 12 after Buten, started working as after school counselor for 6 to 8 yo kids and help them do their homework after reading 1984, ultimately becoming a youth camp counsellor at 17. Which were terribly outside my comfort zone, but Buten showed me how to improve myself, and Orwell how to improve the world (or at least try my best).