For me as a kid who loved reading and fell out of it by the time I finished school (and then re-found that love decades later), the biggest contributing factor wasn't 30 minutes of reading for school. It was forced reading of books that were uninteresting to me in the first place, and then having to engage with those books in a wholly artificial way.
There's a lot of interesting things to be gleaned from books and certainly expanding students horizons is not in and of itself a bad idea. But school reading is painful, whether it's 10 minutes or 4 hours. You're given pre-selected material with pre-selected lessons to be taken from that material. You are expected to write summaries that explain why the curtains in the foyer of this book were blue (regardless of whether there's actually a reason the author did that or if the lesson planner just hallucinated some meaning out of thin air), and then discuss obvious lessons in non-fiction materials as if there was any other purpose to writing the book in question except to present that lesson. Sometimes you're given books to read that match whatever the current hot social topic is, again without regard to the quality of the books, and then expected to regurgitate the correct opinions on that topic as if the book presented those opinions, and again without regard to what the book actually said (or failed to say).
Reading in schools is presented and treated with the rigor of a mathematical proof, and the soullessness of dispassionate scientific observation of dying rats. It should be no wonder that what that is the experience of children with reading, so many fail to find a hobby or pleasure in it. We don't seem surprised when most students don't do mathematical formulas in their spare time after learning it in school, why should reading be any different?
Everyone always complains about the "blue curtains". Did everyone but be ready the same book, or are you just repeating a meme? (for what purpose?)
But I do analyze literature and study mathematical formulas in my free time, so maybe I'm built different.
It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
I can confirm, we ”analyzed” the color of the curtains in some novel I now forget. I believe they were, in fact, blue. The teacher was adamant details like that were always meaningful and certainly not just to paint a scene. It was far from the only instance of such “analysis”.
What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
>What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
I find it disappointing how poorly the lesson is taught. The question shouldn't be 'Why?' [The author did something] it should be "What?" [did the author do]. Whether they were colored for a purpose or not, what does the blueness of the curtains convey?[0]. The point then is to be able to generalize to 'what is this media conveying,' occasionally with intent[1], and 'how do I create media with my intended conveyance'.
[0]'Nothing in particular' is a valid answer, that the protagonist's favorite color was blue could be another.
[1]e.g. in a commercial: actors, wardrobe, setting, et al are all very intentionally selected to convey the message 'this product will make your life better' or similar.
> What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
Same in german. Die Leiden des jungen Werther - dry, boring, irrelevant.
It's certainly possible that "blue curtains" specifically is a memetic reference that I've absorbed via osmosis, but the experience of having to analyze minute details to a ridiculous extent was very much a true one, regardless of the specifics of the example.
I feel like the "blue curtains" problem with reading in schools is akin to the "shape -> rectangle -> square" problem that early OOP education has. It might be a very basic and simple attempt to explain a concept (inheritance in the case of OOP, symbolism in the case of books), but its simplicity and inoffensive genericness is so overwhelmingly devoid of any of the usefulness that the concept brings that its more harmful to the students than helpful.
I've long argued that programing courses are broken. They present a concept with a hugely simplified model, and then tell you when you don't understand why you'd want to do it that it will make more sense when you build a "real" program. I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced. A sort of "in medias res" method of teaching.
I think something similar applies to a lot of the way literature concepts are taught in schools. Boring books that don't connect with the readers and students are assigned, and then terrible examples that are either overly contrived (blue curtains) or blindingly obvious (the bad guy kicks the puppy which shows he's bad) that they just turn the students off. There's no excitement or interest nurtured into the concepts because the taught examples are so lifeless and far removed from what is actually possible.
>It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
My personal opinions on the matter are
1) "too much mandatory study". Yeah when they're adults, they'll need to work 8 hour jobs, but kids need time to be kids and they need time to let the things they're learning sink in and discover real world applicability in their own lives. 6-7 hours of schooling + 1-3 hours of homework + projects + "extra curricular" programs adds up to a lot of time where students don't have any time to find anything interesting in what they've learned before they're shuffled off to the next things. School is stressful enough when you're just learning, but all the other stuff that's piled on and the regimented testing just burns them out. I was turned off of math courses for half of my schooling because 2nd grade math was full of timed tests in which failures were punished by loss of recess time.
2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling. I had friends who were held back from advanced classes where they would have been challenged and engaged because early in elementary school they performed poorly on a handful of standardized tests and were locked forever in the "standard" track. So much of what you want to teach as a skill can be taught via multiple different avenues, and we should offer schooling that takes advantage of that. Literary concepts like foreshadowing, metaphor, symbolism etc can be taught via film, books, poetry, games and even music. Why does every student then need to go through the same literary courses with the same set of books to learn the material? Math concepts can be taught with money, or physics, or chemistry or computer programming or wood working. Why does everyone need to go through the same math textbook?
The most memorable teachers I ever had were the ones that stepped outside the books. The ones that explored teaching a concept from multiple angles, and who understood that often it was necessary to let the students see the deep end of the pool to get them interested in learning to swim at all. Those teachers worked well for me. They didn't work for others. And some teachers that I found staid and boring and that failed to leave me with any love for the subject they were teaching were ones that connected with other classmates. But we were all crammed into the same set of lessons with the same teacher and teaching styles.
Education smothered my love for reading by forcing me to read material that didn't connect with me and analyze and report on that material in a way that was unnatural for me. The ember that was able to be rekindled was only kept alive by the occasional tending of a teacher that would from time to time allow me to step outside the box to engage with books the way that worked for me. I was lucky in that regard. Many students aren't and that's a shame.
Disclaimer: I live in The Netherlands; perhaps the situation is different in the US. It would be great if it was.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on your wishes. I didn't necessarily have the same experiences, but that's mostly beside the point. But as a very junior university teacher:
> programing courses are broken [...] I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced.
There is no time. I want to teach what you say, and as a student I wanted to be taught what you say, but that takes more time, especially if you want to cater for the whole class — that "the hard way" programming is less efficient than doing it the right way, unsurprisingly, so it takes more time (not only that, you're asking them to do the same assignment twice, which is anathema — no time for that!), and the curriculum is already chock full.
> My personal opinions on the matter are: 1) "too much mandatory study".
Sure, but then you have even less time. You'll make the previous problem worse.
> 2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling.
Yes, everyone knows this would be good, but there is no money and there are no teachers. Skilled primary school and high school teachers are incredibly hard to find, and even if you'd find them, there is no money to pay for more teachers than we have now.
Yeah, I have family and friends who are teachers, definitely aware that there's no time. Fundamentally the modern way we deal with education is broken. It's not even mostly the funding, but the way we try to measure it, package it and distill it and spread it around equally. The only way to do that is the same way McDonalds does, strip it down to the barest essentials done by rote , crammed into as small a time unit as possible with as little variation as possible. It works, but it has all the same problems.
Education as a whole needs a re-work in how we approach it, for many reasons but also to make time for this sort of careful nurturing; even if it means we don't cover as many things. We can no more teach all the children all the things in 18 years than we could have them listen to all the music ever produced in that same time. And to my mind then we'd be better served doing everything we can to nurture and encourage children's natural curiosity and desire to learn and do on the absolutely necessary of the things necessary that will quash that curiosity.
How do we do that? I don't know. I have thoughts, but there are certainly going to be no easy answers, and decades of bureaucracy and infrastructure around the current system will not go quietly even if we had the answers in the first place.
There's a lot of interesting things to be gleaned from books and certainly expanding students horizons is not in and of itself a bad idea. But school reading is painful, whether it's 10 minutes or 4 hours. You're given pre-selected material with pre-selected lessons to be taken from that material. You are expected to write summaries that explain why the curtains in the foyer of this book were blue (regardless of whether there's actually a reason the author did that or if the lesson planner just hallucinated some meaning out of thin air), and then discuss obvious lessons in non-fiction materials as if there was any other purpose to writing the book in question except to present that lesson. Sometimes you're given books to read that match whatever the current hot social topic is, again without regard to the quality of the books, and then expected to regurgitate the correct opinions on that topic as if the book presented those opinions, and again without regard to what the book actually said (or failed to say).
Reading in schools is presented and treated with the rigor of a mathematical proof, and the soullessness of dispassionate scientific observation of dying rats. It should be no wonder that what that is the experience of children with reading, so many fail to find a hobby or pleasure in it. We don't seem surprised when most students don't do mathematical formulas in their spare time after learning it in school, why should reading be any different?