More fucking around with education

[garbon]

See?  Otto's read his Brontë.  One of them, anyway.  They're all interchangeable.

Anne!

Anyway, Lord of the Flies? Yeah we need a book that kids will take as an encouragement to pick on others.

[Camerus]

See?  Otto's read his Brontë.  One of them, anyway.  They're all interchangeable.

Anyway, Lord of the Flies? Yeah we need a book that kids will take as an encouragement to pick on others.

If taught well, it should be doing the opposite.   

[garbon]

See?  Otto's read his Brontë.  One of them, anyway.  They're all interchangeable.

Anyway, Lord of the Flies? Yeah we need a book that kids will take as an encouragement to pick on others.

If taught well, it should be doing the opposite.   

Please. Even as a young teen the "good" characters come across as insufferable.

[Camerus]

See?  Otto's read his Brontë.  One of them, anyway.  They're all interchangeable.

Anyway, Lord of the Flies? Yeah we need a book that kids will take as an encouragement to pick on others.

If taught well, it should be doing the opposite.   

Please. Even as a young teen the "good" characters come across as insufferable.

Well, the text ought to be presented more as evidence at the harm that our destructive sides can cause, rather than a tediously moralistic good/bad character dichotomy.

[garbon]

Well, the text ought to be presented more as evidence at the harm that our destructive sides can cause, rather than a tediously moralistic good/bad character dichotomy.

Sure. That doesn't mean that such is what an individual will take away from it though. Particularly not as a child to whom the book is just an exaggerated version of the type of things that go down among children in school.

[Camerus]

Well, the text ought to be presented more as evidence at the harm that our destructive sides can cause, rather than a tediously moralistic good/bad character dichotomy.

Sure. That doesn't mean that such is what an individual will take away from it though. Particularly not as a child to whom the book is just an exaggerated version of the type of things that go down among children in school.

The problem with that argument is that, if we want to ensure that all texts have a clear and unambiguous message that every student takes away from it, then texts will mostly be super boring and didactic, or else the students don't really learn any techniques of analysis from reading the text.

Alternatively, giving students texts that have no relationship to their lives would not be terribly productive either.

Lastly, is there any evidence at all that LotF has a pernicious effect either on bullies / the bullied?

[garbon]

I don't really think it does. Point was is that I thought it was a pretty shitty thing for us to read.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I consider in all truth, one of the great blights of the modern era is how "simply literate" we are. The vast majority of Americans have been literate for a long time (even in the 19th century we had alarmingly high literacy rates.) Most countries of consequences have literacy rates in the high 90s or higher. But we are "simply literate", very few Americans write with the fullness of the language, and very few Americans exist who want to read such writing and who can understand such writing.

Take any extremely popular novel published today, or even simple opinion pieces in the newspaper and while sometimes the author might be capable of a more full-throated prose the reader is not desirous of it. Many of the "simply literate", people who may even read as a hobby, assume that in the past speech patterns were different as were things like word usage, slang and etc, but that more or less we're as sophisticated in literate as any who came before. That simply is not the truth. Yes, go back far enough and random scribblings like the Canterbury Tales are barely better than peasant folk tales, but compared to writing of the 18th and 19th century our current prose is simply childish. I can literally show you children's books from the 18th century that are written with more literary weight than some of the most "serious" fiction today.

It isn't just a vast vocabulary, but that's definitely part of it--because master craftsmen in the written word do not shy from the unused words, but embrace them, but it's also the way writers link to various cultural references that are understood to be timeless and simply part of any educated person's realm of understanding. Not pop cultural references, but references of a classical nature to timeless knowledge. Knowledge that, at least among the truly educated, really is timeless.

Here's a paragraph from the 1860 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, this was not some great work of literature with the author deliberately trying to sound heavy with prose. This was an article penned by the editor coming out in support of a political candidate. So compare that with a like article in even the most sophisticated American paper today and weep for our weak, childish prose:

While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new Timoleon in Sicily,—while we have been reckoning, with an interest scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we became a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good or evil that will follow from the popular decision in November, we might be tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus far characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to the duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid unconsciousness of the result which may depend upon its exercise in this particular election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly from the general persuasion that the success of the Republican party was a foregone conclusion.

[garbon]

So they were verbose back then...

[Ideologue]

Ide needs those kids to eventually create a cure for that case of super diabetes that he is gonna get.

With these new automated checkers, I don't even need liberal arts majors to ring up my Reese's cups at the store, man.

Lol "new Timoleon."  Did anyone ever call Eisenhower the new Rollo?  They happened to operate in the same general geographical area, so the comparison must be apt.

Anyway, I, a philistine?  I read books from France.

[Camerus]

I do bemoan the loss of classical allusions etc. in everyday works of educated writing, but I don't see why the prose in Otto's example should be something we should aspire to. Paragraph-long sentences?  Yeah, no thanks.

[Razgovory]

So they were verbose back then...

I've never cared much for the flowery prose of the 18th and 19th century.  I think it's a hold over from when literacy wasn't common and people who were literate liked to show off.  I don't see the less verbose style as a dumbing down of language as much as getting to the point quicker.

[dps]

I do bemoan the loss of classical allusions etc. in everyday works of educated writing, but I don't see why the prose in Otto's example should be something we should aspire to. Paragraph-long sentences?  Yeah, no thanks.

I agree, and would point out that Otto is missing the fact that people who wrote magazine articles back then tended to get paid by the word.

[Admiral Yi]

It looks like they got paid by the syllable.

[Martinus]

What's more deplorable, with the continuing switch from printed to electronic media (including e-books), soon we will reach a point when a good sun storm will wipe out the entire cultural product of several decades.