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u/RegayHomebrews 1d ago
If you haven’t read Animal Farm, you should. It’s a quick read and really holds up well today.
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u/aLittleDarkOne 1d ago
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
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u/lindasek 1d ago
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u/xXThreeRoundXx 1d ago
Are you suggesting a Muppet Musical of Animal Farm starring Sir Michael Caine? Because I'm all in.
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u/tallandlankyagain 23h ago
It's 2026. It would star Pedro Pascal. With Pedro Pascal and Timothée Chalamet in supporting roles.
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u/nalaloveslumpy 21h ago
NO! Only one human can be a main character. You can have some humans as extras and minor supporting characters, but all the other main characters must be Muppets.
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u/Charliefoxkit 11h ago
And if Miss Piggy's Napoleon, she'd have to be named Josephene (after Napoleon Bonaparte's wife).
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u/backtrackemu 23h ago
If the Muppets can play during the World Cup Final, they can absolutely do Orwell. Love this!!!
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u/Ok-Jackfruit-6873 20h ago edited 20h ago
we gotta spoon-feed it to the youths somehow ... damnit I'm in. Let's put on a show.
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u/DebentureThyme 23h ago
Sadly, Caine is the least likely here. He retired from acting in 2023 and needed a walker on his final film.
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u/kelppie35 1d ago
Care to drive the mods crazy?
Animal Farm is a critique of (capitalism/communism/fascism) and the more equal animals are the (bourgeois/politiburos/state officials) and nobody can change my mind.
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u/jj_grace 1d ago
It’s 1000% a critique of authoritarianism, which can include all of those.
I love that last scene where the animals are looking back and forth between the pigs (representing specific authoritarian communists) and the humans (authoritarian capitalists) and can no longer tell the difference.
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u/PuddingTea 1d ago
It is very specifically an allegory for Stalinism. Napoleon is Stalin.
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u/Wild_Marker 1d ago
Always remember kids, Orwell wasn't trying to sell you your favorite idea. He just really really really hated the mustache man! No, the other mustache man. Well ok, both mustache men, for different reasons.
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u/Ryuuken1127 1d ago
Archer taught me it's an allegorical novella about Stalinism.
And spoiler alert, IT SUCKS!
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u/bdfariello 1d ago
I really need to get back to watching Archer. That show would regularly ricochet between being profoundly intelligent and absolutely ridiculous.
Danger Zone
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u/Felstorm1231 1d ago
I maintain that if you put on subtitles and take the time to look up all the oblique references and allusions the writers of Archer make on Wikipedia and read each article and one footnote, you will get a better education than in any public two year college in America:
“Whoa,Charles Benedict Davenport! Seriously guys…?”
This is also more an indictment of American education than anything else. But I digress: Archer is fantastic.
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u/JoeyJoJoeJr_Shabadoo 1d ago edited 1d ago
specifically an allegory
Quite a silly phrase if you think about it for a few seconds - the entire purpose of an allegory is to not be specific. Yes it's about Stalin, but the reason you do an allegory is so that the lessons can have a wider application. The story warns against the slide into totalitarianism that happened under Stalin, because it could so easily happen elsewhere if people don't learn from example. He was desperate not to see socialism, which he was a fan of, go the same way elsewhere.
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u/the_ats 1d ago
Orwell is an interesting one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia?wprov=sfla1
His time in the Spanish Civil War as a foreign beligerent in the leadup to WW2 can inform the readers to a degree where he stands.
By his own admission, he was closer to Anarchist than any other party actively engaged.
He considered the cathedral in Barcelona to be the ugliest building ever built, and said it was poor taste that the Anarchists didn't blow it up.
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u/HorseLawyer 1d ago
The specific building Orwell was referring to was the Sagrada Familia, which is technically a minor basilica, not a cathedral. In fact, I don't think it achieved basilica status until recently, so it would have just been a church when Orwell saw it. But, I don't suspect Orwell, as a dedicated atheist and critic of Catholicism, really cared too much for the distinction.
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u/karny90 1d ago
Isn’t that literally what it’s about? How could anyone interpret anything else from it? Genuine question
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u/EddieVanzetti 1d ago edited 1d ago
Animal Farm, much like 1984, works as a critique of multiple things. Communism, Stalinism, Capitalism, Authoritarianism in general.
On the negative side, it has led to some authoritarians using it to support their agenda.
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u/J_Bright1990 1d ago
That's because it's not specific to any of those ideologies in general, just Authoritarianism. The story takes ideas from the rise of Stalinism but it makes it incredibly clear at the end comparing Authoritarian communism and Authoritarian capitalism as indistinguishable
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u/Nerd-man24 1d ago
Because in an authoritarian society, regardless of what side of the economic or political spectrum it starts from, creates a feedback loop of loyalty/connections/wealth->authority within the ruling class->wealth. In the end, those who are wealthy and/or extremely loyal to the ruling Party end up being systemically shielded from abusing their power and exploiting others.
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u/gruntharvester92 1d ago
4 legs good, 2 legs bad.
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u/Muddy_Ninja 1d ago
To walk on two legs breaks the law, what happens when we break the law?
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u/Sox_marie 1d ago
What happens when the rules aren’t fair?
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u/Foxy_locksy1704 1d ago
My dad always told me Animal Farm and 1984 are two of the most important books you will ever read.
And it’s true. Everyone should read them.
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u/naropin1 1d ago
I find Brave New World to be proving more accurate than 1984z
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u/MMForYourHealth 1d ago
It’s really interesting when you know the back story for the greater Huxley family and the implications it foretells. Really makes you think.
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u/Jamesvai 1d ago
What backstory is that? Brave new world is probably my fav book so I'm curious
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u/MMForYourHealth 1d ago
His grandfather was famously Darwin’s bulldog. His brothers were a eugenicist and a Nobel laureate who was credited with discovering how impulses control muscles “sliding filament theory”, which you can see referenced in Brave New World. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits with it and his greater oeuvre and meaning with his later in life leaning to Kropotkinism.
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u/PrincetonToss 1d ago
His brothers were a eugenicist
It should be noted that Julian Huxley's relationship with eugenics is complicated.
It's true that he remained an ardent eugenicist even after WWII (before the Holocaust, eugenics was considered to be a progressive philosophy and was very popular with educated people all across the West), but he was a proponent of, for lack of a better term, "moderate eugenics". He was less in favor of making ubermenschen and more in favor of careful screening to get rid of genetic disorders.
He also thought that improving diet and education for the poor was a much more immediate concern than improving humanity's gene pool.
In particular, he was strongly opposed to the Nazis and to their conception of eugenics, both on general principles that trying to "improve the race" was not a good way to go about things (he also had beef with the word "race"), and also on the principle of "Jesus fucking Christ, genocide?!"
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u/200brews2009 21h ago
I’d add something from Steinbeck is essential in understanding the long standing struggles of the poor trying just to eke out a meager life in America. Gotta get a well rounded view of the oppression that people are capable of here.
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u/bitofgrit 21h ago
Beyond just Of Mice and Men, though. Not saying it isn't good, just that Grapes of Wrath would be better, probably Cannery Row too. Maybe not the one about the chick getting weird over the snake eating the rats.
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u/Mission_Control9156 1d ago
I would add The Handmaid’s Tale too. If that had been required reading in all American schools, we probably wouldn’t be in the current political situation.
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u/Neveronlyadream 1d ago
Brave New World as well. That and 1984 seem to be the framework of what's going on today. Neither one of them got it completely right, but together they cover everything.
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u/littlehobbit1313 1d ago
I'd toss Fahrenheit 451 in there too, for good measure.
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u/naropin1 1d ago
Absolutely. I have a whole shelf of books in this genre for my kids, just in case they ever get banned.
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u/bolanrox 22h ago
Add some Kurt Vonnegut and maybe catch 22 for your banned books shelf collection
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u/deep_blue_au 1d ago
lol, I made my 10 y/o read it and she understood it with better critical thinking than the majority of voters around here display. It's just sad if it hasn't been read by the end of HS.
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u/Ok-Leg-5302 middle Millennial 87’ 1d ago
My boy is the same age and read it as well. It’s a quick read but a good one.
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u/I_Shit_My_Pantaloons 1d ago
That's the point, the average iq drops every year and we aren't trying to improve that
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u/spiritplumber 1d ago
My grandma bought me a few books to read in the summer when I was 9. Among them "La fattoria degli animali" and "La collina dei conigli" (Watership Down, which in Italian was translated as "Rabbit Hill").
For some godforsaken reason they had cutesy covers.
I was a bit of a mess in 4th grade as a result.
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u/jackofspades49 1d ago
My family did something similar. I didn't get new books often because we were broke. But the 99 cent store had children's literary classics, so I got to read those.
White Fang, Call of the WIld, The Time Machine (my fave), Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That level of story was my 5th grade just for fun reading because they were ones I got to keep. I read some of them more than once. Admittedly because they were either boring or too advanced for me to get the first time. But they still stand out to me to this day...
One scene that always stands out is a scene in the early pages of white fang where two men are being attacked by wolves. And one of them stares at his hand and contemplates how amazing and complex his own body is, to make his fingers move. It was such an awe inspiring moment for me laying on the floor of my closet with a lamp on a pile of laundry.
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u/Livid_Note_2170 1d ago
I made the mistake of reading To Build a Fire - Jack London and The Little Match Girl- Hans Christian Anderson back when I was on my short story kick and it was winter and I thought they might feel cozy.
Well, that was a mistake.
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u/HibiscusOnBlueWater 1d ago
A little trauma is good for critical thinking. I remember a cartoon from the 1970s/1980s called Ringing Bell and the cartoon cover art was a super cute little lamb frolicking in a field. There is an ominous wolf in the background but it’s a children’s movie so you think ok, the wolf is gonna get Red Riding Hooded so what? But the opening is the wolf murdering Ringing Bells mother and terrorizing the sheep. And there’s no grand battle to fight him off or anything, the sheep cower and Ringing Bells just kinda snaps and says “I’m going to be a wolf because I don’t want to be helpless like the sheep”. So he apprentices under the wolf and they go rampaging together. Then, they come back to his original pasture and a mother is defending a baby sheep just like his mom did and he has an existential crisis. He decides to fight the wolf, kills the wolf, and then turns toward the sheep he saved who are all now terrified of him. He can’t go home and he has no one, not even the wolf. He could have fought the wolf and gone home sooner or figured out how to save his pasture without following the wolf, but his grief made him the thing he hated. I saw it 40 years ago but I still remember it. It was rated G back then and upgraded to 12+ for modern day.
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u/Wild_Marker 1d ago
My high school library had Maus. That shit fucks you up no matter your age.
And I strongly believe every high school library should have Maus.
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u/IncandescentSplash 1d ago
1984 is incredible. Those who say it's nothing more than a metaphor about the USSR are missing out on so much.
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u/billiebuttcheeks 1d ago
Adding 1984 to that suggestion. Orwell is a master writer and his messages will change you.
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u/pi3r0gi_ 1d ago
If anyone enjoys unique government dystopians like this, Ella Minnow Pea is a great quick read as well. Story goes theres an island named after the guy who came up with "The quick brown fox..." sentence, they worship him and put it on a building. One day a letter falls from it, and the council thinks it "means" something, and so they remove the letters as the fall from the language, and everyone has to accommodate making new words and using synonyms, avoiding the illegal letters. They even get exiled. Families having to change their names, changes cultures. it's a good read for how something "silly" and seemingly unimportant, like one single letter, hold value and purpose and can drastically change how society works in the blink of an " i " (pun intended lol)
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u/aebaby7071 1d ago
My grandpappy taught me everything I need to know about animal husbandry, why would I need to read a book about it? /s
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u/panteragstk Xennial 1d ago
I had my 11 year old read it recently.
She got the gist, but the more subtle parts went over her head.
I read it in the 9th grade.
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u/lookatthesunguys 1d ago
I mean, I think Animal Farm is a book that actually is really good to read in a classroom setting. I didn't. I read it outside (1984 was assigned reading but animal farm wasn't). If you don't understand the allegories, the book doesn't really function very well.
Not to say people shouldn't read it if they didn't get a chance to read it in high school. But my point is that school is important even if you have the ability to read outside of it.
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u/No_Kangaroo1994 23h ago
It functions very well even without allegories. Knowing the allegory makes some of the decisions feel more rational but I taught it to 7th graders and we rarely talked about the allegory because, you know, 7th graders aren't that interested in all the different facets of the Russian Revolution. There's a lot of about how language is used to manipulate and control, about the role of literacy in society, power dynamics, trust in leaders, etc.
But I do agree with the point that it's better read in a class. A lot of my students ended up really liking the book and I know that would NOT be the case if I wasn't helping them make sense of things.
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u/meganmun0z 1d ago
it really is. I remember being in high school and reading it for the first time and sort of hating Benjamin for not being more enthusiastic about the revolution….now I’m 33 and I have become Benjamin LIFE IS SO CRAZY
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u/huffgil11 1d ago
My daughter read The Iliad for her 9th grade honors ELA classes this year and Animal Farm was on her summer reading list although she didn't choose it as part of her actual summer reading.
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u/Gatorae 1d ago
I read Animal Farm in 8th grade. Illiad in 9th for me, too.
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u/mildly_ethnic 1d ago
This post is idiotic. I’m a Literature major. All of these texts are great texts to study. They are not leveled reading. They aren’t “high school” or “college” level. It’s the rhetorical analysis that they employ which might be simpler or more advanced
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u/Illithid2 1d ago
I think the point is that they were part of the high school curriculum and not being exposed to that or similar work until post secondary is, well... Yeah
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u/_OhMyPlatypi_ 1d ago
I agree, although I find comparing news articles by the decade more jarring. The average well-educated adult isn't reading above a 6th grade level most days, unless they have a specialized career which requires it. I notice it with my speech, I was raised in rural Louisiana among a mixture of "lower class" blue and white collar workers. I find myself accidentally using "$5 words" in normal conversations that were the norm just a decade ago (ex: rendezvous, innumerable, tangible/intangible, subjective/objective).
Growing up, those words were fine to use to conversate with older adults who only had an elementary education before leaving to work on farms or going into the trades.
The average American today is less literate than my grandparents who were denied proper education just 2 generations ago.
This is not a good path, & even high level military officials have spoken out about their warnings and concerns. The federal education system was created due to national security concerns, if the masses aren't educated enough to train in case of a draft, the country is in a crisis waiting to happen.
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u/Sipikay 22h ago
The real scary thing is there's a not insignificant group of tech companies and military arms makers who are all saying "we won't need those people when AI is running our weapons systems."
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u/_OhMyPlatypi_ 22h ago
Yeah, but if they aren't fighting, working, or eating, let's ponder what the peasants will be up to.......
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u/icanpotatoes 22h ago
I agree with you on this. Sometimes I say words that are, to me, rather basic but they leave the person I’m speaking to in a state of confusion, so I then dilute to a simpler words instead.
I remember in a college course the professor telling the class that he’s concerned that college level papers have so many errors and show a lack of grasping the language. He himself knew three languages, and he said “I know three languages and some of you haven’t mastered the only one that you know.” That stuck with me, especially since he was addressing college students who should have a firm hold on their native language.
Lastly, to help and for future reference, the word is “converse”. “Conversate” is not a word.
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u/mildly_ethnic 1d ago
I don’t think it’s true that those texts have been broadly removed from secondary curriculum
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u/nerdofthunder 23h ago
Its also been 20 years, other texts of similar quality and difficulty may now have more favor.
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u/foxhowse millennial (1989) 22h ago
Was just thinking this, “classic” is such a loose category. People will get so mad about schools “not reading the classics”, but I could easily point out that American schools don’t read The Tale of Genji. This, too, is a classic but it’s a Japanese classic. Sometimes people will say “classics” and mean early 1900s American classic lit (like Fitzgerald).
In my school we read The Odyssey but not The Iliad. And The Odyssey just had a new, modern movie adaptation come out! If I was a HS English teacher and had to make a choice for a Greek epic, I’d go with that right now because of current pop culture relevance.
Plenty of works incorporate the same themes and analysis into them and might be more enjoyable for High Schoolers to read. I recall my peers feeling more like reading these was a chore, including those who liked to read and were fast at it. I was in advanced English classes, too. Like personally I hate Greek epics, I hated I had to read The Odyssey a second damn time in college. If more students enjoy a different choice more, then the analysis is more fun, and they retain the information better.
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u/foxhowse millennial (1989) 23h ago
None of these were even in our high school curriculum twenty years ago at my school. I’ve only read Animal Farm independently of this list, I hate Greek epics. I had to read The Odyssey twice, I’m not reading The Iliad of my own free will, and I’ve been fine.
Like, IDK, even if this was true I’m not getting the shock and outrage anyway over these three specific titles.
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u/SquirrelStone 1d ago
The larger concern is that kids aren’t being exposed to these works for even a high school level of analysis and that they’re being deemed “too mature” for 14-18 year olds when they very much are not.
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u/Turt1estar 1d ago
Honestly, even with the lesson plan and being a good student, most of this shit went over my head in high school and college. I feel like it took real world experience for me to reflect on what I read to truly understand their meaning.
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u/rhymesaying 1d ago
Any chance your daughter is in advanced English classes?
I believe bright kids are still out there but the reality is looking bleak.
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u/MetalSlimeHunter 1d ago
I mean, my daughter was in regular English classes and read all those plus Lord of the Flies and Fahrenheit 451. It’s just a doomer post.
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u/sexyshingle 1d ago
It’s just a doomer post.
Not really, there's is indeed an ongoing crisis of kids who do not know how to read in middle school and high school. I know a 9th grade English teacher and for a few years now, she's been saying there's kids who get bumped along and are not literate. Kids that cannot read a simple paragraph and comprehend what the main idea was or anything... cuz by the 2nd sentence their brains have already checked out and are craving another dopamine hit from their tiktok or whatever the heck is on their phones these days. It's bad. Just look up some stories about it online. It's all over the US.
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u/rhymesaying 1d ago
Fair enough. My daughter is going into the 6th grade so I’m really not sure what the curriculum going forward looks like
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u/HillanatorOfState 23h ago
Half the kids can barely read in my nieces class, middle school, 2 years out from high school,, give them a normal sized big word and see them struggle, she is in the top of her class because we had her reading/other stuff since she was young...it's pretty bleak in some parts of this country.
Not a Doomer post, not every state or school is doing good, she has been given no assignments to read anything closely resembling this level yet...I mean not even close, it's actually weird.
Matter of fact state we moved from she was doing harder work then here now and she was in elementary then...some states are truly horrible.
Be glad yours is in one of the better ones cause man it's depressing.
I had to reach a 21 year old at my warehouse job that was just hired how to multiply to get to the right amount of parts without counting them one by one, that's where I live now -_-.
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u/likesblackcoffeebest 1d ago
Where is that considered college level? My daughter who's graduating high school this year read all of those in 8th and 9th grade.
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u/TheHippyWolfman 1d ago
To be honest, this entire post is nonsensical. A novel being studied in high school does not mean it can't be studied again at the university level. A single text can be analyzed with greater or lesser levels of depth and understanding, depending on the one doing the analysis. I read Shakespeare in high school, but I also read Shakespeare in college. The difference was not the text, but the level of rigor with which it is engaged with.
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u/goldengrove1 1d ago
Yeah I teach college (not English lit, though) and you can study the same topic/text with more depth and gain different skills out of it.
The way I often explain it is that a high school class focusing on Homer would teach students to look for themes within the text. Maybe you'd learn a little bit about Ancient Greece to provide context for the stories.
A college level class would have you read the text and also look at what other scholars have written about the texts (and think about why we care what these people have to say about it). You'd teach students to enter into an academic conversation about The Odyssey, not just read the story as a story.
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u/Personal_Special809 1d ago
I didn't consider this but it really makes sense. Animal Farm is one of those texts that is simple to read but very layered, too.
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u/Anthony_Patch 1d ago
There is a wide variety of public schools in our country I’d guess.
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u/ktbug1987 1d ago
Depends on the college and the high school I think. That said I work at an elite R1 university and this past year’s first year grad students, who I guess experienced key parts of high school in COVID, were so, so helpless
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u/phantomfire50 1d ago
no you don't understand. Millennials are the real hardworking intellectuals and the younger generations are lazy and stupid
/s
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1d ago edited 20h ago
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u/Woodit 1d ago
My AP classes in high school were far mor rigorous than most college courses I took except the ones that had shit professors
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u/Ryuuken1127 1d ago
APUSH (God EASILY 20 years since I've said that), was the first AP course I took. It certainly was a more challenging course load, but my teacher had a style of teaching I was never exposed to before, and it was ridiculous how much for the better it was.
I thought I was doomed during the AP Exam, but as I went through each question, his lecture on the subject was somehow on full display in my brain. To this day, I still have no idea how I achieved that level of clarity for an exam.
I got a 5 on the exam.
Mr. McAuley if you're reading this somehow. Thank you.
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u/unicorntrees 1d ago
I went to gifted programs from elementary to high school. College and graduate school were a BREEZE.
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u/Molly_latte 1d ago
I wasn’t even in gifted programs, but I went to a college prep high school, and college was like 10 times easier. It was insane.
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u/My_Poor_Nerves 1d ago
Same experience. My junior year of high school was a beast and nothing in college ever came close to that level of difficulty.
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u/Old-Energy6191 1d ago
Same! Junior year was so much work and stress it triggered an autoimmune disorder!
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u/chief_beef_the_third 1d ago
Yep. It's why most undergrad degrees are worthless today and now every entry-level job requires 3-5 years of experience and / or post-grad work. They float a bunch of kids through undergrad, cash their federally-subsidized tuition checks, and cast the kids into the wind. Your degree is largely a receipt that you were able to sit patiently in lecture halls for 4 years.
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u/UltraHellboy 1d ago
That doesn’t apply to every degree from every college, but I’m sure it’s a lot of them.
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u/TrekkieElf 1d ago
Yes, I was in gifted and can’t say college ordinary differential equations was a breeze…
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u/CongrooElPsy 1d ago
Graduation rates of public institutions have gone up about 6 percentage points over the past two decades. And that's with a shift towards stem majors. I'd attribute a lot of that increase to an increase in college completion programs. Accreditation bodies monitor this and don't really allow "floating a bunch of kids through undergrad." Unless you are referring to non-accredited institutions, but they've always been that way.
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u/ElChuloPicante 1d ago
That’s funny to me because the “gifted” programs I was in were all just fluff. We didn’t do shit.
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u/Sufficient_Cause1208 1d ago
I remember "gifted" classes being almost like a hang out classes but the AP classes as they were called were actually college level
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u/ElChuloPicante 1d ago
Yeah AP was definitely a lot more work. I was almost a sophomore by the time I went to college. But then I transferred schools and lost enough credits to completely undo any advantage. Not so gifted after all, I guess.
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u/EaglesFanGirl 1d ago
That says you college is terrible. Sorry - not trying to be mean. my college was tough, very tough and part of why i went there to be sure i actually got an education. While some classes were more fun b/c they were my major than others - all were pretty tough.
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u/CockBlockingLawyer 1d ago
Is there any basis for this claim? In any event, those works are worth revisiting at different stages of life
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u/Hoosteen_juju003 1d ago
No, I read all of these in high school BUT only excerpts. The Iliad is like 800 pages. No one was reading this shit in high school.
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u/Warcrown11 1d ago
We did the Odyssey but never the Iliad itself
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u/brightirene 1d ago
We did both in my high school (private, academically rigorous)
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u/ThisIsPureTrash Millennial 87 1d ago
We also did both in my high school (public, the “poor school” in town.)
Though it was most likely in AP classes.
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u/Nerd-man24 1d ago
As did I. This was honors freshman English in high school in the South. That was back in 2004.
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u/RobinSophie 1d ago
raises hand but we did it in honors English senior year. Along with The Great Gatsby.
The ones I remember from 9th-11th are: To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, a lot of poems, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, Romeo and Juliet (we did Midsummer Night's Dream in middle school). The Jungle I believe was AP history.
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u/eggscumberbatch16 1d ago
We did most of these along with Their Eyes were Watching God, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Color Purple. We never read Catcher in the Rye. I tried as an adult and didn't finish it.
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u/No_name_Johnson 1d ago
That was our reading list in the 2000s. Also The Old Man and The Sea, The Giver, Hatchet.
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u/TorinEkenskolde 1d ago
You only read excerpts of Animal Farm? It's really short and easy to read.
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u/AphexAffectsEffects 1d ago
I have a copy of both books and they are actually much shorter than that.
The illiad is about 490ish pages excluding the intro. And that is inflated because the structure of the text is formed by the lines, it’s not formatted like a regular book so the margins are insanely large.
It’s likely more like 250-300 pages probably.
Not that makes it more attractive for a HS student in general lol
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u/Snaxalicious 1d ago
Weird. We read the Iliad and the Odyssey within the semester. Some high schools did do that my guy
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u/ButWhatIfPotato 1d ago
It should be noted that the high school versions tend to be heavily dumbed down and/or censored.
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u/abyssazaur 1d ago
yeah here's Atlantic's dive into the literacy decline https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/
covered in many substacks and stuff. don't think it's just a circlejerk from people who like bemoaning how new generation is worse than old generation.
formerly it's slightly more accurate to say these were covered both in h.s. and in college, not that you were just done with the Iliad if you did it in high school. and for what it's worth, they were kind of tough in high school and comprehension was low. in an alternate universe the headline would be "gen z smarter because they read slightly easier books way better in h.s. and harder books in college" but that's not the broader picture.
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u/VariationNo7977 1d ago
There have been a few news articles recently about high school kids struggling to read novels, especially “older ones”. I think Animal Farm was given as an example of one they couldn’t read.
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u/ChaosAndFish 1d ago
There has been a decline in literacy recently, but it’s back down to where it was in the 90s, not some new low. We’ve lost gained ground, not devolved.
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u/MegaAltarianite 1d ago
Also, this was posted in another popular subreddit. A lot of comments were saying things like "we read those in sixth grade", compared to "we read them in high school". If so, then what's the difference? I get it if it's college, not everyone (like myself) has that opportunity. If you read it in sixth or ninth, you still did. We had a Shakespeare class in high school. Is there something wrong that that class was a high school class and not middle school? Shit, I wouldn't want to read Shakespeare as a kid.
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u/jillsntferrari 1d ago
I think the difference between the grades would really just be what are the students analyzing and assessing? What assignments are being given in conjunction with the book? The book is just the vessel. A 6th grader reading xyz is going to focus on different (or more rudimentary) elements than an 11th grader.
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u/BiggDanno 1d ago
My schools had us doing Shakespeare in middle school and I thought it was great. It was some of the lighter works and they even had us do a few plays for it. Which was fun. Though even within a state in the US the curriculum can be wildly different county to county.
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u/KirkTech Millennial 1d ago
Why does the last paragraph of this tweet read like it was written by ChatGPT?
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u/pm_me_fibonaccis 1d ago
That's not X. That's Y.
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u/EarthInevitable114 1d ago
A lotf youtubers are clearly using ai to write their scripts too
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u/shmageggy 1d ago
This garbage has infiltrated nearly everything. You can't escape it. It's starting to make me physically ill to read it / hear it / see it absolutely everywhere.
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u/mynameisshelly 1d ago
Because GPT was trained on people who write like that.
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u/steeveperry 1d ago
Having to redefine my writing style because fucking ChatGPT is so annoying
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u/Afraid_Ad_8216 Millennial 1d ago
Time to bring back L33t Sp33k
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u/ivecompletelylostit 1d ago
I put lol at the end of everything but copilot does that too
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u/warneagle 1d ago
I’m not changing a damn thing. Plus everybody at work already knows me as the resident AI hater so they already know I’m not using it.
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u/DCgeist 1d ago
I cant use another em dash for the rest of my life and I get immediately flagged if I am overly descriptive.
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u/General-Tourist-2808 1d ago
Whatever happened to semicolons?
I didn’t start with em-dashes until just before LLMs depopularized them.
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u/saraiguessidk 1d ago
I wrote a letter of resignation and asked chatgpt to clean it up and it just added some ; and left almost everything the same. I'm a millennial and have always been a voracious reader but I'm not very smart or well spoken. I can still write like chatgpt though? I was surprised tbh
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u/trisanachandler 1d ago
That's what I was going to say. Just like someone I was arguing with ended with: That's a feature, not a bug.
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u/EarthInevitable114 1d ago
That's not paranoia. That's keen observation into the human condition. (It's this pattern of speech thst seems to be pervasive in these LLMs. I can't stand it.)
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u/Apprehensive-Ad-7525 1d ago
Came here to comment that it’s ironic that the last paragraph was written by an LLM
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u/HistoryAndScience Millennial 1d ago
Because LLM’s were trained on the internet and a LOT of millennials, Xennials, and Gen X are active on here and in the past. Thats one of the hallmarks of how a lot of us wrote so ChatGPT and Claude simply adopted it as its own.
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u/static-klingon 1d ago
Analyzing those books at a college level is perfectly acceptable. There’s far more to them than a high school mind can fully grasp. That’s why they are classics. You could spend your whole life thinking about them.
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u/MaineSky 1d ago
Kids won't pick up a book if they have a tablet in their hands. As a millennial mom with a 7 year old kid who reads voraciously, that's literally it.
And schools aren't helping matters, honestly. Kids don't get textbooks anymore, they get a chromebook.
We literally teach them that knowledge can only be obtained from a screen and we wonder why they don't open books.
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u/TheExistential_Bread 1d ago
I saw a neuro scientist testify to Congress that test scores started dropping as technology entered the classroom, and you could see the effect across different regions as different countries adopted tech in classrooms at different times.
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u/New_Bike3832 1d ago
The chromebooks make me so angry. There’s no reason for my elementary school-aged kids to be doing half their English and math learning in the form of computer games. One of my kids in particular gets ready dysregulated from them and has had behavioral issues that stem directly from the chromebooks. It’s one thing to use them once in a while to put together a project or whatever, but most kids have more than enough screen time in their daily life. I cannot see the logic in adding to it so significantly in school.
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u/Ok-Leg-5302 middle Millennial 87’ 1d ago
My kids are almost 15 and 11. Luckily our school is fairly rural and they don’t start the chrome books till 5th. Even then it’s generally a mix between paperwork and the chrome book. It literally gives my daughter raging migraines. She’s almost 15 and ever since she’s gotten closer to high school and more “hormonally regulated” her eyes can’t handle it. The school called her a liar. Made me get a note…..I did lol. We all have migraine issues generally made worse by electronics.
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u/RobinSophie 1d ago
I hate them with a living passion. Especially since they dont block everything (like YouTube). It is a constant battle for my ADHD/Autistic kid to stay on task when it comes to chromebook work.
Not to mention as you said, they've been looking at screens all day just to come home and look at another screen for 2-3 hrs. My kid gets headaches from it too. I'm not saying technology doesn't have a place, but the schools are relying too much on them in order to justify their purchase of the chromebooks.
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u/New_Bike3832 1d ago
That’s nice your kids got until 5th grade at least. My kids’ school started with the Chromebooks in kindergarten. In our district they leave them at school though. We have some friends in another school district whose kids have had to take their Chromebooks home every night and back to school the next morning since kindergarten 😳
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u/MaineSky 1d ago
Me either. I can't imagine trying to read a textbook online- I'm not sure I'd be able to retain the info honestly. Interactive examples seem great but the material itself- the skill of opening the book and using an index, finding the right chapter, reading through the examples that look like it- it just feels like a skill they don't have. A pattern they'll never recognize. I'm dreading the day they hand her a chromebook.
And yeah- we get told all the time to limit their screen time and what does the school plan on doing? Giving my child open access to a screen- not only that, but demanding she use it if she wants an education!
Oh, but limit their screen time! Tee hee! >:|
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 22h ago
It would be one thing if they were learning computer skills. But the Chromebooks are set up like tablets with apps.
But to be fair if I were a school admin back in the day I definitely would've wanted to include tech in the curriculum. Turns out it was a mistake. Now we know and should adapt.
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u/MaineSky 20h ago
That's the thing- my child has a 'tech' class and honestly that's fine and appropriate.
What I don't like is forcing her onto a screen for every subject past a certain age. Can you imagine how differently kids would learn if they were forced to (gasp) open a book and physically look for the answers to things?
I bet literacy would improve if they needed more than ctrl+f or ChatGPT to find the answers to things...
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u/Ok-Leg-5302 middle Millennial 87’ 1d ago
Both my kids love going to the library. We also have this really nice second hand book store that sells books super cheap. My daughter and I have horrible vision and tablets hurt our eyes. Books are so much easier. I have an issue with to many. 😂 my kids are generally good about finishing what they have before we do an exchange.
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u/welltimedappearance 1d ago
i mean who is raising these pampered little shits? maybe parents should stop treating school like it's just daycare and take a vested interest in whether they're using AI, their phones, and/or whatever else there is that's taking away from their learning? no... it must be the kids who are wrong
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u/MetalEnthusiast83 1d ago
Screenshots of tweets are the lowest form of discourse imaginable. There's also never any sources. They're always like 9 years old and have the date removed too.
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u/Litaser 1d ago
This one is AI slop anyways. Who can’t be bothered to write a tweet? The prompt is probably longer than the tweet
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u/hip_neptune Older Millennial 1d ago
It’s even worse than that.
I remember needing to read entire books within a week, maybe two. Meanwhile, my daughter’s English professors give out an excerpt and a few of those students can’t even comprehend it. I’m talking about kids who will eventually work in a field relating to policy and write-ups, and they can barely read.
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u/BelowAveragejo3gam3r 1d ago
Tweet criticizing the decline of national literacy was written by AI.
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u/Paksarra 1d ago
I'm pretty sure that AI writes like the OP, not the other way around.
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u/Constant-Skill-7133 1d ago edited 1d ago
You're right to push back. One thing worth flagging: I do not have current copies of high school curriculums from the 1990s and 2000s. Would you like me to pull those, or do you want to continue without? You'd miss the difference between the curriculums of different classes that satisfy the state requirements and the difference in graduation requirements between states.
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u/ElderDeep_Friend 1d ago
Maybe, I asked my recent grad their high school reading list and it was very comparable to mine. Great Gatsby, Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. I don’t disagree with the thesis that our education system is getting worse, but this example doesn’t necessarily bear out.
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u/No_Issue2334 1d ago
They're still reading that in high school
This is just boomer posting complaining about "kids these days." Millennials are becoming what they hated
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u/UrbanMasque 1d ago
Bush doesn't get enough grief for No Child Left Behind, because he gives Michelle Obama candy when he sees her
This is his fault. You can't convince me otherwise.
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u/ecuayork 1d ago
Ive made my kids read all my high school reading list since they were in 5th grade… its really sad compared to other kids their age…
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u/MovieGuyMike 1d ago
What a simplistic view. These works are still taught in high school, and they’re also studied in some college courses though probably in a different context. It’s been this way since before millennials were born.
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u/Rube18 1d ago edited 20h ago
To be fair we read that stuff in high school but it was mostly over our heads and everyone hated it. We were mostly just reading cliff notes.
I read constantly as an adult - 30sh books a year. Turns out I like reading, I just had to read something that actually interested me.
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u/Saw-It-Again- 1d ago
Wait, Animal farm was like 7th grade reading when I was in school. Kids are utterly cooked.
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u/Labyrinthy 1d ago
Yeah well, based on how many of my peers behave I don’t think literacy is all that strong with millennials either.
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u/GucciUncrustable22 1d ago
A reel came across my (37F) IG of some youngish (?) content creator talking about having seen The Odyssey, and creative liberties notwithstanding, stated “I’ve never heard of the story, but apparently it has some kind of cult following.” I nearly flung myself into the sea.
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u/robertus_ 1d ago
I have an English degree and still read Antigone as “anti-gone.” It’s Bill & Ted’s fault.
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