Quote of the Day
"Why incentivize laziness? High-school students shouldn't be discouraged from grappling, sometimes unsuccessfully, with challenging books, pictures, and songs. A really, really good work of art doesn't bow down to you; you step up to it, and it rewards you. In the end, kids faced with what Chaucer actually wrote may still dislike him, and I'm fine with that; they will have earned that opinion rather than had it handed to them. For heaven's sake, it's easy for kids to see themselves and their peers in a rap song. When they can start to see themselves in a 14th-century poem, then they're actually learning something."
-- Jeff at Quid Nomen Illius
-- Jeff at Quid Nomen Illius
posted by Kate Marie | 9:10 PM | Permalink
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2 comments
2 Comments:
I heartily agree, though of course I would contend that no American teenager is really learning until they can see themselves in a pre-imperial work of Chinese cosmology.
For what it's worth, an earlier draft of that post followed the "14th-century poem" line with a couple of other non-Chaucer examples of mind-expanding artistic experiences, but I cut them. I figured, hey, no one's going to take me that literally...
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