"You are in effect making the argument that "tough learning" has no place in the curriculum.... you seem to have a particular problem with canonical literature."
No, which is why I explicitly mentioned Swift, Dickens, and Melville. We read both Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal in school (nowhere near a complete list, of course), and even if it wasn't everybody's "favorite literature ever", at least it was comprehensible to people. You could send students home with a reading assignment, and they might actually do it, and then when they come to class the next day, they can discuss the text, and find out the deeper meanings, rather than having to come to class to find out just what the hell it was they just read. This is not a valuable use of literature time. Also, as I said, I read quite a bit of the "canon" of my own free will and could read Ye Olde Texte far better than most people of my age. More than once I was given a school assignment to read a book I had already read.
Your story is not a counter to my point; it proves my point. You had to be interested and bring a lot of effort to the task of reading those things. This makes them grotesquely unsuitable to be using them in high school where those things are not generally available. That you found it rewarding is great. I too have done that, both in the computer domain and the literature domain. But an awareness of what it took is precisely why I say it's a terrible approach to general education.
I never said it was a worthless sham. I said it wasn't worth teaching in high school, and that it should be left for college. Based on the age you had your experiences, you hardly provide a counterexample for that. It would be way better to simply allude to Shakespeare's genius and let motivated people find it, than spend valuable time jamming it down students throats only for them to see an incomprehensible mass that they are never again motivated to look into. There's no way school could every have given you that experience. (Maybe a really motivated teacher, but even then it would have been a personal interaction, not a schooling thing.)
Basically, my position is that you have to educate the students you have, not the students you wish you had. And, if we are going to build our education system around teaching masses of children, building our core curricula around something that will maybe appeal to one or two kids per year, and then only several years later, is such a waste when we could be teaching people things that might actually encourage rather than discourage the pursuit of further learning.
So often the choice is presented as "Shakespeare or nothing", or "only incomphrehensible literature or nothing". You sort of have those memes in your response too, when you read into my post that I'm against literature. But when I spell that out, it's obvious that there are tons of other choices. There's thousands of other school-worthy candidates that won't have the side effect of firmly squashing all future interest in "literature".
(There's also a frequently unrecognized assumption that we have infinite time for students to learn in, and therefore it is sufficient to establish that something is "good", and therefore we then put it in the curriculum. That's not even close to true. Our time as students is terribly limited compared to what there is to learn, and it's getting worse every year. The question is not "Is Shakespeare worth learning?". Duh. Of course it is. But then, there's enough "stuff worth learning" to fill your lifetime and beyond. The question is, is it the best thing to learn? That's what I'm challenging. Given the enormous liabilities that teaching Shakespeare... oh, and by the way, C, since the parallel continues to hold(!)... brings to the table, including the very-real risk of completely destroying any interest in literature/programming that may have been present, why shouldn't we teach the things that don't carry that risk?)
No, which is why I explicitly mentioned Swift, Dickens, and Melville. We read both Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal in school (nowhere near a complete list, of course), and even if it wasn't everybody's "favorite literature ever", at least it was comprehensible to people. You could send students home with a reading assignment, and they might actually do it, and then when they come to class the next day, they can discuss the text, and find out the deeper meanings, rather than having to come to class to find out just what the hell it was they just read. This is not a valuable use of literature time. Also, as I said, I read quite a bit of the "canon" of my own free will and could read Ye Olde Texte far better than most people of my age. More than once I was given a school assignment to read a book I had already read.
Your story is not a counter to my point; it proves my point. You had to be interested and bring a lot of effort to the task of reading those things. This makes them grotesquely unsuitable to be using them in high school where those things are not generally available. That you found it rewarding is great. I too have done that, both in the computer domain and the literature domain. But an awareness of what it took is precisely why I say it's a terrible approach to general education.
I never said it was a worthless sham. I said it wasn't worth teaching in high school, and that it should be left for college. Based on the age you had your experiences, you hardly provide a counterexample for that. It would be way better to simply allude to Shakespeare's genius and let motivated people find it, than spend valuable time jamming it down students throats only for them to see an incomprehensible mass that they are never again motivated to look into. There's no way school could every have given you that experience. (Maybe a really motivated teacher, but even then it would have been a personal interaction, not a schooling thing.)
Basically, my position is that you have to educate the students you have, not the students you wish you had. And, if we are going to build our education system around teaching masses of children, building our core curricula around something that will maybe appeal to one or two kids per year, and then only several years later, is such a waste when we could be teaching people things that might actually encourage rather than discourage the pursuit of further learning.
So often the choice is presented as "Shakespeare or nothing", or "only incomphrehensible literature or nothing". You sort of have those memes in your response too, when you read into my post that I'm against literature. But when I spell that out, it's obvious that there are tons of other choices. There's thousands of other school-worthy candidates that won't have the side effect of firmly squashing all future interest in "literature".
(There's also a frequently unrecognized assumption that we have infinite time for students to learn in, and therefore it is sufficient to establish that something is "good", and therefore we then put it in the curriculum. That's not even close to true. Our time as students is terribly limited compared to what there is to learn, and it's getting worse every year. The question is not "Is Shakespeare worth learning?". Duh. Of course it is. But then, there's enough "stuff worth learning" to fill your lifetime and beyond. The question is, is it the best thing to learn? That's what I'm challenging. Given the enormous liabilities that teaching Shakespeare... oh, and by the way, C, since the parallel continues to hold(!)... brings to the table, including the very-real risk of completely destroying any interest in literature/programming that may have been present, why shouldn't we teach the things that don't carry that risk?)