The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

> She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones.

The evidence that cell phones are hugely detrimental to the development of young people is pretty overwhelming these days, and no amount of old, out-of-context quotes taken from earlier "technological panics" will change that. I think the works and research of Jonathan Haidt do an excellent job digging into the effects of cell phones on kids.

And don't even get me started on the "Kids don't want to read the old classics because they're dense and hard to read, they're just challenging the white male patriarchy!" Spare me...

>Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts

Yes, some literature is better than other literature. Some literature should be taught in schools. The fact that this teacher defends giving simpler less sophisticated works because it speaks to the children more (how is a power struggle in a palace speaking to the children more?). Difficult language is not an excuse to not read a book, this is literally lowering expectations. I am not saying those books are bad, but they are all written at a middle school level, and should not be taught in high school. Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.

I guess I don't talk to enough high school kids but is this really actually true? There has been ~200 years of linguistic evolution between when this teacher went to school and now? English has changed as significantly as it did between

"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote"

and

"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."

Wasn't the theory that recorded media would decrease the rate of core linguistic evolution? There has always been slang, but I would call this a total false equivalence.

>Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that.

This, in response to a story about Gen Z and Gen Alpha at elite universities. Why are they attending the elites, then, if not to become part of the power apparatus?

Reading difficult texts is how you get better at reading?? If students are not struggling at all they are not learning. But the author seems more interested in validating students identities or whatever than actually helping them learn.

An unabridged translation of Les Miserables is 3-6x as long as any of those other books. I feel like that could explain a difference in being able/willing to finish those books by itself. At the same time, updated language and abridgment are extremely normal in translations and would be very appropriate here. I'd be surprised if those choices aren't already considered by professors assigning Les Mis in anything but a class on Les Mis for seniors or grad students. Presumably a competent abridgment would cut much of 'going on for chapters about the sewer system' or whatever. The OP talks about such translation techniques working for her class when she teaches The Odyssey! I don't see how Les Miserables is very different, but maybe the translation(s) she uses for the Odyssey are really exceptional.

An unrelated point the OP kind of gets at but doesn't focus on, in favor of diversity and recency of authorship: the mere fact of assigning reading and setting a schedule for it often sucks the pleasure out of it, doesn't it? I read two authors of classics put down in the OP as 'vanilla' and 'dust-covered', Dostoevsky and Hugo, for pleasure in high school... and by my senior year of high school was skipping many (if not a majority) of assigned readings in favor of bullshitting my way through based on second-hand summaries. (The books I skipped included both titles by 'dead white men' and more contemporary titles by authors of other backgrounds.) If I hadn't the pleasure of choosing the classic texts I did read as referred to above, I probably would have given them a shallow and resentful treatment, too.

Aside: after looking them up, the books the OP lists as examples sound way more interesting than the 'non-canonical' texts I was assigned in high school, and I'm envious of their students in that respect. The non-canonical texts in my school days were infrequent and also often felt like second-rate additions to curriculum: slim volumes, simple language, facile premises.

How true are these allegations?

For example, book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.

I understand that removing books from a library is bad in principle. But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.

I'd enroll in that class

This is entirely the reason to read them. Literature is partly about opening up and expanding your perspectives, and challenging the reader. If you simply surround yourself in what’s comfortable and familiar you’re not exploring the depth of the human experience.

And Hugo’s whole theme is about injustice and inequality. What it means to live in a society without sanitation, something that still exists in large swathes of the world. These are themes that continue to resonate. Just because he was a “old white man” does not negate the value of his literature. Instead this article reads as racists and ageist.

So thanks to the Atlantic for continuing to bring up difficult subjects that make certain groups unhappy because they need to be pried from their insulated and privileged perspectives.

As Hugo so eloquently writes:

    As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century — man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness — are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.

A curriculum should update over time, but there's plenty of value in having a canon. It's a shared point of reference to create a common culture. Fashions, music, television to streaming video or whatever, might all change rapidly, but at least give parents and children something they're both familiar with. Beyond that, it can in and of itself create the kind of urbane cosmopolitan widening of one's circle of appreciation and belonging she seems to want kids to experience. Reading old material teaches you that there actually are common elements to all human experience. Even old white guys from hundreds of years ago had the same hopes, fears, desires, and bodily experiences you have. We're not so different from each other, let alone fully defined by our skin color and century of origin to the point that alien cultures can never have any hope of appreciating and empathizing with each other. Les Miserables is about inequality, poverty, abuses of law enforcement, overcoming modest beginnings to achieve great things, giving back to the less fortunate. How the fuck are these not relevant modern topics you'd want children to read about? Let them know these are not new concerns and even old white men might be more progressive and empathetic than you assume based purely on their age and skin color.

This is an absurd dismissal.

Little by little it feels as though some sanity is creeping back into the world.

It's too bad because I think these institutions do a lot of high quality work, but it seems to me that they pretty regularly do this kind of thing. Perhaps this is a universal flaw of all publications, but there have been efforts to criticize this in specific instances[1] which seem to have little impact and generate little reflection and it's a shame.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157181127/nyt-letter-trans

There's never been a time when kids didn't demand things that are "relevant" to them. Soul on Ice and The Teachings of Don Juan certainly seemed more relevant than Macbeth 50 years ago.

The fact is, they're not capable of deciding that. That's why they're in school. The teacher's job, which this person refuses to do, is to make the classics relevant.

If you're one of the people repeating the facile, shallow, and dumb cliche that "the older generation has always been critical of the younger generation" then you are, ironically, part of the problem. You have no insights that younger people value, so of course they're going to ignore you.

Gazing into a mirror is not generally a recipe for the growth we want in students.

Kids are strongly influenced by the people around them, especially authority figures. I wonder how much her own views about long books written by old white men shape the views of her students.

Yikes! Homer and Dostoevsky were both (presumably) white men so they obviously have the exact same experiences. Diversity is more than skin color or genitalia- what a shallow take.

I haven’t read Horowitch’s piece, but the section where the author realizes “I am the problem” appears compelling, where her experience as an educator no longer fits the mold of story in flight.

I’ll be following this thread specifically for feedback from people who “value reading enough” to asses the Atlantic piece as well.

And yet she seems resigned to students maintaining “dialects” that make it difficult to talk to grandparents, and impossible to read the “old white men,” while she cites the phone as a reason:

> Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects.

This is ridiculous. Is the book less important, less valuable, because of who wrote it? Did the Odyssey last so long because it has little value. It was a “very old” book even in the 1500s.

This essay reads like someone who argues with the teacher about the value of algebra. And speaking of math, most mathematical concepts are “very old” as well — doesn’t make them less valuable.

Who wrote something is less important than what it says. Sounds to me like this essay writer is still young enough to think they know everything.

I'm sorry, but if gen Z isn't interested in the Parisian sewer system from 1830, then I think there is little hope for them. I remember being told to read the abridged version of Les Miserables so you wouldn't need to hear Hugo ramble about Waterloo, sewers, and fertilizer, but I just thought "can I read just the parts taken out of the abridged version?"

I found two of these three books on Lexile Hub and it looks like they are written at the level of Nancy Drew (Zoboi) and Harry Potter (Beah). So maybe they do like them better because they are much easier.

I'm a little skeptical of the claim these books "reflect their lives and experiences" because they are about three different demographics, so at most, only one of the books could be speaking to the experiences of any given student. And frankly, I hated these kinds of books in school. Dickens and Vonnegut was the fun stuff. But at any rate, the traditional point of an education was not exactly relevancy, it was 1) to seem the commonalities of human nature even in very different circumstances and 2) to teach the texts that create a common culture.

In a move as cliché as blaming standardized testing, Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. It seems too easy of a target to take seriously in the context of a major American journal like The Atlantic, but here we are.

But she then she admits it is true:

Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school.

Creating space for the joy and curiosity of reading is important work that high school teachers step up to every day, designing lessons to teach what once came naturally. Previous generations turned to reading as a leisure activity, so they had an innate sense for how to read in school and how to read sneakily under the covers way past bedtime.

To summarize: Students are no longer reading for fun, they are using more casual language on social media, so instead of teaching kids challenging texts in school they have to focus on simply being able to read anything.

A lot of this comes down to this teacher not believing that traditional Anglo-American civilization, or more broadly the Latin Christendom civilization, is worth teaching and preserving:

From a similarly stodgy perspective, Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.

My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. ... As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate students’ identities.

It used to be the point of a public education was to "melt" all the immigrant communities into one American identity. That meant enforcing a standard dialect. (And the same thing happened in many other countries, such as France). It is notable that the teacher no longer thinks this is a good thing.

This really is a basic difference in values. It has been said about public policy, "We all want the same thing, we just have different ideas about how to get there." But in this case, we simply do not want all the same thing and there is no getting around that.

This is the change that has left a reader like me stranded on an alien shore. I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read. It never occurred to me that any book would be about someone like me and I never sought it out. Ironically this change means it is hard for me to relate to modern readers which is something I do sometimes hope to do.

Relevant gripes:

>> These are all points I made in speaking to and emailing with Horowitch and her fact checkers throughout the summer. [...] Perhaps the most disappointing defeat I observed in the final article was that although I shared my observations of the tireless work of colleagues at the state and national level advocating for intellectual freedom, Horowitch does not acknowledge that culturally, we do not value reading. We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers. We pay lip service to the importance of literacy, requiring four years of English and regularly testing literacy skills, but when push comes to shove, we don’t make space for the curiosity and joy that are the foundations of lifelong literacy habits. In truth, we seem to be doggedly fighting against the best interest of a literate populace.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terr...

As far as the Atlantic's take on the limits of acceptable literature at the high school level, it's not hard to understand if one can accept that their ideological grandfather was Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). His idea that 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' leads to the conclustion that, in an authoritarian state, education would be a continuation of the state’s political ideology. and the fundamental rationale of education would be to serve the state’s objectives. Thus, the Atlantic supports teaching a version of history, politics, and culture that aims to create loyalty to the state and its leadership as the primary goal of high school level education. From this viewpoint, 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' by James Loewen is heretical blasphemy.

The alternative to rigid indoctination of students is to present them with multiple works with differing viewpoints and have them debate them on the merits - e.g. have them read Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' as well as Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' and let them come to their own conclusions. Also, stop excluding fantasy and science fiction literature from the academic curriculum! The Three-Body Problem is highly suitable for a high school literature course, for example.

The challenge in today's environment is convincing people in elite institutions that liberal authoritarian ideology and censorship - e.g. banning Conrad because they see him as an old white racist - is as much of a threat to a free and open society as conservative authoritarian ideology is.