Because the book tells you?

To my shame I've never read Dickens, but I did read the Romanian canonical authors (I am Romanian), and a lot of them, the ones I liked, gave you a very real sense of the life of the people at the time.

Ion, for example, is basically a tragedy about the titular character scheming to marry a woman whom he doesn't love (but who loves him) because he's poor and she's "rich" (owns land). And the book really shows you how important and spiritually so it is for the main character (and therein, for the average farmer at the time) to work his own land, to sweat and toil over his land. How he collapses to his knees and kisses the dirt when he finally gets it etc.

High schoolers can get most books with adult themes, and most books require very little context, since they are filled with passages upon passages upon passages of description.

> How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?

Because they literally say it!

    “Not that I am afraid of myself, but I dread other people’s remarks.”
    “How can I promise to be wiser … if I am tempted?”
    “My father’s opinion of me does me the greatest honour; and I should be miserable to forfeit it.”
    “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”

    “To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or finer success.”

I don't think waiting 20 years to acquire a much vaguer and much less correct understanding of the context from YouTube/TikTok/TV cultural diffusion is very wise.

> So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture

A lot of school is like this though. English is basically my only language, I have taught myself some very basic Spanish over the years but it is a struggle when you are busy and don't have a consistent routine. I can't believe that for years the state paid a professional to spend hours each week trying to teach me not one but two languages and I completely wasted it. I just had no interest.

In school they basically teach you a bit of everything (maths, science, languages, arts, history, etc), if you are lucky you will take to one or two of those subjects and view the rest as a chore, but all of them are potentially valuable if you really embrace them.

> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?

Ideally, a good English teacher will explain these things, and/or you will also be learning history which may touch on them. Sure, maybe that isn't enough, but I still think it is better for people to be exposed to these things at a young age. Many young people do actually really take to these works and get a lot of value out of them.

It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning.

The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.

Yeah, I feel you on that.

It took about 20 years for my philosophy and literature degrees pay off.

I know more now, but I had to start -somewhere- even if it was hard to get the whole context.

Much of that time between putting in all that work and feeling like it was worth it was spent reading a lot of other things and amassing life experience, raising my kids, and working in unrelated professions.

However, having that context for the experiences I was getting is probably why it feels useful in retrospect.

Even though I didn't really understand Sartre or Kirkegaard or whoever (and I suspect that they don't have the best ideas all the time), having them available to me was helpful.

To me, even if I didn't totally get the context of "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or "Ulysses" or "Pamela" or "Borderlands/La Frontera" or "The Sun Also Rises":

a) knowing that these were things people do deeply explore was helpful and

b) the little bits that did resonate have stayed with me.

Further, it's been very useful to re-visit these texts as I've gotten older has been supremely interesting.

So yeah, education is wasted on the young and all but it set me up well.

As a not-super-old 48-year-old with adult children, I'm quite pleased that I can review the texts from my 20s and will be able to do the same if I get to be in my 70s or 80s.

> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such?

We did talk about these things in English class in high school. The teachers would lay out the historical/social/cultural context of each book we read. Did your school not do that?

Context is everything for art and literature! It's not to say they can't be enjoyed out of context, but a lot can be lost without it, especially for a teenager.

I'm tempted to say that history and literature classes should just be combined, gradually working in books from (or about) the period and place being taught!

I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with "strange torture" more like "sore muscles from exercising mental muscles". Yes I remember hating The Great Gatsby when I was 14 and having to read it critically in school, I sure didn't have a lot context, but I remember having to do it, and I can look back after years of secondary and post secondary schooling and appreciate the exercise.

I think we should be much denser and more rigorous with school material in the middle/high schoolers, at least relative to what my experience in public school USA was, but that's sort of a separate discussion.

So that’s what I thought - but if I hadn’t been exposed to it early I don’t think I’d have gone back to it as an adult.

So I think it’s useful.

> But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.

I think you just had bad teachers. Historical context was always part of the English language/literature curricula at my high school, and it definitely made a difference. I didn’t even go to a good school. Our district was the worst funded in our state with a 40% dropout rate.

It’s certainly true that an adult would tend to have more additional knowledge and be better able to understand a lot of writing, but if you avoid exposing kids to anything they don’t have total understanding of the context of, you won’t really be able to teach them anything. Discussing books can help provide some of that context they’re missing. It’s probably fine to teach arithmetic before algebraic number theory too.

The real value isn't in getting it at the time, it's having those seeds planted, among a population who will likely read very little after graduation, to find fertile ground later.

There's all manner of things I'd Studied in School (primary, secondary, uni) which only became clear to me many, many decades later.

I'm helping an older friend with their one remaining pastime, audiobooks, many of which are re-readings of works they'd first encountered as a teen or young adult (now in their 10th decade). As TFA notes, there's a thickness to many of these works, and even having read them several times already, there's a reward in hearing them again, 60 or 70 years after first encountering them.

I listen in on some of the books. They've covered over 2,000 titles, which is impressive for anyone. One aspect that stands out to me is that I now catch the references to many of them: Herman Hesse commenting on Dante Gabriel Rosetti's "Beata Beatrix" (at the Tate), several references to Erewhon, and numerous places, people, and historical events of which I now have far more context.

I second this. As a teenager, you don't have the life experience to appreciate most classic literature. I don't even think you have it in college, although this is less true.

That being said, there is important literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that should be introduced early, even if they won't really grasp it for decades. Most would be early philosophy and mythology, along with their best refutations. Learning how to read, think, and discuss them is the skill you're really looking to impart on the students to prepare them for real reading as adults.

Unfortunately, the education system is designed to train children to the minimum requirements of their predestined jobs and no further. It's no surprise that schools have made reading and thinking so unpleasant that most people are too traumatized to do it on their own.

> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to.

I agree with this premise - but the arts and humanities are a big part of how we learn these things in the first place!

In other words, you have to start somewhere. Context builds on context.

> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?

Well, you probably had some history classes, maybe watched a movie or two, heard something, maybe asked your parents or the teacher, etc. Also the books usually do set the scene by describing the environments, so you can infer from them.

It also works the other way, after reading that book it gives you some foundation for when you consume other media related to that period/place.

100% agree. The best literature class I ever had was in college. In class our professor spent very little time discussing the book and spent most of the time discussing the author's life and historical context. I understood those books way more than I had ever understood classical literature before.

But fiction is the best way to learn about those past times.

You could read in a history book - in the few sentences your locality's curriculum can spare for Victorian England - that there was a lot of urban poverty in London after the industrial revolution. Or in a geography book, that that area is prone to smog if you build coal-burning factories in it.

But are you really going to get it in the same way as someone who reads and imagines young Oliver Twist asking for "more", or about the smoke and the mud and the fog crawling down over rooftops in Bleak House?

> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?

I think this depends on who is reading it, but not the "obviously" type of depends. I'd imagine a teenager from America reading it would have a different take than someone from the UK (possibly Europe at large as well). A lot of that understanding will come from the context of living in the same area. A lot of history is learned/absorbed without formal teaching. Kids just ask questions about various buildings and the why? type of questions that start forming that kind of context.

I've always thought about that with history - it should be taught to people with enough life experience to realize the subtleties.

On the other hand, art class can teach personal creation to young folks, before it gets optimized away as you grow older in favor of consumption.

The best class I had in high school was American Dream: a mixture of literature and history/social studies. You'd learn about a time and then read a book for that time, like Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle or All Quiet on the Western Front. It was a double period, had two dynamic teachers (one old hippie and one young fun guy), and most of the grades were from papers about how the book and history related. More schools should have something like that.

It’s not only the historical context is missing but you yourself haven’t experienced life to be interested in the topic. If you haven’t had a child or a marriage, or even a friend who had one. Why would you understand that relationship. How can you possibly think about government structures when you’ve never led anything.

One might consider this an argument for an integrated curriculum. Teach Les Misérables during a unit on the French revolution. Teach Huckleberry Finn or Roots when discussing the history of slavery in the US. Teach The Great Gatsby as part of a unit on the roaring 20s and Prohibition or alternately on the second world war.

School in general is terrible at teaching the "everything is connected to everything else" of history.

The point of school is to expose you briefly to many things in hopes that one catches your fancy.

>there isn't time for that

If there is one thing I miss about my adolescence, it is the vast amount of free time. I have never again been able to devote hours upon hours to reading. I used to be able to finish entire books in a couple of days, or a week at most.

I learned not to like literatures, and arts learning them in school. There were some kids who did great, and did not like it. Some liked it.

Giving as much experience to students provides a way to decide their own life.

I still am not fond of arts, and literatures, started digging it a bit.

It's this, and also a lot of required readings were just girl books even in hindsight. I wasn't part of the intended audience. It's like if some day Twilight becomes an American classic.

I think books in education often serve as an means to putting yourself in those scenarios and attempting to learn more about different times and cultures.

I think the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now applies, life is a conversation with experience.. you are not the same person you were in your teens, in your twenties.. and once you go through life some more life you perspectives shift even more drastically. Doesn't mean younger perspectives are useless.. you were more engaged with the world when you younger and more innocent.. you really can't get back to that

I don't know any 50+ year who really looks as young people as anything other than filtered reflections of themselves who will learn on their own..

is innocence unwise and experience embittered? Perhaps but that is a Judgemental and cynical perspective - we need more perspective in this world..and we must expose our best art early so that conversation can begin...The young will get there.

> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.

That suggests a need for better cooperation across subjects. In college I learned calculus at the same time as physics and the two reinforced each other. We should be aligning English reading requirements with what's being taught in history class.

School is about wide exposure to concepts that wouldn’t be encountered elsewhere. The goal is to teach students how to think, not what to think. The actual subject matter is irrelevant.

I don’t remember if the area of a triangle in my geometry homework was 5 or 7 and it genuinely doesn’t matter. What I do remember is that formulas are generalized way to solve problems.

Nobody needs to remember the content of fictional literature. But malleable brains do need to examine it critically so they can examine anything critically.

A book report is simply a demonstration that you can ingest and comprehend non-trivial information. That’s it. The content is irrelevant.

A book report on Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels serves the same purpose. But your instructors need to be familiar in order to assess your competency so they stick with the classics.

Having completed book reports on any topic at all better prepares you to study history (or any topic) later in life because it is literally just “how to internalize information”.

This. I am late bloomer in humanity subjects. I was a typical stem students that didn't really understand any of those classes.

It was not until working after finishing Universities, I started to get back to understand those topics. It also became much more enjoyable once I had the contexts. And learning the contexts is a actually a bigger part of the fun

Wow. So I'm a college instructor (in IT) and you're nailing what I'm trying to defeat to the best of my ability. I do an intro class, and I think most everyone around me believes that my job is to "go over the technologies that are important to students."

And it's kind of like that, but overwhelmingly what I'm really doing is "I find technology to be endlessly fascinating and exciting and important, and here is both how and why, let me see if I can transfer this excitement to you."

If that's there, the learning just happens, that's the easy part.

There is no vampire in all of literature able to suck blood from victims as well as high school English classes are able to suck all the joy from reading.

Here's a seminal work of literature. Instead of taking your time and reading it, write an essay about something you don't give a shit about that's tangentially related to the book.

I feel like it depends on how the classics are introduced.

Being forced to read classics in their original form, while illuminating is unneccesary at the K-12 level where classics, humanities, and arts are meant to spark curiosity and an openness to synthesis.

Using abridged adaptations (eg. Illustrated abridged classics, wishbone) aren't a bad way to impart much of the ethos of those works.