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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child

I think this is a pretty weak argument. The reality is that kids just don't engage with novels and poetry at any meaningful scale. Especially not now, but, in my opinion, not really ever--most people just aren't interested in that. On the other hand, while I have no evidence at hand, I would bet that multiple millions of American children spend more time on TikTok than on any other single activity, including sleep.

Kids being demoralized by the tens of millions by reading Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers is a bridge we can cross when or if we ever come to it. TikTok is the bridge we're facing right now, thus it seems perfectly sensible to me to dicsuss TikTok and not novels.

Kids being demoralized by the tens of millions by reading Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers is a bridge we can cross when or if we ever come to it.

I find this to be supremely amusing, because in the country I grew up, this was in fact a mandatory reading in every single high school, as set by the Ministry of Education, which fixes the syllabus across the entire country.

I won't say that everyone actually reads the whole thing (I gave up halfway through, and skipped to the end to enjoy reading about how he offs himself, which was a consolation to me for suffering the first half), but the national equivalent of the SAT exam very much assumes your familiarity with this work. For example, in 2018, half a million of high schoolers were expected to read a fragment in which Werther recounts his meeting with Albert, during which he broke the first rule of gun safety (by putting it against his own head), and, based on this, and your knowledge of relations between Werther and Albert, write an essay describing potential causes of lack of mutual understanding between people.

Thanks for reminding me about it -- now, half a life later, I actually I want to reread it, to see if added life experience will change my perception of the work.

mandatory reading

This isn't relegated to your country or a ministry of truth. Every student has had an educator they were convinced was going through life just to make his/her students as corrupt and miserable as said teacher was. And the students were generally correct.

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