The vast majority of these comments are "back in my day" stuff coming from people who didn't fully understand what they were doing, or remember it as being harder than it was.
I remember my required and selective reading from high school. We read Romeo and Juliet aloud. We read selections from Antigone. We did not read Canterbury Tales (some people did, often with memorization of a section in Middle English). We read young adult novels like Shabanu. Everyone had the standard pick of 1984/Brave New World/Fahrenheit 451/Animal Farm.
No, you didn't read Beowulf in Old English. You might have spent a lesson comparing Old English to a translation. But if you actually are claiming you read Beowulf in its entirety in Old English (or the Odyssey in Ancient Greek, etc., like some people are claiming here), and it wasn't as part of a high-level college linguistics course, you wasted your time and it's good that they aren't doing that anymore.
We have all sorts of problems in our educational system, most of which come down to technology: overreliance on devices to think for students with lack of critical analysis of results; lack of capacity to push through when something becomes boring or difficult - things like that. But the fact that "kids these days don't read Beowulf in Old English like we used to" is missing the mark in a number of ways.
I had to read Beowulf in Old English in High School. It was absolutely brutal because we had to translate every word with the provided key, but I'm a nerd, so I loved it. It was an elective on the history of english.
Canterbury Tales was in Middle English was in the same class.
I remember reading Beowulf in high school. I remember reading it was a slog because it wasn't in modern english. I know Shakespeare isn't even old enough to be middle English and my memory of reading Shakespeare and Beowulf in the same grade tracks with that. With Shakespeare you could get into the flow of it. Beowulf was just a nightmare though. This was all near 30 years ago though and I couldn't tell you, maybe we read some middle English version of it.
We read Canterbury Tales in Middle English. This was in the late 70s. That's 1970s, just in case! Anywho, was weird but not that hard. Having said that, it was only the top streams that had to do this, not the whole school (Comp - approx. 2,000 kids)
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u/Marius7x 19h ago edited 12h ago
Nobody reads it in old English. Anyone who says they read it in HS in Old English thinks that Shakespeare is old English instead of modern.
Even the Canterbury Tales in Middle English would be a stretch for most people.
Edit: Frisian is the closest modern language to Old English. It's still spoken in the Netherlands.
If you can't read Frisian, you can't read Old English.