Is Readicide a problem in schools?
Yes. I know so many people who hate reading because of school. Schools require books/plays/other texts to be read and then students don't read outside of class because they don't like the books they read in school. My solution would not be to take out all required reading. My solution would be to take books that are more recent to our times, but with similar messages and themes of the older texts. Then you could take pieces of the older texts to reference and compare between the two. One of the most important part of reading for me is my relations with the characters, and if I can identify with anyone in the book. When I read Shakespeare, its hard for me to even read the text, must-less identify the characters. Nothing against Shakespeare of course, but why can't we read something more up-to-date?
Is literary fiction relevant to our current culture? Is it preparing students for the job market you are about to enter?
If analyzing text and finding the theme of a piece of text is going to get me anywhere in life, I'm all set. I don't know how to turn a washing machine on, but hey I can read Elizabethan text. Are skills from reading actually going to help me in the real world? Reading is important, but we are just not reading what we should be in schools. I understand The Fault in Our Stars isn't going to teach me how to work a washing machine, but it is so much easier to relate to and to understand. The world and the culture we live in today is different from the world William Shakespeare lived in.
I agree with you completely. Reading in school does not have to be just classics. We can still gain important info from reading more reccent texts. Plus we can actually understand what they are saying and relate to some of their problems.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this and these are my exact thoughs. Once we start to read in class and they are the classics, it puts me off reading entirely which i find frustrating because I love to read.
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