Agreed.
“Like a lot of American kids, I read [Lord of the Flies] in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn’t get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.”
-Paul Graham, Why Nerds are Unpopular
I like how this essay gets off to an awkward start and then explodes with insight.
Haha, yeah, so often in school they tried to get us to figure out the meaning of books that we were just totally incapable of understanding. Guess what! Kids don’t have a huge library of personal life experiences! They haven’t been reading nonfiction books, reading Harper’s or whatever, or watching the World News or having complex, adult romantic relationships. Kids just play video games, act cruelly towards each other, have awkward, immature relationships and mope in their bedrooms.
I didn’t figure this out until I was much older, obviously, but when I did, I was like “Why were those teachers so frustrated that we couldn’t understand the deeper meaning in those books written by adults that we had no way of relating to in the least?”
They could have just told us what the fuck the point of the book was.
via dalasverdugo