How would you fix obligatory reading at school?

Lithuania

Well girls in general will just read whatever they are told to read, but boys should be asked what they want to read instead. If boys could decide for themselves what they read, they would hate school less.

Teach the kids that there's knowledge to be found in books and how to find moral lessons in what they're reading. You should probably set it up with an example like "x happened to y because he was z"

this too

Have them start with the Greeks

By which, I mean stuff like Aesop and mythology summaries. Then gradually scale them up to some of the tragedians by high school.

Have teachers who actually care about literature. I don't think kids simply hate being "forced to read." If they have someone enthusiastic about books teaching them how to read deeply they will have a blast.

I would just ban it. Literature shouldn't be imposed into the mind of sheeps. Presented, of course.

Teach girls to read a couple years after boys.

so that way you're only forcing slightly less than half the kids to read something they don't want to. Much better.

I remember for one unit my sophomore year they offered 6 books to the class, and we could choose which we wanted to read. The included Flowers for Algernon, Catcher in the Rye, two different graphic novels for the brainlets and slackers, and a few other books which I forgot. I chose the Autobiography of Malcolm X. It was a good system and I wish it had been implemented more than that one month.

only republicans claim that republican education with their mandatory teaching about reading and counting is a good thing

On high school literature

>About half of what we read were national authors (Australia).
>International works tended to focus on issues such as race, gender, class.
>Literature portrayed as a documentation of class/minority struggles, not as an art form.
>Focus overwhelmingly on themes and symbolism, little attention paid towards literary techniques.

You'd be forgiven for walking away from high school Literature thinking that the highest novels/poetry can aspire to is making a trite anti-racism statement.

>Much better.
yes

We did the exact same thing in my sophomore year

so does lithuania actually have a national literature or do you just read translated polacks like mickiewicz? serious question

in my experience most of the kids that read do it because their parents invested time getting them into it, like mine did. in high school (10 years ago in eastern europe) we got assigned absurd amounts of reading but the only people who benefited from it were the ones who already liked to read because everybody else just looked up plot summaries. since you can't ensure everyone gets decent parenting and individual tutoring is not economically feasible the only solution i can see is something automated. some sort of interactive system where as the kid reads he gets asked questions, can get extra info on the subject, gets to choose out of recommendations for further reading and so on. something that continuously verifies that the kid understands the text, is interested in it, thinks about it etc. a form of digitally guided reading that later gets phased out slowly until it's just normal reading.

Perfume is good, you fucking pleb. If you're talking about Suskind, that is. It's not even depressing in the end.

>in high school we got assigned absurd amounts of reading but the only people who benefited from it were the ones who already liked to read because everybody else just looked up plot summaries
My experience as well. I don’t think this is a problem that school can fix to be honest, unless it’s a really good teacher that the kids look up to.

We do, but there's some poles sprinkled in the curriculum too.
Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz opens with: "Lithuania, my country, thou art like health; how much thou
shouldst be prized only he can learn who has lost thee. To-day
thy beauty in all its splendour I see and describe, for I yearn for
thee." :^)

What federal state are you from? We had one year reading Greek classics like Antigone, another year of Shakespeare and Goethe, the next one featuring Brecht and other more modern authors, etc. Gotta say that I've read some good shit in my schooltime in Mecklenburg.

>Pan Tadeusz opens with: "Lithuania, my country

you and i both know he meant the region of the old polish kingdom and not any independent lithuanian national identity. it's still funny that the lithuanians have to read "their" national epic in translation and the polacks have to see "their" national epic open with the name of a foreign county. no one will ever be happy about his mess.

Good books, I curiously struggled with reading in school outside of the books that weren't shit.

Wew. There's no "evil postmodern neo-marxist cabal" running SACE or IB, you faggot. The latter read The Stranger in my school by the way. I read BNW, Hamlet, Macbeth, Animal Farm and watched movies like Blade Runner - all of which are commentaries on class, gender/sex and even race for some. Because that's what society is, bogan trash.

Why don't you just have everyone pick what they themselves read from that list of books?

I wonder if the UK didn't have such a terrible literacy rating, something like 80% of the population can barely read, then maybe we wouldn't hold Harry Potter in such high regard.

In Ontario, Canada we had a pretty solid curriculum of Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell, Dostoevsky, and others once you got to the final two years of secondary school. In the first two years of secondary school you would have to read Shakespeare, but the novels ranged from decent like Catcher In the Rye to crap like The Kite Runner.

The real problem (since the book list hadn't been corroded yet in my time) was the lack of emphasis on writing. We were evaluated on essays, but the biggest thing they pushed were "adaptations" or "artistic interpretations" in which we were forced to act out scenes from the books, or create artworks inspired by them. Those were a complete waste of time.

Can Lithuanians even write?

fuckin make them read philosophy

I'm unironically wondering if letting plebs read was a mistake

Let the plebs have their smartphones and social media. Literature and philosophy will always be the king's hobbies.

It's like letting the peasants wear purple. Soon enough the market will exclusively feed the rabble and we'll eat nothing or, worse, eat shit

Bavaria. I also had the misfortune of having to go to a Hauptschule, because I didn't speak the language.

That's possible, but that requires a different curriculum, right? I'm assuming that it would be a class reading, because you can be a lot more in depth discussions, so then the priority is to a) minimize how many people actively hate what they're reading and b) give them the option to choose what they're reading. Even if they don't like it, just knowing that it wasn't forced on them, but put to vote makes it a lot easier to stomach reading a book you don't want to read.

if the divide is too big between the students, there's still the option to break it down into two or three groups.

if it's everybody gets to pick their own book, then that's just a book report.

You're doing that badly? Good God, I can't imagine how fucking bad it must be here in Spain; as far as I know about 65% of the population doesn't read at all.

Can't plebs grow out of that shell through literature, though?

general education is a meme, stop giving the peasants books

I don't think so. Plebs will always be content with their mud, but true kings, even if born from a hay craddle, will always strive for more. They have an innate wish to claim their birthright. Sometimes it just hasn't yet been revealed.

My manatory reading from ages 11-18 in Los Angeles:
Number the Stars
Some retarded Bradbury story
Flowers for Algernon (Abridged)
Anne Frank
Farewell to Manzanar
The Pearl/Of Mice and Men
The Odyssey

By the time we graduated we just watched twilight zone, the graduate and citizen kane lol.. Algernon was definitely the best

Give them Finnegan's wake at the beggining of high school and the only way to enter college is by fully understanding the book

The only real way to make kids read is to make them enjoy it from a young age, starting at home, and pushing them towards the classics as they approach puberty. I loved reading but my parents let me read whatever I wanted for the most part and I ended up wasting most of my time on YA fiction; I wish I'd been pushed harder towards authors like Verne and Conrad and London.

I was in gifted program so in high school we had some really good required reading

-brave new world
-heart of darkness
-inferno
-sound and the fury
-the things they carried
-crime and punishment
-borges stories
There were way more

>make them enjoy it from a young age
fuck off fascist retard

make that hot nun from second year teach them. i still know half of merchant of venice far too well

>London
London is YA fiction you pleb.

Have Americans be taught philosophy and critical thinking skills.

You know what I mean, dunkass

>only books approved by me, personally should be allowed
>no women or non-white authors
>we start with the Greeks

This is correct, at the end of my schooling they only prescribed race and gender authors. Fucking "Growing Up Asian in Australia", for real
fuck off lefty cuck

By making it more accessible to students. For example give them a lot of information about the text, it's cultural and historical context and why it's important to read this. Visualizing things/themes by going to museums or show them paintings of how others interpreted a certain scene. As others have said let them choose from the canon (but we are going to start with the Greeks). Also definitely shorten the texts or give them little snippets from the text to get them engaged and interested, e. g. if it were the Iliad a fighting scene or the scene of Hector with his wife, kid and shining helmet, something that resonates with people over time.

I agree. Kids should be made to work then given IQ tests at age 8 and those over 135 are recruited into proper schools and the rest learn how to hammer nails.

I didn't get so much of the race/gender shit but yeah the study of literature was pretty lame.

>oooh! an alliteration! this guy is a genius!

the books i remember being forced to read in HS in USA (NJ)
Fahrenheit 451
The colour purple
Hamlet + R&J + Macbeth
Choice of novel from huge classics list (picked Moby Dick holy shit i fucked up)

Last time I found out back in 2011 or so it was around 70% but I imagine it is much worse now. Always knew there was some kind of literacy epidemic since I would never meet anyone who was passionate about reading like I was then again maybe it's because I live in the north where we have a massive divide in education over the south.

Every time I get worried about this issue I just remind myself that we were doing far worse in previous centuries in that regard and still managed to create high quality literature so I can relax about it.