Wolfchild wrote:Are you saying that no high school education should be better than yours?
As a rule, folks from my graduating class could tell you what ten percent of five dollars is,
could point out France on a globe without hesitation and knew when to say "its" instead of "it's". I'm confident the majority of them could spell "midichlorians" without consulting Google, too. My sad little town didn't get it right very often, but the school's academic performance at the time was on the entire state's short list.
Some of the things I've been reading about American and British schoolkids are themselves horror stories. Knowing how to calculate percentages, knowing where major countries are on the globe and being able to manage proper spelling and grammar should be criteria for graduation from
middle school, but if what I'm reading is true, the bulk of today's high school educated Yanks and Limeys couldn't figure these things out without a smart phone and a three day head start.
My strong preference would be have somebody able to prove that I'm misinterpreting what I read, and that most high school kids are getting a
better education than what I had.
Wolfchild wrote:In any case, I don't think that Poe ever published anything that could compare to the antics of Zombie Håkan.
Nor do I, but Poe was just an example. I do remember being required to read up on men abducting others to island settings in order to hunt "the most dangerous game", or about being immured or buried prematurely. Different people find different things upsetting.
I'm still trying to remember some of the other things I was required to read in high school, but not coming up with much. To be honest, I think I used English and literature classes to catch up on my sleep. Can any of the other greybeards chime in with anything they'd had to read in high school from Way Back When that would be called into question today for its horrific content?
Another issue here is age. Like you, I think I'd be calling some people and asking some pretty pointed questions if I were to learn that high school freshmen were being required to read an unedited LTROI in its entirety, but I'd be considerably less upset if the
seniors were studying it. There's a big difference between the twelve years old I was when first going into high school, and the eighteen that most kids are when they collect their diplomas.
And yet another issue was gone over in this thread, but let me add this: I am personally much more discomfited by violence than by sex; for most Americans, it's the other way around. Goodness knows why on the larger scale, but anything involving raw, brutal violence made my twelve year old self skittish and nervous; this may have something to do with having experienced some of it personally. No doubt a few of the others would have been uncomfortable with Haken and his "antics" not because of religious beliefs or conventional moral outrage, but because their hidden personal experience is too similar. Older kids might not be as bothered because, well, they're older, bigger, physically stronger and, one would hope, mentally tougher.
After having seen some of the lists of books banned from school libraries and school curricula, though, and some of the reasons cited
for the banning: I think it's an excellent thing that parents are so concerned with what's happening with or to their children at school, but some of these banned titles leave me questioning just what kinds of questions the parents are asking.
