I don't know if this is better left for SG (feel free to move, mods) but, I was thinking the other day.

Now, I'm not saying ALL these books suck - but for some reason, the VAST majority of books on a school required reading list seem like they're designed to make kids fucking hate reading! They're incredibly boring, unimaginative, or too complex for most kids. This makes them frustrated - and they're frustration of course, turns into dislike.....a dislike for reading in general.

This upsets me, for some reason. My ma was a librarian - so of course I was bred for a love of books. It just baffles me that our schools are trying to force such uninteresting garbage down kids throats, then scratch their heads in bewilderment as they try to figure out why all of them hate reading/just read the cliff notes.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? Is this a trend other people notice, or am I out of order here?

On top of that, some teachers INSIST upon reading the book to the students out loud. Even in grade 9 I had a teacher do this. She managed to make Lord of the Flies seem monotone.


It's because they need to choose books that wont offend anyone, or anyones parents to be more specific. This means the books chosen for schools must contain no form of racy content in the least. This makes it very boring for students.

QFT. My sophomore year, we read Julius Caesar out loud. I know it's a play, but it took a fucking month, a month that I spent screaming inside while people found it difficult to prounounce even the most basic shakesperean language.

My grade twelve teacher read to us everyday... painful stuff. Although, as far as books I was forced to read for school, they were generally not too bad. Although once again my grade twelve year may be the exception.

Are you talking about any books in particular? Most have their redeeming qualities under everything else, and like said above aren't offensive.

The twin goals of all institutionalized education, from kindergarten to post-doctoral research, are indoctrination and neutralization.

Assigned reading is but one vector by which the Corporate State seeks to control not only your actions, but your very thoughts. The fact that some 'dissident' instructors may encourage freelance reading is a laughable irrelevancy as the student is typically so overburdned with assigned hogwash that z has neither time nor inclination to pursue other interests, the system makes damn sure of this, as this saturation is key to the perpetual maintenance of its strangehold on young minds worldwide.

All potentially subversive literature, with 1984 being the boiler-plate example, is quickly assimilated and defanged. Faux-debates about 'censorship' of the 'classics', meanwhile diverts attention from the books by publishers like Loompanics or Paladin, which the school library would never dream of having, and no professor would ever assign. Likewise, any 'dissenting' books offered by a State or Corporate sponsored instructor are going to be within whatever liberal confines of acceptability are in fashion at the time.

Erudition cannot come from institutionalized education, for the latter's sole aim is the successful regeneration of the status quo, ad infinitum.

Burn your textbooks.

Back in second grade I being a curious youth started looking at the astronomy books. All the universe and planets. Just science books in general. My teacher saw me picking one of those generic looking books labeled "Earth's neighbors". She promptly walked over took the book out of my hand and in front of other students told me i wasn't at the right level(smart enough) to read this book then pointed out another student and said he could read it. Never touched another book until harry potter came out, pathetic.

^^^ What a cunt. It shouldn't matter whether or not she thought you were advanced enough to read it, there was no need to take it off you and humiliate you. If i saw an eight year old trying to have a go at the medical dictionary, (like my mum did with me), then I 'd let them keep at it.


I have the sneaking suspicion that some of my English books in lower high school were written specifically to be studied by students. We never touched the 'classics' and didn't get a go at Shakespeare until the last two years. When reading those books, you couldn't shake off the feeling you were being patronized by the author.
They were all about kids or age who were all going through so called 'teen issues' like sex, sexuality and friendships - and we were meant to dissect the sensitive points. 'Cause, you know, we can relate to it an all.

Sorry authors (and whoever set the texts), if you knew anything about kids that age, then you would know they are too apathetic to really give a fuck.

It's true I think. Throughout school kids are forced to read books they don't enjoy or in many cases, even understand for themselves.

The teacher asked a student to summarize what he had read, and he couldn't. So he asked another student. Same answer. So she asked another, and gave up, writing a summary on the board. Now they knew the answers, passed the tests, but this seemed...wrong to me.

It is a very common occurrence I think. Knowing 2+2=4 does you no good if you don't know why it equals 4.

I don't know about the rest of America but here in Georgia, I know kids are made to read "Their Eyes Were Watching God." I almost killed myself. I hate that kind of shit.

Younger kids though are forced to read out of those giant lit books though, the ones that have like, Shakespeare plays, Edgar Allen Poe, the "I have eaten the plums in the icebox" poem, and mythology all in one huge book, with all the little side notes and exercises and stuff. They don't get to actually get a feel for a book for themselves. They are taught exactly what the green light at the end of Gatsby means, not how to interpret meaning. So... then they decide that literature is about fascism and hate it.

I could never really do the whole chapter or two a week thing. Either I liked the book enough that I wanted to read it and did so quickly, or I didn't like it, but wanted to get it over with and did so quickly.

This got me in trouble a couple times, apparently it messes up predetermined lesson plans but I thought getting in trouble for that was ridiculous.

Alot of the books we read in highschool did suck...
I did enjoy kafka's the metamorphosis.
We also read Fahrenheit 451 which was a good read...
I always begged my teachers to read 1984 or Catcher In The Rye but it never happened.
Had to read them on my own.
I was always in in school suspension and shit around the end of my junior year so to speak...
My 11th grade english teacher gave me the book "Heart of Darkness" to write a report over which is the book Apocalypse Now was based on... It was a pretty hard read.
I was fucking up in school around that time so yeah... Don't remember too much of the book.
I ended up taking nightschool my senior year and they were alot less strict with what we could read and so forth and my english teacher had us read some pretty damn good ones.
I wish i could remember the names of the books, LAME.

i think the US's whole approach to making kids read is completely misguided. The more the schools force books on kids the more they'll think of reading as a chore.talk about reverse psychology. I grew up believing that reading is a passtime, a break frm working and school and such..and i believe thats the only way to go

This is why I hated reading through school. We would have to read each night and review during class. One chapter a night of the books was horrible. I can kill a large book over the course of one night. Hell, I read Hocus Pocus, Bluebeard, and Fight Club while sitting in the library one day (public, not school).

What fucking irked me was that our school library wouldn't just let you check out a book you wanted to read. Certain books were deemed inappropriate for the grade level and in order to check them out, you had to petition the librarian and your english teacher to let you check it out. Lets just say I have a decent collection of books from the library at my junior high and high school that they won't see again. Fuck petitioning them, I just took them

That and my highschool english classes destroyed some good books in my opinion. The Iliad, The Odyssey, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, etc. We had to read them SLOW as fuck or we would only be allowed to read a certain section because they bought the excerpt copies.

Oh, I almost forgot, we weren't allowed to read any Orwell books in classes because they were considered unintelligent works, and they would just waste our time since the subject matter was "beyond fictional and written for the simple purpose to incite fear". (Quote from my 11th grade English teacher).

I used to spend 2-3 hours reading for pleasure my own chosen books for every 30-60 minutes reading required texts for school. I considered it my reward for putting up with the forced reading given to me.

Also, I remember reading an assigned book in high school called House on Mango Street and wanting to shoot myself after every chapter. It was like being forced to read some 12 year old emo Mexican girl's livejournal that's about a hundred pages long. I don't think I learned anything from that book except that somehow she got raped at one point and no one in our class cared or even remembered having read that part.

Well, aren't you Mr. Superior, you fucking Acolyte.

i sat there and stifled laughs as well.

Amen brother.

I will forever remember having to endure Romeo and juliet in my freshman year. I had seen it done 4 different times live, and done a report on it in second grade. I spent most of first period every day telling the teacher how to pronounce the words correctly, what they actually meant, and what had been censored or taken out of the textbooks. And pointing out all the bawdy jokes that nobody understood, and were twice as funny because of it

I read like mad in grades 2-7, practically stopped in grade 8.

Welcome to capitalist hegemonic education, emancipate yourself.

Capturing freethinking individuals ideologies is tantamount to the perseverance of the state.

Well said, intellectualism and erudition aren't necessarily limited to the narrow walls of academia!

Same for me but I think I stopped around 5th or 6th grade. I distinctly remember winning an awesome frisbee from the library for reading so much.

I actually was talking to a few Ron Paul supports asking them, what happened if you got rid of the Department of Education? How would kids learn? They gave me reasons and ways usually some type of homeschooling through their parents. But then they gave me a link talking about the education system in the US and this is what you should watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uiL4wmDbo0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDyDtYy2I0M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ

Now it seems like the education is supposed to create a uniformed dislike in reading and staying informed because, schools force you to do it. I read 1984 and Brave New World, I am grateful I did in High School. It seems important to read these types of books because their myths but myths always speak of the underlining truth to something present in the world.

So it comes to my belief that:

Dumb Down Education System + A Stimulating Entertainment Industry = Materialistic, Ignorant, and Superficial Mind

Read non-fiction books critical of society!