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Politician Wants Sci-fi To Be Mandatory In School
Avantare writes "The first sci-fi novel I read was A Wrinkle in Time; the next was Dune. Why don't more people read these extraordinarily imaginative books? Delegate Ray Canterbury, who represents Greenbrier County in southern WV, wants to help with that. Canterbury introduced House Bill 2983, which reads, 'To stimulate interest in math and science among students in the public schools of this state, the State Board of Education shall prescribe minimum standards by which samples of grade-appropriate science fiction literature are integrated into the curriculum of existing reading, literature or other required courses for middle school and high school students.' For decades, walking around with a paperback sci-fi novel in your back pocket at school was the quickest way to find yourself permanently excluded from the cool-kid clique. But what if it wasn't just the geeks who read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke? What if science fiction was mandatory reading for all students?"
Creationism?
When I went to school (I'm 46), "Wrinkle in Time" was on the curriculum.
While I think this is actually a good idea, I don't think that mandating curriclum from the statehouse is a good thing.
It's all moot though... anything that promotes imagination is never going to make it out of a committee anyway.
Sorry, this is a ridiculous idea - quality literature should indeed be mandatory for educational curriculum, but specifically highlighting a particular genre is arrogant.
I'm not in favor of legislative mandates for any kinds of curriculum. That said, I do agree with Canterbury's position that science fiction needs to be included in the types of literature covered in school. That the various education boards have overlooked the mainstream SiFi authors like Clarke and Asimov is a symptom of a deeper failure in their processes.
Personally, I'd throw in a little Lovecraft. Just so more people will get my Cthulhu references.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hes a West Virginia state legislator
There was a post here recently from a teacher who was looking for inspiring SF books to give his students as a summer project.
As a result, I discovered "The Martian", (it's on Amazon for a buck), which, with expletives removed, would be perfect for young kids.
This old kid enjoyed it "as is".
So, how hard would it be to encourage publishers to adapt SciFi classics for the younger audience?
My eldest son is reading it (he's 12) and it's a good start!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
The first sci-fi novel I read was A Wrinkle in Time; the next was Dune. Why don't more people read these extraordinarily imaginative books?
They are waiting for the movie to come out
Drop teach the test / College prep for all as well That is eating up a lot of time.
schools also need more recess time (kids are getting to fat no days) also poor fatty school food can be part of that.
Sci-fi is nice but an trades track in HS is needed as well.
I think what you read in school only matters if you also read at home. (I mean besides your homework).
Pupils should imho read a book per month or week even. Ofc a brought range of genres would be prefered. But some people simply can't stand Sci-Fi (likewise I can not stand that SF is mixed up with fantasy in the book stores shelfs).
Perhaps pointing out some SF stories that are not to 'wiered' to such students would help (Not everyone is into Phillip K. Dick e.g.)
I for my part e.g. would perhaps let a 12 - 14 year old read Enders Game.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And though Science Fiction is usually combined with Fantasy, there is a rather BIG difference...
Science Fiction (at least GOOD science fiction) tries to stick with only one violation of physics (frequently the speed of light, other times just that something is easy to do - such as neural implants). Each additional violation weakens the "science" into fantasy. Good Science Fiction focuses on the characters, and the physics violations are only a transport to get to a situation.
Fantasy, on the other hand, allows all kinds of physics violations - at the whim of the author when they can't figure out how to resolve a situation - POOF, a miracle (some god or other magical being/device) fixes/saves the character. Good fantasy doesn't even focus on the magical issues - they focus on the characters. Unfortunately, many fantasy authors cannot keep their "magic" coherent (and I include JK Rowling in this group - fortunately, the focus on characters greatly exceeds the magic.. most of the time).
wrinkle and dune, very little sci in that fi. they're mostly philosophy expressed with fantasy
How about politicians focus on the bottom layers of Maslow's Hierarchy (e.g. safety, security, etc.) and let educators worry about the mid- and upper tiers. Why do politicians think they can meddle with any part of our society?
Every student entering 6th grade should read "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card and "A Wrinkle In Time."
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Most people don't read science fiction because it's beyond crap. I love science but that's not the way to go for the kids. UNLESS the books are the first three in the Hitchhiker's Guide series. Everything is else is rubbish, albeit mostly harmless.
There's usually a sliding ground between them - if you look at books like the Dragonriders of Pern you have a wide spectra.
It's also possible to look at Science Fiction from the perspective of trying an idea - which Heinlein was doing a lot - take an idea and write a story around it. Not all ideas are realistic, but it can still be a seed for a nice story.
There are also the dystopian stories like Nineteen Eighty-Four, THX 1138 and Kallocain.
Add to it the movie and TV series Max Headroom, which really is interesting since it looks much like the future we are heading to. "This is Edison Carter, Live and Direct...".
Science Fiction is a great package for "Thinking outside the box" stories.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There's nothing sinister here. You can question the literal material he's suggesting but I don't think there's any question that this is from the heart. He's encouraging something that won't cost anything and that might perhaps get kids to see the world in a different perspective.
The guy represents West Virginia. It is a part of the US in need of dreams.
Personally... I say why not. It can't hurt can it? And it isn't as if there aren't other books they read which are of roughly the same caliber... or less for that matter. I remember reading some absolutely terrible books in school. Any classic book... even a science fiction classic is likely to be better then some of the ALTERNATE options which are frequently not read at all outside of captive classrooms.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
... make it part of the English lit. curriculum. All of the "classics" were popular literature in their time. Shakespeare was extremely popular in the USA in the 19th century. Now, though, few read the classics for pleasure. I think that's partly because in high school most are taught to hate them.
In my experience, requiring certain books to be read is the quickest way to make people hate them. Or was it just that all of (Dutch) "literature" I was forced to read actually is bloody awful?
Or H.G. Wells, Jules Verne.
Asimov was a good storyteller with a fine imagination, but I wouldn't call him a great writer of fiction. There's a "need to meet Astounding's submission deadline" aspect to his work.
If you want to kill a kid's joy in something, make it a school assignment. If you want to make absolutely sure, make them write a paper on it. For extra credit, give them a reading assignment they absolutely do not have the background to understand (e.g. Slaughterhouse 5 before they've even heard about WWII).
Let's let the schools continue to ruin horrid bits of literature, like Willa Cather and Herman Melville. Leave the SF to people who like reading.
But is their not some requirement that all books that teachers can make you read in English class have to be incredibly boring? That is the only way that any of the assigned reading I got would make any sense.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
My high-school actually had Science Fiction as an English credit. Favorite English credit ever.
That which is not dead may eternal lie,and in strange aeons even death may die
Oh yeah, many already make fantasy mandatory. Sorry.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I spent my youth reading everything sci-fi I could find (and there wasn't nearly as much as there is now). I wanted to be an astronaut so I took flying lessons (all astronauts were pilots back then) but my eyes were not good enough (late nights reading sci-fi?) but I ended up working at NASA and still love reading sci-fi. I tried to get my daughter interested in sci-fi but she is more into adventure. Oh well, each to their own. She did go to a very good school and Farentheit 451, 1984, and Flowers for Algernon were on her reading list.
And you forget Huxley's "Brave New World". That's a classic!
First, I think we've had enough of legislators getting into curricula. Students already spend at least a third of their time prepping for standardized tests. Common Core curricular guidelines are demanding that 70% of English class readings be devoted to nonfiction, specifying things like menus and instruction manuals. Teachers already teach a lot of science fiction. And I'm going to say this as a fan of SF who knows about the "wide range" people are already trotting out: many teachers teach SF/Fantasy for two reasons: one, their own educations did not prepare them to understand, say, Shakespeare or stuff like poetry, and, two, they can't or don't want to take the effort to make that stuff interesting to students. I have actual data I've collected on poetry instruction; almost all teachers I consulted said these three things: they don't teach poetry, they don't read poetry, they don't understand poetry. I'm not saying that poetry is what we need but that this indicative of a problem of effort and education, as well as a system that is based on credentialing teachers based on education courses and not causes in the subject they will teach. It's "worse" at the college level; students can often get thru college lit reqs without ever touching anything more than SF or Fantasy, and often it's not even "high brow" SF/Fantasy but stuff on the order of Orson Scott Card or Harry Potter. I think we would be better served to place some actual intellectual demands on all our future citizens and do our best to give everyone the intellectual tools necessary to enjoy some more difficult reading. No one will like everything, but that's no reason to race toward an "ow my balls!" curriculum designed by President Camacho.
The first Sci-Fi novel I read was A Wrinkle In Time in the 6th grade. The very next book I read was Heinlien's "A Stranger In a Strange Land". I spent the next 30 years trying to build my very own cult/commune. My lack of any magical abilities whatsoever has made this endeavor less than successful. Perhaps we shouldn't make it mandatory that our children go down the same road. Just sayin'.
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I have moved several times and the schools seems all seem to have "The Veldt", "1984", and "Brave New World" as part of the curriculum. It is not that there is SF in the curriculum, but rather is there relevant SF in the curriculum. The titles above good but dated, the best SF makes you think about the world that you are in and what the futures could be, the titles above starting point is too far in the past. I have trouble recommending title because the best I can immediately think of have too much sex and drugs in them for the schools systems (e.g. William Gibson).
Unfortunately, most public schools pay the absolute minimum they can get away with.
My son's public school pays teachers an average of $79,787. Last year a teacher retired, and they received over 400 qualified applications before they even advertized the job vacancy. Local charter schools, which can pay market rates, have average teacher salaries below $50k, yet achieve slightly better results.
If you live in California, you can see how much your school district pays by clicking this link.
Isn't there a way to promote them without mandating them?
My school had a lot of mandatory Shakespeare in 8-12th grades, 2+ plays a year and guess what? I always loved reading and yet absolutely detest and despise anything by him or any of the authors that was mandated as I associate it with a tedious chore and avoided anything by them ever since.
Idk if it's the case for everyone, but I always sought out what was interesting to me, it didn't have to be mandated. The trick isn't to ram it down the throat so the student has no choice but swallow but to provide a taste of it. You're never going to make students uninterested in science interested through brute force.
Science class should show some Carl Sagan's videos (and Brian Cox I find interesting too) to light up the imagination but another idea I think could be interesting is that science books, in between chapters, could print some short stories by these luminaries. Don't make it mandatory reading, but just have it there. A lot of people read to read, and having it right there in the text book could reach a lot of kids. If they like it, they will seek the author out on their own and branch out on their own.
1984 was required reading for us. I think it was up to the individual teacher or schools.
I also read Ender's Game in school. It was picked by me, but approved by the teacher.
Since this course is to develop the imagination and explore possibilities for the students, why not implement it as the first national curriculum MOOC? It would seem appropriate that a Sci-Fi curriculum would embrace new technologies and explore a newer forms of education.
While I like science fiction, I don't like this law:
1. Onerous, cluttersome. The United States has too many laws. Do politicians feel insignificant if they don't make them? Maybe they need to adopt the mindset of good programmers and take pleasure in refactoring the legal code down to a smaller, more elegant set.
2. Counterproductive. As said by others, making people read something has no guarantee of making them like it. In fact, they'll like it less. If he were really clever, he would outlaw science fiction. Then teens would want to read it.
3. Defiling. Art does not exist to advance the industrial usefulness of its citizens. It cheapens a culture if art is appreciated for things like like better factories, cars, and drugs. Hey, this does sound like 1984!
My younger sister was assigned to read Fahrenheit 451 for one of her classes. I read through it because I had never been assigned it and was curious about the storyline. Personally, I thought it sucked compared to many of the more advanced Sci-Fi stories exploring the human condition that I was reading at the time.
She had to write a report on the meaning of the book. I pointed out to her that the writer's forward actually said that he wrote the book because he was tired of his editors screwing with his book manuscripts and deliberately or accidentally changing the meaning of his books. So she wrote her report and got a poor grade because it wasn't what the teacher either expected or believed, despite the fact that it was there in black and white for all to see.
Most teachers interpret Fahrenheit 451 as being about deliberate censorship. Bradbury, a few years before he died, interpreted his own work to reflect a society where there is more interest in entertainment and less and less interest in reading, so books get condensed to the point where the meaning is lost and society grows to despise books.
http://www.laweekly.com/2007-05-31/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/
The point is that English departments have been interpreting books for years and have taught their "official" interpretation to students with no flexibility for students to come up with their own unique meaning. In my opinion, it's this institutional method to reading that makes it a chore. What makes reading fun is the ability to approach the material on your own and develop your own interpretations. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen because it makes it harder to grade...
One big potential problem is that in the US at least, sci-fi now means horror, ghost hunting, dungeons and dragons and stupid reality shows.
The surest way to turn kids off of science fiction is to make reading it mandatory in school.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
For all of those that think this is a good idea, there will be a number of schools requiring Ayn Rand... /shudder/
I think you stopped reading as soon as you hit the "because"
;)
"Stalemate" is the right word, he's making a pun on the similarity of the misspelling to the name of a certain rather well-known bearded man.
I didn't discover Heinlein until I was in my mid 20's (I'm 42 now). I wish I was exposed to his juvenile works when I was young...
This politician's point isn't about making children read his favorite books because they're his favorites. He wants children and teenagers to read Science Fiction because it makes science and math interesting, which in turn, turns more of our youth to those fields of study. I seldom agree with politicians, but this guy is absolutely right-- if we want to improve ourselves as a species, we need to get our youth interested in these subjects. Getting them to read Science Fiction is one good approach.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
>Look where 1984 as required reading got us. If they make the kids read Lovecraft, I fear what the next generation of politicians will be like.
Good joke...or should I say that would be bad?
That sounds like a highly unusual situation. Most public schools pay jack squat.
That being said, there are a couple of things to consider:
First off, you may live in an area with a high consumer price index. I'm sure people can get by just fine on $80k, but it may not be as much as it sounds like to someone from, say, the midwest (my understanding is that most of California is this way, but feel free to link your actual county if you want to prove me wrong about your specific situation). Most likely the teachers at your charter school are underpaid and not living particularly comfortably.
With respect to your charter schools getting slightly better results, it's important to consider the fact that it's generally more affluent families that can afford to pay extra to send their children to a non-public school. Affluent parents tend to have more free time to spend with their children, and can afford to be more involved in their kids' lives, which means they can push them to study, do their homework, etc. On average, kids at public schools have parents who make less money, and are more likely to be raised by single parents. Blaming the difference in performance between public and private schools on public school teachers is problematic unless you're also correcting for socioeconomic factors.
No, the literacy standards are intended to increase the amount of nonfiction by adding additional reading in non-English classes. The standards are not intended to reduce the amount of fiction at all, and if that's happening, you're doing it wrong.
The reality, though, is that technical texts are inherently uninteresting. I spend 40 hours a day writing technical texts, and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone unless you need to understand that particular subject. There's no such thing as a general-interest technical text that would be useful, accessible, and interesting to an average high school student, because different students have different interests and technical backgrounds. Technical texts really have no place in a high school curriculum except as part of a technical class. High school students should read technical texts in computer classes. They should read them in woodworking classes. They should read them in science classes. They should not read them in English classes.
The purpose of English classes is to teach the English language. Technical texts do not do that. Except for subject-specific terminology, we write at about a third-grade reading level. The sentence structure is fairly rigid, the word choice is very basic, and the sentences are kept very short. We use bullet points to simplify parsing of anything longer than about ten words. In short, technical texts are designed around precision and concision, which is to say that they use as little English as humanly possible while still conveying the point. Therefore, using such material in an English class would actively harm students' vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, etc. because all those things pretty much go out the window in a technical text, in favor of absolute simplicity.
And students really are fairly well prepared for reading technical texts. Reading the texts, assuming they are written properly, is remarkably easy. What students lack is the vocabulary in any specific discipline. However, they can't usefully get that in high school because high school is not a specialized, single-career-track program. That's what college is for. Having all the students in an English class read some technical report about bird habitats or whatever isn't particularly useful to them in a career unless they plan to go into an environmental studies field. Having them all read a computer programming book isn't useful unless they plan to go into programming. The notion that high school can somehow prepare students for the technical parts of a college curriculum is prima facie absurd.
What high school can and should do is require students to write more. Requiring research papers in science and history classes is a great way to do this. It teaches students how to read technical texts for comprehension, but allows students the flexibility to choose a subject that interests them. It forces students to write, so even though the texts they are reading don't really improve their vocabulary (except in a subject-specific area), it encourages them to use their vocabulary while writing, which inherently strengthens it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
it's important to consider the fact that it's generally more affluent families that can afford to pay extra to send their children to a non-public school.
1. You are wrong. According to Wikipedia (which provides many more citations): Early critics feared that charter schools would lure the highest performing and most gifted students from centrally administered public schools. Instead, charter schools have tended to attract low income, minority, and low performing students.
2. You don't seem to have a good grip on what a "charter school" is. Charter schools are free public schools, paid for by the taxpayers, so there is no "affordability" issue.
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Or Beer, as in Heinlein's example in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". Understanding that would be a great thing for every kid to learn. I'm surprised by how many otherwise intelligent adults appear tongue-tied after rallying for some new subsidy when you just ask the simple question 'Fine, what will you cut to cover the cost?'
My brain nearly imploded once when a college educated friend said 'We should subsidize solar panels on houses' and I replied 'Groovy - So what would you cut?', and they said 'Nothing - Just print more money'
First, straight up, Dune is in my opinion the greatest book ever written. Every man, woman, and child on earth should read it. We should conquer other planets if only for the expressed purpose of forcing their inhabitants to read it (after that, we should just leave them alone in peace, you know?). We should spend decades working on technology that will teach trout and other sea creatures to read JUST SO they can bask in the glory that is Dune.
That said (and kidding aside), even though every student should read it, these kinds of mandates never really work. People won't see how great Sci Fi is unless they read it voluntarily. They might read it, but I don't know if they'd enjoy it.
Yours is one of the better criticisms of Common Core that I've read. I'll just add that in addition to the English curriculum being weak and misguided, the math curriculum is the same. Instead of aiming for calculus, C.C. drifts into statistics. While there is some value in statistics, it seems like something a bureaucrat values. Calculus is important to technology, which makes it important to our future.
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There's value to your suggestion of making reading the Bible mandatory. I can't think of a more effective method of making children hate Christianity.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was on an optional reading list in high school. Clemens remains good reading today.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Apparently I had the wrong idea about what a charter school is. I retract what I said earlier.
Yes let the kids choose for themselves, and don't bitch when they all end up majoring in vampire studies.
It would be drawing a long bow to insist that all students read sci-fi, but there is an alternative. At Murdoch University, in Perth (WA, Australia) all first-year students are required to take a foundation unit in first-year to get their study skills up to scratch. One of these (by far the most popular) is called "Life and the Universe" and explores a range of science-related themes with a pretty good selection of sci-fi texts.
By comparison with the rest of my undergrad degree (BSc Biotechnology) it was pretty fluffy, but it served its purpose well, and the reading list was broad and fun.
It was a very long time ago when I did this, but the course is still running. Now, obviously I'm not saying everybody should migrate to Western Australia (I, myself have migrated away) but a course of this nature provides both a taste of sci-fi from a range of authors and also a useful underpinning for later studies.
The MBAs running companies don't want to pay STEM workers more. They see them as mere mechanics who should be happy to have a job.
Public school teacher salaries vary wildly from state to state and district to district. In some states, they do quite decently or better, in other states they're paid worse than waiters. There's a lot of recruiting that goes on for schoolteachers, with the poor-paying states ending up not getting any decent teachers because they all leave the state for places like what you describe.
Why would I bitch : fewer little sprogs threatening to try to do my job for lower day-rates. Let them take vampire studies.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Science Fiction gives carte blanche to the writer to invent any utopian vision he likes. To invent a dream land with little relation to reality, to act out his political fantasy. with little regard to human or alien nature, history, or physics. So, all constraints are off. Gulliver's Travelers would be called Sci Fi by today's standards even though it was political allogory by the standards of the 18th Century. I'm not surprised that a politician would want to make dream land mandatory reading, since most of them are in dream land anyway, not that it is an awful idea, actually, but next we will make Ayn Rand mandatory and teach her as fact, which she isn't. I'm sure there has been plenty of criticism of her where she has gone off the rails, and much of that has to do with fantasy vs. reality.
We already have Sci-Fi works on the supplementary lectures list for Junior High School students in Poland - Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad" and "Mortal Engines" (polish: Bajki Robotów). Some years ago other books by Lem were on the supplementary lectures list for the last classes of primary schools - "Tales of Pirx the pilot" and "Solaris".
He wants children and teenagers to read Science Fiction because it makes science and math interesting, which in turn, turns more of our youth to those fields of study.
But if we do that, children might start using their imagination.
They may even start having ideas of their own.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
*shrugs* I work in high tech, and although I know calculus, I can't say I've used it... well, ever, at least not since I took the class. Calculus is certainly important in certain narrow fields relating to materials science, aerospace, etc., but it doesn't have a lot of practical use as a general tool. (Quick, when's the last time you needed to calculate the area under a curve?)
On the other hand, I use statistics frequently as a fundamental part of my understanding of the world around me. Every day, I curse the public's lack of understanding of basic statistics. When people panic in fear of relatively rare events while doing nothing to prevent common problems that kill people on a daily basis, I grow concerned. When products get banned because of a couple of deaths over several years, while the news media decries those products as death traps even though more people die annually from drinking too much water, I grow concerned. And so on.
What I'd like to see is less time spent on basic math during the first few years. When you really get right down to it, we have calculators and computers for that. Being able to successfully add, subtract, multiply, and divide four-digit numbers is no longer a particularly useful skill. Instead, we should spend only a year or two explaining all of the basic concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions sufficiently for kids to understand what's happening at a crude level, then move on to more useful, high-level math like algebra, statistics, geometry, calculus, etc. By wasting so much time on the tedious basics (which half of them will never use again once they get their hands on their first calculator), kids get turned off to mathematics before they even get into the good stuff. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division simply cannot ever be anything but drudgery. Statistics, on the other hand, is actually moderately enjoyable. Can you imagine how much more fun it would be if the Skittle color statistic stuff was taught in first or second grade instead of high school? And once you're teaching statistics in elementary school, then moving on to teach trig in 8th grade and calculus in 9th grade is a no-brainer.
Then again, I'm of the opinion that by first grade, every student should be exposed to abstract concepts like variables, whether in programming classes or in algebra. (And yes, I learned to program on my own at that age with a series of training tapes. Most kids can, honestly.) Abstract thought, like language skills, is something that must be learned while the brain is still forming. By high school, it's too late to pick up those skills, and if you don't have them, you'll barely make it through algebra. Many people never do, and IMO this is at least in part caused by teachers spending all of the critical first two years of education teaching kids to color the horse black or brown, teaching them how to count coins, and other relatively concrete concepts instead of exposing them to things like music, computer programming, abstract mathematics, and other tasks that require higher-order thought.
This is not to say that you should really teach statistics, algebra, trig, and calculus to first graders; they're not really ready to fully grasp the concepts yet. Instead, you should expose them to the concepts early and often, presenting the same concepts with varying levels of complexity and in different ways, knowing that they'll pick up more and more of those abstract concepts as they get older. The important part is to lay the groundwork. In much the same way, kids can pick up the tedious grunt work like addition and subtraction a little bit at a time, spread over the course of their entire K-12 career instead of having it all shoveled in at the front.
Of course, such an approach pretty much requires throwing away the book on how teaching is done. You can't evaluate kids on their skills if your primary goal is laying the groundwork for those skills rather than teaching them entirely. You have
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Expecting people to read? In US state schools?
--
That is the dumbest thing I've heard since breakfast, which puts it in with some stiff competition.
Silas Marner!
I think there are a number of science fiction novels that would be beneficial for high school students to read, but that's true of other times of literature as well. The problem is the minute some politician makes a law that says students must read/study such and thus in school for whatever reason, education is defined by politicians instead of educators. Education isn't a mystery and the only thing that really needs to be retooled is to make the emphasis of the educational system on giving students skill sets that they need to function in the modern job market, not to indoctrinate them in the latest social beliefs and priorities.
I recall reading Animal Farm, 1984, and Brave New World all in the same year as curriculum. I think it was Grade 9.
Did A Wrinkle in Time and Dune on my own dime.
Couldn't agree more with the politician. I think I am mostly just surprised that a good idea came from a politician. He must have good staff or something.
Then again, unless they tackle the whole creationism thing down there, it's a bit of a mess. I mean trying to promote science and math by getting kids excited about science fiction on one hand and yet teaching them anti-science in creationism on the other... doesn't make a lot of sense.
He wants children and teenagers to read Science Fiction because it makes science and math interesting, which in turn, turns more of our youth to those fields of study.
But if we do that, children might start using their imagination. They may even start having ideas of their own.
The HORROR!
so that's where politics always gets it wrong, it's never about creating options is it, it's always about i say what's best for you and now it's mandatory ... ... 'old-worlders' as i call them
... listen to the ted talk on education by mister robinson overthere, you create options and you let your children claim themselves (to quote a black poet), since it is my conviction people will always advance twice as fast in area's they're interested in since it wont be a chore, and the learning wont stop after school hours
...
i got a disgust for classic 'intellectual' literature because it was shoved down my throat on a weekly basis in school. I'm still not much for the poo-ha most nobel prize literature revolves around. I read my first lord of the rings when i was about nine and i had a moment when i couldnt find any sci-fi book in the library next city that i hadnt already read.
i dont read a lot anymore and the books i still have are mostly there for touch and smell, some of them i hardly dare touch for fear they might disintegrate lol but
this 'mandatory' part is the biggest flaw in the genetic blueprint of politicians and
you're talking about teenagers, right, how come everyone forgets that? did they just go from the cradle to wearing an expensive suit and skip that part?
you don't want to tell a hormone bomb in conflict that this is mandatory 'or else...' , do you now ?
so you create options
but you need the mass to fill up the gaps you created in the labour force?
that's not my problem
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?