Ask Lemmy

You could convince me that the high school curriculum is designed to take any interest in reading out of teenagers. K-8 tends toward stories that are intended for children to enjoy because that's how child psychology works, but from the age of 14 on up it's crusty old shit written in dead languages or in English so old no one remembers what the slang words mean, about shit no one cares about anymore.

Shakespeare is the classic example. Shakespeare was kind of the Joss Whedon of his day; he not only wrote in Ye Olde Englishe, but he wrote in slangy quippy word play-ey Ye Olde Englishe. Like, imagine high school students of the 2400s taking turns reading the script of Firefly out of a textbook, the kid who got assigned to read Mal's lines tripping over stuff like "And I think you weren't burdened with an overabundance of schooling." 25th century school kids are going to write papers about 21st century attitudes to homosexuality due to the use of the word "sly" in one throwaway line in the episode set in a whorehouse. I really want to hear a 25th century English teacher tastefully describing who and what Saffron is. Then in their Junior year they're going to do three random episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

That's what studying Shakespeare is like in a modern high school. It would blow William Shakespeare's mind that school children in nations that didn't exist during his lifetime are taught what "Romeo and Rosemary begin with a letter" means.

Why do we do it this way?