“On assigned reading”,
I don’t know how to start this, or didn’t at the time of writing.
Most schools, at least schools here (the United States) assign readings and texts to their students. The choice of text often comes from the “Western canon”, which is a selection of mostly dead, mostly White European (and some American, e.g. Mark Twain) men. The definitive example is Billiards-boy S.—more commonly known sous le nom de William Shakespeare. This year I was assigned Macbeth from him, and c’était ok, mais ça ne fait rien, what I was originally talking about is that the classroom environment is not very conducive to deeply engaging with literature. The core tenet of that engagement is doing it on your own volition, and you simply don’t have the choice of engaging with it since it’s assigned. Along with it there are also usually annotations to do, or some sort of other way to prove you read the book, e.g. summarising the chapter or taking a reading quiz. But what I don’t understand is the pedagogical purpose of this if you’ll discuss it in class anyway, since adding to the class discussion and bringing up new points (especially if group work is involved) already proves that you did the reading, or at least familiarised yourself with the SparkNotes well enough since that has the same effect. Over a schoolchild’s career spent in this system, which is more of a theater of engagement rather than genuine engagement with texts, they start to treat books in general as puzzles to be solved, as something to be interrogated rather than sat with. And that can shape someone’s image of what literature’s for after a while. ♦