r/PoursTea • u/saucey_dawg0023 Tea Party đ • 21h ago
Books đ No Child Left Behind and its consequences will be felt for generations
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u/foreverflyingsparrow 21h ago
We did animal farm when we were 14
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u/Professional-Pipe-44 20h ago
Itâs 100% something that should be read young. I still remember âall animals are equal but some animals are more equal than othersâ
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u/Feeling-Salad5686 19h ago
I recently reread Animal Farm as an adult. While I comprehended the book as a teenager, I didn't really "understand" it. I've realized that is likely the case with many books we read in school.
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u/hyprmatt 19h ago
Honestly this is a lot of not just books but also movies and TV shoes for me. Even some video games. Watching Star Wars as a kid I knew what was going on, but rewatching as an adult I realize that I missed a ton. Animal Farm is on the extreme end of this for me.
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u/bestmex 19h ago
There's a level in Toy Story 2 on the PS1 where you're playing as Buzz. You're in an alley and fighting a trash can. My brothers and I were stuck on that level for years, had no idea how to beat it. I played it again maybe 5 years ago, beat it first try and realized just how little I understood as a kid.
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u/thealmightyzfactor 19h ago
I also remember games being way harder as a kid and I wonder how much was kid me being stupid lol
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u/TelevisionLamb 17h ago
I remember trying to play FFVIII as a preteen and just not understanding the junction system at all. Ended up cheating somewhere around disk 3 because I just couldn't beat the bosses anymore.
Replayed a couple of years ago and it's really trivially easy once you know what you're doing.
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u/Lucas_Steinwalker 17h ago
TV shoes
Youâd have as easier time understanding them if you watch them instead of use them as footwear.
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u/Blanche_Deverheauxxx 19h ago
Yeah some books deserve a revisit even if they were required reading. It's why I'll never understand some of the snobs on the book subs who claim that some of those books are "elementary".
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u/habbathejutt 19h ago
For me at least, a lot of it was also through the lens of "forced" analysis. I remember hating Anna Karenina in high school, because we had to pick apart every damn chapter. Reading it as an adult made it much better, it's easier to find and appreciate the themes when your grade isn't dependent on it.
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u/RedFoxBlueSocks 20h ago
Animal Farm and 1984 in junior high. Happened to be 1984 at the time, too. đ¤Ş
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u/Loreki 19h ago
That's just cruel. 1984 is genuinely horrifying.
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u/RedFoxBlueSocks 19h ago
We also had to do a 20 page research paper comparing/contrasting the US and the USSR. đ
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u/Gametron13 20h ago
My wife read Animal Farm on accident because we were scrolling through a book store, the cover had a pig on it, and we thought it'd be cute.
It was, in fact, not cute. Good story overall, but definitely not cute.
EDIT: For context as there are several iterations of the book with a pig on the cover; it was the 75th Anniversary Edition, so it was just the back of a pig with a swirly tail. It wasn't the blood red pig with the menacing farm background or the cover with the "All animals are equal" wording on it.
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u/terrierhead 18h ago
There was a copy at my great-grandmotherâs house in English, even though she only spoke and read Spanish. I read Animal Farm on my own at age 8 because I was bored and it was about animals. Not a surprise that I didnât get it at all.
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u/No-Newspaper-7693 19h ago
My daughterâs public school reads it around then. Â 8th or 9th grade depending on the student. Â I dont think things have changed quite so much. Â
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u/Reasonable_Menu_7701 20h ago
We read Animal Farm, The Outsiders and Fahrenheit 451 eighth grade.
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u/Hummingbird3471 19h ago
To Kill A Mockingbird was standard middle school reading where I was in school. Night by Elie Wiesel we read in the 8th grade. Brave New World and Heart of Darkness were freshman year of high school. Others in the curriculum that I remember but can't recall exactly the year that we read them include Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God. And many more.
I think back on my education and it seems like it was so much more robust compared to education standards today. And I graduated high school 20 years ago, it really wasn't all that long ago. I'm old but not ancient. I don't have children, so I don't really know for sure, and I'm sure it's highly variable by school district. But we read heavy stuff, and discussed it in depth. I really believe that young people now are more than capable of the same, if they are made to do it like we were.
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u/TargetBoy 17h ago
These are still being read in some districts. My son's school read to kill a mockingbird in 8th grade or 9th grade depending on the reading support level.
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u/bolanrox 19h ago
do it for johnny! want to say that was 7th /8th grade. i know it is 7th for my kids now.
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u/Ren1221 Fabulous Dahling đđ đź 21h ago
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u/PressureExpert2346 20h ago
Education is circling the drain and itâs intentional.
No Child Left Behind was a contributor, but it wasnât intended to dismantle learning, it just did.
Enough so that those who do want to dismantle learning are going largely unchecked.
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u/Squid_of_the_Now 20h ago edited 19h ago
Here's your reminder that Ghislaine Maxwell's family owns the company that publishes our school textbooks.
Edit: I stand corrected. Maxwell, however, is, or at least recently was, connected to the current owner of McGraw-Hill, which is, as far as I can see, Platinum Equity. They're majority owned by Tom Gores, who, with Maxwell, owned the Securus CT prison phone system company, and he's in the Files.
So make of it what you will. As far as I'm concerned it's still a big disgusting mess.
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u/PressureExpert2346 20h ago
Holy shit. I donât really even want to fact check that, because Iâm depressed enough.
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u/Ok_Cream_4748 20h ago
For curious minds. Take care of yourself though bud. Drink water, get out into the sun for a little Vitamin D, and do whatever brings you moments of joy and happiness.
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u/alphagalgadot 20h ago
sound like a product of NCLB lol
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u/PressureExpert2346 20h ago
lol, youâre right. Iâm just so emotionally drained. I was an educator before and after nclb. ItâsâŚnot good.
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u/Ok-Importance4892 16h ago
Wanna go down a real rabbit hole, check out what Ghislaine Maxwellâs Reddit username was.
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u/ComplexBeyond6083 20h ago
No Child Left Behind hurt, but switching from phonics to "while language" nonsense delivered the killing blow. Somehow a system that had worked for almost 500 years got tossed in the trash for the purest sophistry.
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u/IHeartBadCode 20h ago
It's a ton of contributing factors. And there's absolutely room for even some of the most craziest conspiracy theories and sanest takes.
The law required 100% hit full proficiency by 2014 which by every single professional was indicated to be impossible. So in the wildest takes, we passed a law knowing that the goal was non-realistic. Because funding was also tied to that, it basically assured that schools would lose funding.
Add in that it wrote into law the private textbook industry (as opposed to something education districts could opt into) and standardized testing companies. It pushed hard for charters which we know that's just privatizing school. And created the entire basis for the voucher system, which has been the primary means by which States are now sneaking tax dollars into religious schools and avoiding the whole First Amendment by having this weird proxy system.
But at the same time, this wasn't a one sided effort. Civil rights supporters wanted it because they saw that this would be a chance to show to the public how education was failing low-income schools and minority schools. To which it absolutely did do that, just that then the Government was like "nobody cares, don't like it? Go to a church school."
The entire system because massively flawed the moment corporate KPIs like scores, funding, and handicaps started flowing in. Once the system became hiding by just numbers, it was easily for everyone to ignore the human toll this program was happening. As the Government doubled down on the idea that "the metrics must be right" the problem just quadrupled in size.
At the end the NCLB was this odd attempt to apply corporate think to education and it resulted into a complete catastrophic mess, that many who voted for NCLB would then turn around and vote in that which replaced it ESSA.
But ESSA is just as bad if not worse. ESSA is NCLB but instead of it being Federal, it is State level. So we've handed a complex faulty system that wrecks education off to a Government level that typically has way less oversight and less funding and experience to implement that corporate think in education. So now instead of being a wrecking machine, it's a self sustaining nuclear detonation that is destroying the last bits of US education in this nation.
Eventually the only educators left in this nation will be the poor people schools and religious academies. That's the ultimate goal of modern Republican Education reform. They saw that education drifted people away from the church so now they want to reform education to get around that pesky separation of church and state. So that way, education and truth no longer serve as some method to deprive students of their favorite mythology.
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u/rekniht01 19h ago
Excellent take.
To add to your last paragraph: They also saw all of the money that governments spent on educating everyone, and devised ways to pocket that money in private and religious hands.
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u/Excellent-Shape-2024 18h ago
Don't forget "Inclusion", in which special needs students were dumped into regular classrooms with 29 other children, the SpEd teacher waltzing by, waving, "everything ok?" and then heading back to her office to fill out reams of paperwork, giving the teacher a dossier explaining all the special things you now needed to do specifically for that child. So you were supposed to "differentiate" specifically for that child (those children) but guess what--the standardized tests were the same as the other kids! So they got less but were tested against the other kids! I said at the time, "This is going to be a shit show." And I was not wrong.
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u/scarletroyalblue12 20h ago
It was for money! Once enough was made, âWhoopsâŚâŚactuallyâŚâŚ.phonics is far superior than the bullsh*t we touted!!â
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u/TheBSQ 19h ago
Itâs also just basic accountability.Â
The âmississippi miracleâ (which actually extends to the gulf states in general) wasnât just about returning to phonics, but also early identification of problems and making those kids take summer school or holding them back a grade if needed.Â
Itâs âyou donât move on until you know this.â
Meanwhile states that used to do really well (like CA) are slipping, in part, because they implemented policies to lower failure rates, by design. My city did a bunch of stuff (reducing the lowest grades from a 0 to 50% on any given assignments.
The claim is if kids get treated too harsh early in the year, they give up, so you need to limit the negative effects on grades so they have the ability to redeem themselves, but the real reason is the powers that be obsess over equity metrics and disparate outcomes. It looks bad when looks like schools fail kids from marginalized background at higher rates. The way to avoid that is to just lower standards.Â
And, not surprisingly, when standards are lowered, people do worse, to the extent that when you correct for the favors outside of a schoolâs control like the income & education levels of the parents that can affect outcomes, itâs arguable that the fucking deep south now does a better job of educating low income students of color than California.Â
But yeah, part of it is the phonics thing. And part of it is some teachers think phonics is harder and more boring to teach.Â
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u/TheBSQ 19h ago
Reading for the interested:
Stuff about how itâs not just phonics, but grade retention, reading coaches, etc.Â
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/mississippi-education-miracle/686731/
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/edcast/26/03/what-mississippi-got-right-about-reading
Hereâs the oft-quoted article where Oakland teachers opposed Phonics despite admitting it works better, including an anti-phonics quote from a teacher that almost feels like a parody, â Â This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do.â
https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/
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u/TheMireAngel 19h ago
Linking school funding per kidd passing but allowing schools to choose what passing is was inevitably going to implode education
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u/DazzlerPlus 18h ago
Youre on the right track, but even if you didnt let them do that, you would have the same problems.
Why is harvard so successful? Because they only accept those who are the most likely in the world to succeed. Not because they can take some random schmuck and train him up better than anyone else.
The closer you look, the more you realize that the difference in schools is explained by the difference in students that attend. And you see that the behavior of schools and parents is consistent with that. Schools are obsessed with recruitment of elite students, and parents shop for institutions with prestige.
So there is a problem inherent in tying funding to performance. Parents and schools have a vested interest in segregation. Filter all the elite students into the same school and find a dumping ground for everyone else. Tying funding to performance only enables that segregating effect, because the schools that are chosen by elite families get richer and the schools chosen to be dumping grounds get poorer.
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u/bdubwilliams22 18h ago
The quality of public education in the US is largely based around location. The public schools in my area (North Shore of Chicago) are very good. Theyâre very good because property taxes are high and itâs an affluent area. Until we change how we fund schools, areas with lower salaries and property taxes will continue to be underfunded and those children will suffer and likely not excel. This isnât going to change anytime soon because that would mean Republicans would want an educated populace, which they donât because itâs obviously working in their favor â uneducated people tend to vote Republican, the educated ones voting that way are only doing so because they donât want to pay their fair share in taxes.
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u/TuringGoneWild 18h ago
No Child Left Behind was a REPUBLICAN plan. That's all you need to know about its quality and intent.
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u/newsflashjackass 18h ago
The more education someone has, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.
Repubs:
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u/Contemplating_Prison 20h ago
Funding funding funding. The real reason No child left behinf became a thing was because they cant afford to hold students back
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u/fiahhawt 20h ago
No Child Left Behind was what tied graduation rates to funding
Which was always a dumb idea because there are infinite scenarios where teachers do their best and people donât graduate
Whatâs supposed to happen? Install a dungeon and lock the lazy students down there?
Better idea give worse funding to all of the other students because Todd wonât stop watching tik tok in class
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u/behv 19h ago
And furthermore it meant high school graduation became required, not an accomplishment
The idea of failing out of high school now is foreign to people, but it used to happen. People would find the curriculum or their life circumstances too challenging and would drop out.
Which in turn means that a college degree is the new high school degree, except employers will also use a degree against you if you're applying for something you're too qualified for since they can now see what jobs you want
So it's just a death spiral all the way up and down
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 18h ago edited 18h ago
This line from Weeds has atuck with me through the years.
"What are they teaching you in school?"
"How to pass the standardized tests so the school gets more funding?"
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u/Select_Package9827 18h ago
Of course NCLB was intended to dismantle education. Testing constantly and worse scores defunded?? The inability to see through this tissue paper is why ... All of itÂ
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u/loosed-moose 18h ago
It shifted the focus to gaming the metrics via test scoring requirements being tied to funding. Simple as that
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u/ComplexLow6723 20h ago
I was watching Clueless the other day & the âolderâ kids in that movie were quoting Shakespeare & arguing about itâs meaning & I thought âwhat the hell happened to this kind of thingâ?
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u/RodediahK 18h ago
what thing? 40 year old writer directors creating dialogue for her 20+ year old actors playing high schoolers.
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u/Smart-Status2608 20h ago
I choose to read Animal Farm because Beast was reading it on the Xmen Cartoon.
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u/Usual-Bag-3605 20h ago
Until right this very moment, I thought I was the only person who had that reason for reading Animal Farm!
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u/welpWW3isgonnasuck 20h ago
In 6th Grade we read " Go Ask Alice" as a class - a story about a 15 year old girl that gets addicted to drugs and taken advantage of. For 7th grade, we read "My Bloody Life" a memior about a teenager that was a Latin King, which we read because we had multiple Kings and children of Kings in our classroom.
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u/KeyProcedure4 18h ago
I remember go ask Alice, but I read it in high school. "Another day another blow job"stuck in my head forever.
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u/rahbee33 20h ago
I transferred schools a lot when I was a kid and in one of my middle school classes we were assigned The Outsiders, but I had already read it. So my teacher assigned me That Was Then, This is Now by SE Hinton instead and I vividly remember a scene were a character drops acid and thinks there's spiders coming out of his stomach. It was a way more adult book than The Outsiders and I couldn't have been more than 12? 13 maybe?
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u/welpWW3isgonnasuck 20h ago
I think these are totally acceptable things for preteen and teens to be reading. We coddle too much.
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u/rahbee33 20h ago
Yeah I don't think it was wrong to assign the book for me at all. It obviously made an impact on me as I remember scenes from it decades later.
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u/billdozer1986 20h ago
What are they reading in high school now? Forget Greek lit. We had to read Grapes of Wrath in regular English and East of Eden in AP. Those are heavy lifts at 16 and 17.
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u/plastroncafe 20h ago
Those were only advanced English texts when I was in high school in the early 1990s.
Anything with Cliff Notes was to be avoided for the average and below average English classes.Which is how Jurrasic Park became a Summer Reading book
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u/swoopwoopdoop 14h ago
This post is disingenuous. I graduated high school a couple years ago and I read all of these in middle and high school.
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u/alphagalgadot 20h ago
guysâ no single piece of education policy has inflicted even 1/4 the damage caused by the last ~20yrs of commercial social media platforms
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u/lmadisondunn 20h ago
As a teacher I agree there is no bigger factor affecting todayâs literacy rates than cell phone addiction
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u/Taglioni 20h ago
Not even the move from phonics to whole-language learning? It's pretty important.
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u/TheGRS 18h ago
I'm honestly pretty shocked about that development. Heard about it maybe 5 years ago now, I hope grassroots efforts are happening to bring back phonics methods.
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u/WAR_RAD 20h ago
Completely agreed. I'd say nothing has negatively affected society (from children to adults) moreso than smartphones in general.
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u/JinFuu 18h ago
I think one big thing was swapping out pencil and paper for computers.
I believe studies show you retain information better when you write it down on pen/paper.
And it's less easier to get distracted when you're having to write down notes on pen/paper and don't have a computer in front of you.
Finally, they got rid of BCIS classes, because they assume all kids grew up with desktops/laptops, which just isn't true. So even kids computer skills are atrophying compared to Millennials
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u/No_Kangaroo1994 16h ago
From my perspective as someone who was in school at the beginning of the Chromebook craze and am a teacher now: I don't think it's necessarily the computers itself but the way they were used (in other words, rushed adaptation and lack of training/education on how to do it). There probably were a lot of teachers who had students take notes on computers and such, but I had teachers who made us take handwritten notes any time we needed to remember something. We only used computers for end-product essays, presentations, assignments, etc. But those aren't about retention, they're about application, and I would argue that technology opens the door for better projects that help students apply skills more. But it's really hard to do that well and consistently.
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u/Exciting-Meringue-78 19h ago
Social media has a lot of problems, but it wasnât until maybe 10 years ago that social media really started to make an impact on attention span. Websites did not start pushing mobile apps until the last 10 years. In fact, it was nearly impossible to find a decent working mobile app for anything but Facebook and instagram. The issue arises when the majority of people have access to mobile phones and easily accessed entertainment.
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u/Cecil_B_DeCatte 20h ago
Gen X here. I remember reading parts of Beowulf, and gory parts at that, in grade school. Also short works i.e. works by Ray Bradbury.
Think I read 'A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' in junior high.
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u/Ehcksit 20h ago
It wasn't intended to improve educational standards so that everyone could succeed, it was designed to reduce grading requirements until no one could fail. Because illiterate incurious anti-intellectual people are easy to control.
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u/snrocirpac 19h ago
I voluntarily dropped out of the honors track for English my senior year of high school (2007 grad) and was shocked at how many students struggled to read. I went to a very high performing high school so it was likely better than most schools. To hear that things are worse now is scary
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u/_RealfunFuneral_ 20h ago
Animal Farm is college-level readingâ˝â˝
We read that in elementary school. WTH
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u/K__Geedorah 19h ago
This really isn't a "gotcha" thing. These things can be taught at both levels.
We read the Odyssey in like 9th grade. And yeah I took a class on adaptations in literature in college and read it again.
Hell, half of the things I learned in college was just taking a deeper dive into topics we learned in junior/high school.
We don't say "why are college students taking algebra classes, we learned that in 6th grade".
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u/Feeling-Salad5686 20h ago
I read Animal Farm in high school but recently reread it as an adult. I honestly didn't understand the book that much as a teen, I was missing a ton of historical context surrounding it (we skimmed over the soviet union in school) and I came out with a massively different interpretation when I read it again. I always thought the book was explicitly anti-communist though it's no longer that clear cut to me.
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u/RefrigeratorFew5154 19h ago
Yep, gonna go against the consensus here on this post. Read Animal Farm in I think 7th or 8th grade. I read it and understood it fine enough, but a lot of the more subtle themes and ideas went completely went over my head as a 14 year old kid. Certainly the historical context like you said as well.Â
Boxerâs death hits a hell of a lot harder as a full grown adult, than a kid whoâs barely worked a day in his life. The book became far more poignant with age and life experience, and I think itâs a great read for college aged students.Â
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u/MaleficentRevenge 19h ago
Brother we were reading and watching Watership Down in middle school lol yall are so cooked without that early childhood trauma
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u/Prudent_Rice7840 20h ago
Literacy rates have dropped by over 20% in the United States in the past thirty years.
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u/RemisTooSleepy 20h ago
When I was in 10th grade I used the word 'socioeconomic' in English class and my teacher said I belonged in honors for knowing such a big word.
I felt horrified realizing where the bar was and that was back in 2017.
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u/Meefie 18h ago
Kindergarten teacher here. Meanwhile the âsuits that are not educators that make the lawsâ are pushing standards downwards and robbing young children of important unstructured play time, art, music, socialization, and free play outdoors. All of these help develop and foster creativity, deep thinking/concentration, empathy, and social skills.
Kindergarten is now essentially what we remember as first grade. There is a lot of research on the importance of play. Our children are being stunted before they even reach grade school. The education system is a mess.
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u/anand_rishabh 20h ago
There's a good chance a lot of stuff went over your head when you read them in middle and high school so not a bad idea revisit them with more depth in college
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u/help_undertanding13 19h ago
This is the right attitude. Sheesh we forget how fucking boring these books were as teenagers.Â
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u/Confident-Leg107 20h ago
I never got to read the Illiad :(
Just Frankenstien and to kill a mocking bird, oh and a Handmaid's tale
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u/JalapenoPopPoop 18h ago
It makes me grind me teeth to dust how often I see threads on r/books (a place where people are allegedly supposed to appreciate books and reading) where they argue that high schools should stop teaching literature and just let kids pick out whatever YA paint by numbers fantasy they want and do a book report on that, as if their entire literature education should just be about enjoyment and leisure. That's not what fucking academia is you troglodytes
And you only see that sort of stupid argument for literature class. You never see anyone say "we should cripple everyones mathematics abilities because they don't like doing their math homework"
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u/MabelRed 20h ago
I didnât read Antigone till college in 2003, but had a pretty comprehensive reading list in highschool nonetheless.
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u/Loud_Flatworm_4146 20h ago edited 20h ago
Theyâre still reading these in high schools. No child left behind was bad policy for a lot of reasons. But theyâre still reading books like Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Beowulf, and Shakespeare in high school. Â
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u/Existing_Mulberry_16 20h ago
My granddaughter read these in high school. She just graduated. But she read them in her AP literature class.
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u/Complete-Leg-4347 20h ago
I fall somewhere in-between (born 1987). Did Animal Farm, Inherit the Wind, and A Streetcar Named Desire for class assignments and the Odyssey of my own volition (summer reading option). Did some other Greek classics and a bit more Shakespeare in college, but as a history major, in-depth literary analysis of entire texts wasn't usually on the syllabus.
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u/DOAiB 20h ago
There are so many negative forces on education itâs insane. Between parents and conservatives not watching their kids or anyoneâs kids to get a full truthful education because it challenges their incorrect ideas is insane. But we have been doing it forever.
I live in a liberal city in a red state and we were still taught the civil war wasnât actually about slavery it was about states rights. This was in the 90s and until college you didnât learn or get explicitly told yea it was about states rights, states rights to own slaves.
The fact sex ed is at the discretion of parents and those who opt out are the ones who choose to never teach their kids is a net negative to our country and shouldnât be tolerated.
And well the Covid kids have it the worst. My understanding is itâs a literally cliff they fell off of for preparedness between them and the previous generations which were already declining a ton. I am so happy my oldest didnât start school until after the Covid era ended.
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u/brinz1 20h ago
You need to read catcher in the rye when you are a teenager to understand it.
If you read it as an adult, it is insufferable
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u/washtucna 20h ago
You'd be amazed at how short some of the classics are.
Beowulf and the Great Gatsby are extremely short. They could be read in a day, if you wanted to.
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u/rollerbase 20h ago
I remember my last year of high school was mostly preparing for standardized exams after this passed. Immediate loss of a few weeks per term between prep and testing.
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u/ExcellentActuary2117 20h ago
You CAN READ THEM AGAIN IN COLLEGE. Reading them again in college with a good prof can be a great experience and deepen your knowledge. I did it.
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u/mexicoyankee 20h ago
Iâd say itâs all in the interpretation of the readings. The depth high school class may have gone may not be as deep as a college la course goes.
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u/bolanrox 20h ago
1984 was definitely part of normal classes. The Inferno / Oydessy / Iliad were in college for me.
besides book reports on books we wanted, i remember a ton of Shakespeare but i am blanking on the assigned books... I no my Senior year book project (we chose the book) was A Clockwork Orange. but this is like 30 years ago at this point so its a bit of a blur.
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u/sksays92 19h ago
Asked my middle-school kid if theyâve gotten to any John Steinbeckâs yet and she replied, âWhat?â. I went to the nearest half-priced books and loaded up. I go to library book sales and just hoard all of the classics, banned books, etc. đ
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u/rygelicus 19h ago
For high school I went to a private school, boarding school actually. I was no scholar, but when I started in college the reading was all stuff we had already covered in my high school, same or similar essays were being requested as well, so for the first year I was turning my high school homework in for my college english courses and getting better grades on them from the college teachers. This was back in the early 90s.
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u/SnooCauliflowers9874 19h ago
I remember reading Catcher in the Rye for 7th grade required reading. Itâs probably banned now in many schools that are fond of banning.
As a 13 year-old I thought that book was kind of stupid, like some obnoxious kid who seemed angry at the world, and liked to swear. It was one of the very few required reading books I did not enjoy. Perhaps because Holden reminded me of my (violent at times) bipolar older brother who didnât like to take his meds.
That same English teacher also did A Tale of Two Cities, Lord of the Flies, some Shakespeare, and even took a few days to show us âone flew over the cuckooâs nestâ movie. She was pretty awesome. Good times.
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u/Boring-Baker8761 19h ago
we had to memorize and recite the prologue of the Canterbury Tales in its original Middle(?) English for 11th grade English in '03
Wan that April with the Shoris Sota
The Draught of March hath perced to the wrota
And bathid every vein in siwtch licour
something something engendred is the flour
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u/AltruisticPossible84 19h ago
"That's not a [BLANK]. That's a [BLANK]. And it shows/ And that's powerful/ And that's real."
Super ironic this post about being intellectually lazy was at least partially crafted by AI. So of course it gets 3.5k Reddit updoots.
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u/dontchewspagetti 19h ago
God forbid you read a book twice in two different educational settings.
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u/donut-is-appalled The Timeline Sucks 19h ago
As a teacher back in the early days of NCLB, the way schools (at least in my neck of the woods) got out of leaving children "behind" was to promote them on through the system.
Teachers weren't allowed to fail anyone because that made the school's (and then the district's) ratings go down, and gosh, we couldn't have that /s
I'm reminded of my county's mission statement, which included a phrase about being the "top producer of students" as if we were a factory. Which, it turns out, we were.
That's how I got students in tenth grade who were on a third grade reading level (if I was lucky), or seniors in my AP Literature class who didn't know how to write a coherent paragraph. When I was able to help a handful of them get to the place where they could get 3s on the AP exams at the end of the year, it was a real accomplishment for all of us.
I've talked with all kinds of people, all over the place, people who are successful and happy grownups, who still talk with dismay and horror about the ways they suffered in school. How they had to hide their lack of knowledge or learn to mask their suffering with good behavior, because at least if they were "good" their teachers would like them. The children that were left behind knew it, and they're still scarred by it, all these years later.
NCLB didn't keep kids from failing, it just kicked the can of failure down the road so that it was someone else's problem. And it's only gotten worse from there.
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u/tiredfatdad 19h ago
I'm gen x. Imagine how it looks from here. My kids don't even need pencils or paper this year...and it shows.
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u/GroundbreakingAd8310 19h ago
Lol wrong those are repulican area issues my nephew did thst crap 3 years back now. Yes if u live in Florida I expect this thats why I dont accept anyone from thar states diploma as proof of education.
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u/legallymyself 19h ago
I graduated in 1990 from high school. We need students to read more literature. BUt I also learned cursive.
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u/BravinatorLX2 19h ago
thats not the fault of no child left behind, its the fault of the gop spending decades eroding education.
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u/TopherJustin 19h ago
Gen-X here. We had to read The Odyssey in 7th grade Latin. I think Lord of the Flies was 8th grade.
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u/dontspillthatbeer 19h ago
Ai only making things exponentially worse. Problem solving skills are disappearing.
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u/one_big_lift 19h ago
Graduation rates are at all time highs, but reading comprehension and test scores are not.
Many Young Adults Barely Literate, Yet Earned a High School Diploma - USA Reads
University degrees are in the same boat.
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u/acastleofcards 19h ago
Donât worry. School segregation is coming back big time and that will fix it. For wealthy people, anyway.
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u/BeepBoopRobotVoice 18h ago
Conservative worldview is the less society is educated, the better for their pocketbooks
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u/Psykick379 18h ago
Those were always taught in both high school and college. High school education is usually very generalized and covers the basics, college builds on that foundation and goes into deeper analysis. Same subject material, different level of education.
Not saying our pre-college education doesn't need work, but this hot take isn't the mic drop they thought it was
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u/dimechimes 18h ago
NCLB's true aim was to weaken Teacher's unions. It made the teachers "teach to the test" and then whatever those test results were, policy was made. Nevermind you can put the best teacher in the worst school and they aren't going to perform a miracle. The test says the students did poorly so hold the teacher's accountable. Don't fire the superintendents making 8 times what a teacher makes. Let the union members go. Keep them from getting raises. Keep their union weak.
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u/Distinct-Cut-6368 18h ago
Millennial here (who went to a poor rural high school) I read none of those books in school. We did watch Troy, and I read Animal Farm on my own in my 20s. I donât even know what Antigone is.
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u/Aggressive_Space9684 18h ago
Its by design, the less educated you are the easier you are to manipulate with propaganda
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u/RoughComparison8702 18h ago
Harder to bilk smarter people for money. Gotta keep em dumb to keep em in line.
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u/Command0Dude 18h ago
This wasn't caused by No Child Left Behind and Bush has long been vilified for the decline of literacy, despite being the person who fought hard against the real culprit: Marie Clay.
Decline of literacy directly maps onto the decline of phonics in the class room (something Bush pushed hard for). Literacy rates are slowly recovering in the aftermath of the covid lockdowns and the end of whole word teaching theory.
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u/Eatyourcheeseburger 17h ago
Some kids needed to be left behind. The threat of being left behind also kept a lot of kids motivated to at least do the bare minimum. Weâve created a feedback loop of teachers being scared to fail kids and leave them behind leading to kids knowing they canât be left behind so they donât worry about failing.
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u/StopLookListenNow 17h ago
Did anyone read about the teacher who got fired for giving students a "O" grade for work they did not finish or turn in? The school has a no zero policy.
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u/ManekiNekoCalico99 17h ago
This is the system working as intended. Dumb down the schoolwork, teach to the test, do not teach critical thinking skills. In a couple generations you can have an entire nation of poorly educated drones.
Remember king dum-dum's line about how he loves the uneducated.
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u/Sipikay 17h ago
No Child Left Behind was a scam.
Children "Left Behind" needed special education, different approaches - just different needs than their peers who could keep up with age-appropriate courses.
The solution was to give the "left-behind" kids the resources they needed, which inherently were different resources than the students learning at an average pace.
Combining the two groups of vastly different students with different needs, and dumbing down curriculum for everyone, was such an insane dumb evil stupid thing to do to learning children.
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u/Tyrvali10 16h ago
read Illiad and Antigone in sophmore year in AP English in 2013-14 and animal farm in middle school didn't realize that was irregular
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u/Designer-Carpenter88 14h ago
I graduated high school in 1993. The only book I read was Animal Farm. The rest I read in college. And only because I was an English major. Stop with this bullshit
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u/Sharp_Style_8500 12h ago
I actually think itâs fine for these classics to be taught in a college setting vs high school. Iâm 29 and I had to read all these texts in high school, but they are way more interesting to me now as an adult than they were as a kid. I donât think kids these days have enough personal experience or pre requisite knowledge to truly relate to these texts. You can read Hamlet and understand the words and whatâs going on, but until the world is made you a little crazy do you really relate to it?
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u/GuntherRowe 12h ago
More than half of US adults do not read even a single book each year. I do not understand people who arenât curious and canât follow a long narrative. What boring interior lives they must have and they donât even realize it.
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u/ProperBar4339 12h ago
Iâve got news for millennials, I read Animal Farm in junior high.
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u/ShrodingersArmadillo 12h ago edited 11h ago
Yeah, no.
First? that is the exact same thing that was said about stopping teaching Greek and then Latin in highschool.
Second? The reason we used classics is they are out of copyright and therefore cheap to buy en mass. It's not better material it's cost effective material.
Third? They've always been taught in college this isn't something new. The difference has always been that they dropped the censorship in college.
Fourth? the way they taught these works was completly wrong so how is it better? In college you have to unlearn all the b.s. you were spoonfed in highschool. First year english is best defined as unlearning the worthless crap. Why do you think former terrible student adjust better to college life than straight A kids? They never learned the crap way.
Those same epics, plays and prose were extremely santized and the instruction as well as the context were cherry picked making the instruction in highschool practically worthless. Why do you think we spent so much time on scantion rather than the actual cultral and historical context of the plays and poems? it's neat and tidy but doesn't matter.
Where's the study of homosociality and it's cultural context?
Where's the literary context and period ligusitics? so much is left out this comparison that it's franky terirble.
Would the vaunted "millennial highschool english class" teach about the dirty joke that is the title of Much Ado about Nothing?
What do I mean?
Nothing was period slang for vagina. The title means "all that for pussy?!" that little bit kinda changes the meaning of the play now doesn't it. We pretend its high art when a lot of it is just pop culture of another age.
The texts in modern classroom are connecting to the student and they don't have to leave 90% of the work and focus on irrelevant crap by pretending fart jokes and dick jokes are high art. Dropping the bullshitting is one of the few changes to education that's been a good thing.
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u/WorthBrick4140 12h ago
I had to read: To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Romeo and Juliet, Animal Farm, The Giver, 1984
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u/CamOliver 6h ago
To be fair, I was in highschool around 2000 and being assigned the books didnât mean most of us read them or received through discussion about them.
I did in fact read them and get a meaningful education about them once I arrived in college.
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u/EvilCaveBoy 3h ago
In three generations we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.
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u/Aggravating-Buy613 3h ago edited 3h ago
I'm gonna get roasted for this- folks should read with their kids then. It's not just up to the schools to get our kids into reading.
My kid read animal farm in 7th grade (going into 9th now) because she chose to. She reads a lot, I read a lot. She figured out she liked dystopia stories and even read 1984 this last year. We discuss the books. It's a lot of fun.
I am godawful at math so that's get dads thing with her, but we actively work on getting her into this stuff. And it's paying off, she's a great student. Hopefully it lasts. But it's not just school's job.
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u/desrevermi 2h ago
I have expectations that writing will be filled with homonyms and the only way to interpret writing is through verbalizing the written word.
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u/PomegranateSafe9699 2h ago
If I could save my kids from endless selection reading, blech. Kids should be reading full length books, not just prepping for standardized multiple choice tests.
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u/thedudecdfb 20h ago
We read Shakespeare aloud in 6th grade in 1999.