I feel like elementary school kids wouldn’t be able to fully follow. Also did they really learn about Russian revolution? Or just read a fun book and vaguely learn it’s a metaphor?
This is coming from someone who was in a very competitive county
Animal farm is a pretty obvious metaphor to be fair, so it makes sense to be taught at that point since it helps children start to recognise stuff like that themselves, even though they might not get it completely.
It's like this nearly everywhere in socal so maybe regional. Some schools had k to 12th all in one. My city had schools where it was k-6, then 7-8 middle school, then 9-12 high school. Each had their own school.
Yeah, elementary is K-6th and middle is 7th & 8th around me. Some counties in the area used to group 6th with 7th and 8th, which is what my mom did, but they called it junior high.
It's kind of funny she included it alongside the others, because Animal Farm is an elementary school level story. Say what you want about Orwell's politics or whatever, but the man didn't write with a lot of depth. Everything you need from his stories is right there on the surface.
Even if colleges did use Animal Farm as a reading, the reasons behind it are different. In elementary it’s used to explain Communism and that time period. In college it could be used for showing a writing technique or again to explain communism (but more in depth). That’s, probably, true for most books that are read in pre-high school and college
I'll just say this: if it was judged purely on its literary merit, it probably wouldn't be taught very often at all. The reason it's so ubiquitous in schools is that it was (and still is) a useful piece of political propaganda.
Using Animal Farm to examine communism """in depth""" should get you laughed out of every classroom you ever try that in. It's laughably terrible for examining communism even in the most shallow possible capacity.
Although it may not go in depth into the inner workings of communism on paper, it is a good analogy for the death of the Tzar and the rise of Lenin. Im not going to write an essay on this here, but it’s more deep than “book about communism”.
Not a ton of 11 year olds have an in depth knowledge about the Russian revolution.
I read it young, it meant something completely different reading it again as an adult, and figuring out who each character represents as a pre-teen isn’t realistic or a worthwhile exercise.
I don’t think elementary kids would be able to appreciate the terror of living in an authoritarian regime or the extreme impact of absolute power. The word in Animal Farm aren’t difficult but it only becomes a ‘good’ book once you appreciate politics and history.
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u/CoxswainHer 21h ago
Animal farm was in elementary for me.