[quote]zecarlo wrote:
[quote]groo wrote:
[quote]therajraj wrote:
[quote]zecarlo wrote:
So it’s not that women are the problem. It’s the lack of men that’s the problem. [/quote]
I’d say it’s both. Women are great at handling their own sex, but terrible at handling males.
[quote]zecarlo wrote:
My daughter is reading The Hunger Games. I asked her where she got it from and she said her teacher gave it to her to read. I know of a teacher that assigned Twilight to her kids. WTF? What happened to Mark Twain? Homer? So what happens is at home I have to force my kid to read stuff that isn’t crap. [/quote]
That’s pretty crazy. The books I was assigned in high school English classes were Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, the Hobbit, Black Robe (Canadian book).
[/quote]
Speaking from the perspective of someone who was an English major and who has read the Hunger Games because his daughter insisted it was good…its really not that bad. Its certainly written as well as the Hobbit and I’d argue the Lord of the Flies. She’s in AP English and its more rigorous than what you claim in that at her tested level she has to read “serious” works of fiction or nonfiction to get any reading credit. She reads less and sticks to the nonfiction as she finds many of the “Great Books” tedious and while I find value in works like Ulysses many great books are often a chore and reading needn’t be a chore. Sometimes its about telling a story and doing it well and there’s really not that many plots. If Suzanne Collins can get millions of kids reading anything there’s nothing wrong with that.
And often really great modern writers tend to get ignored to some idea that older fiction is better. And dangerous fiction often can’t be taught because it gets someone’s panties in bunch.
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That’s the problem: things need to be fun and interesting at the moment. That isn’t life. Some things you need to know. Some tasks need to get done no matter how tedious you find them. Sometimes the payoff comes later. Homer is essential to understanding Western Lit. It’s just the way it is. No one can claim a fundamental understanding of Western Lit if he hasn’t read Homer just as no one can claim an understanding of American Lit without Melville and Twain. There is also a difference between contemporary writers and modern writers. It could easily be argued that Cervantes and Shakespeare were modern writers. It could even be argued that modern writing started with pre-Renaissance humanism.
The funny thing is that all of this old and outdated and boring hard to read literature is still used as source material for contemporary writers and film makers. Troy came out not that long ago. There was an Odyssey miniseries in the 90s. A horrible retelling of Beowulf. Shakespeare’s plays are adapted to modern settings or performed as is. The Coen brothers based a film on The Odyssey. This stuff isn’t going anywhere so kids better learn to appreciate, or at least tolerate it, because some things are just the way it is and it’s always been like that. But we are talking about a generation that has been brought up to believe they are special and unique individuals whose every thought, desire and word needs to be expressed and then validated and for whom parents, and by logical extension all adults, are supposed to be their best friends and peers. We are the generation that blinked. [/quote]
Late to this thread and only on the first page but I wanted to say that this is bang on. I am firmly in agreement with you on this thread zecarlo, my vehement disagreements with you on other matters notwithstanding 
There is another point here as well that I want to touch on–old lit, while maybe tedious and hard to read, the writing itself teaches in a way that modern literature cannot hope to equal. The very cognitive process of translating “old english I’m not sure of” to “english in today’s words” inside the brain forms the ability to process and think critically and adds to the vocabulary. Vocabulary is a fundamental building block to all human communication and old classic lit uses a variety of words that nobody will likely encounter in day-to-day life. Consequently it teaches or reinforces cognitive abilities–and especially “mental flexibility”-- that are already sorely or almost completely lacking.
EDIT–Vocabulary size has been linked directly with reading comprehension, and thus indirectly with critical thought capabilities particularly and education level as a whole. In fact there have been a number of studies (indeed whole books) on this matter. This is a primary reason that ‘old tedious hard to read literature’ is necessarily better than ‘easy to read fun modern literature’ for the purposes of education.