Does the school system have any right to impose older generations' taste in literature on students?

  • Thread starter LimaUniformNovemberAlpha
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If they're not sure, I would say that as far as tests of critical thinking go, "deciding for themselves who to believe about what to read" sounds like a good supplement to the subsequent essays or book reports themselves. The other reasons she gave are better ones against it, though.

For what it's worth, though, I already mentioned that I felt imposing a specific medium on students is only slightly better than imposing specific stories from within that medium.
 
I’m curious, @LimaUniformNovemberAlpha. Did you enjoy anything about teaching? You seem very critical of the whole education system. There are definitely plenty of things that aren’t ideal, but many of them are beyond a teacher’s capacity to change.

Would I love for every kid to be able to make choices for texts? Absolutely. Likely to happen during my teaching career? Not very. True change is S-L-O-W. We do what we are told to do. Some years it is a basal. Some years it is “real-world” text. Some years it is novels. Some years it is a mixture. Never in my entire 28 years has it been a text-based set of standards, though. It’s always skills-based.
 
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I miss having an audience in front of me in person, even if I didn't always get along with that audience so well. I miss getting paid to travel to whichever town needs more teachers this year, though after this pandemic I'll never look at travel the same way again (Doug Stanhope's remarks on people worried about immigration no longer have an "I feel vaguely uncomfortable with his tone" feel but more of a "this guy is full of it" feel) and given the sheer workload it'd probably have been cheaper to work long hours at some other job and travel in my vacation time. I guess I also miss the authenticity of having a first-hand glimpse at the formative years of people in said towns, before they've learned to have a filter, instead of trying to decide who to believe about said town based on whatever other flawed heuristics come to mind this week.

I still think it'd be more wholesome to have kids compare and contrast historical events than have them do so for fictional ones, but I'm content to agree to disagree at this point. More than anything I guess I'm just relieved that the effect of imposing specific literature on them is more by mistake than by design.
 
Mistake as in unintended side effect, but yeah.
 
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