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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.

Maybe it not being easy to understand is the point? It is a skill to stick with hard, somewhat alien material and learn to interpret it or, more likely, give enough of a bullshit explanation to get by.

(Obviously, for Westerners, keeping in touch with the canon of one's civilization can have its own intrinsic value).

The kids who want to read Harry Potter or other YA are gonna do it anyway. That's why they're bestsellers.

Maybe it not being easy to understand is the point? It is a skill to stick with hard, somewhat alien material and learn to interpret it or, more likely, give enough of a bullshit explanation to get by.

We could also have kids decode, by hand, arbitrary sequences of words written in ROT13. The question is, is this more useful than anything else we might have those kids spend that time on?

(Obviously, for Westerners, keeping in touch with the canon of one's civilization can have its own intrinsic value).

This is indeed probably the best argument for literature, but I don't think it's compelling enough. For one thing, I think kids understand and internalize their civilization without formal instruction. It's just "in the water", as it were. But secondly, I suspect much of the Western canon is more likely to turn off any interest a kid might have had in their civilization. These works of fiction tend to be extremely difficult to make any sense of or derive any value from. Some of that is because the metaphors and allusions are completely lost on a child (or in many cases almost any modern person) or there's a reference to something contemporaneous that's long been lost to time. But, frankly, a lot of it is because the language is just sorely outdated and teachers seldom want to "sully" the work by using modern translations. For example, Shakespeare uses "a haggard" to refer to a falcon. Just fucking say "falcon"! But noooo, that's not "poetic" or "authentic" enough.

If anything, subjecting kids to this stuff and telling them this is an iconic and beautiful important part of their civilization is just going to result in kids thinking their civilization must be pretty fucking boring and unimportant. And I care too much about Western civilization to inculcate indifference to it.