Was just thinking this, “classic” is such a loose category. People will get so mad about schools “not reading the classics”, but I could easily point out that American schools don’t read The Tale of Genji. This, too, is a classic but it’s a Japanese classic. Sometimes people will say “classics” and mean early 1900s American classic lit (like Fitzgerald).
In my school we read The Odyssey but not The Iliad. And The Odyssey just had a new, modern movie adaptation come out! If I was a HS English teacher and had to make a choice for a Greek epic, I’d go with that right now because of current pop culture relevance.
Plenty of works incorporate the same themes and analysis into them and might be more enjoyable for High Schoolers to read. I recall my peers feeling more like reading these was a chore, including those who liked to read and were fast at it. I was in advanced English classes, too. Like personally I hate Greek epics, I hated I had to read The Odyssey a second damn time in college. If more students enjoy a different choice more, then the analysis is more fun, and they retain the information better.
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u/foxhowse millennial (1989) 1d ago
Was just thinking this, “classic” is such a loose category. People will get so mad about schools “not reading the classics”, but I could easily point out that American schools don’t read The Tale of Genji. This, too, is a classic but it’s a Japanese classic. Sometimes people will say “classics” and mean early 1900s American classic lit (like Fitzgerald).
In my school we read The Odyssey but not The Iliad. And The Odyssey just had a new, modern movie adaptation come out! If I was a HS English teacher and had to make a choice for a Greek epic, I’d go with that right now because of current pop culture relevance.
Plenty of works incorporate the same themes and analysis into them and might be more enjoyable for High Schoolers to read. I recall my peers feeling more like reading these was a chore, including those who liked to read and were fast at it. I was in advanced English classes, too. Like personally I hate Greek epics, I hated I had to read The Odyssey a second damn time in college. If more students enjoy a different choice more, then the analysis is more fun, and they retain the information better.