SHAME! SHAME! LET CHILDREN READ BOOKS!
The philistine supremacy in schools (and at Netflix)
The new curriculum removes all full-length novels from the 8th grade curriculum. Previously, Deal 8th graders read challenging and thoughtful novels like To Kill a Mockingbird and A Raisin in the Sun. The rationale for this change is that the old curriculum was cobbled together through trial and error by Deal’s English teachers and the new curriculum, which focuses on short passages, will better prepare the students for high school.
The philistine supremacy has really clasped its cold dead hand around the school system when 13 year olds aren’t expected to read an entire book. There are no good excuses for this. I hear this all the time from other parents, by the way.
Shame! Shame! Shame on all the people making these decisions! We are talking about children for God’s sake.
LET CHILDREN READ BOOKS!
Talking of the philistine supremacy, here’s what the CEO of Netflix had to say in a recent interview about why watching movies on the small screen is merely a matter of personal preference.
I guess I’m thinking of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” Are there things that just don’t feel like they’re in your wheelhouse right now? Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix. And so I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that certain kinds of movies do or don’t work. There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people. My son’s an editor. He is 28 years old, and he watched “Lawrence of Arabia” on his phone.
Oh, no. But it is just an interesting thing. At every new development of technology, there’s wins for the audience.
I have nothing to say in response to this gross philistinism other than: please, please, do go and see great movies on the big screen. It’s incomparable. Telling people that the small screen is purely a matter of personal preference is a lie. Sure, watch on your TV or your laptop, but also sometimes go to the big screen. See the art as it was made to be seen.
People claiming thirteen-year-olds can't be expected to read an entire book clearly haven't encountered middle-schoolers. Your ability to focus and to chew through books is basically unparalleled at that age. Yes, not every kid is going to like reading (that's true in any cohort), but it's insane to claim that none of them does, or even that most of them don't, and especially insane to claim that that should guide educational policy.
And also, Mister Netflix CEO, not to sound like a boomer, but watching Lawrence of Arabia or 2001: A Space Odyssey on your phone screen is only 'a matter of preference' if your 'preference' is for an objectively worse experience.
(I understand that sometimes there are accessibility issues that make watching films at home easier, but that is an argument for greater accessibility of the big screen, not fewer big screens).
I think the problem arises when reading (which I'd define broadly to mean engagement with longform narrative, whether it's the traditional reading of a book, listening to stories, or watching drama) starts getting bowdlerized into a set of "skills" that are applicable to other things. The truth is that I don't think any of us know what longform narratives are good for in an absolutely scientific way. They might teach empathy. They might help with concentration and focus. They might help us understand complexity. Those are all plausible stories about stories. But what we know for sure is that spending time with imaginary characters over the course of a narrative is part of the deep cultural practice of humans, traceable back to our prehistory. We had a lot of other things to be doing back then to survive, but we still took time out of hunting, gathering, defending ourselves against predators, etc. for the time-intensive art of telling long stories to each other. To me, this speaks to its intrinsic importance apart from any of the discrete skills that we'd associate with post-Industrial Revolution mass literacy. It speaks to its meaning of imaginative leisure for the human soul, even if we can't say precisely what that meaning is. I know that schools don't like to speak in that language because of the religious overtones, but my own definition of a soul owes more to Aristotle than it does to Christianity, and I think it is defensible on wholly secular grounds. And I think we lose (or lost) the battle when we start trying to make engagement with fiction into a means to something else instead of an end in itself. That's where the philistinism creeps in: when we turn something that's just human, full stop, into a job-related skill set.