It’s really weird too, because I remember learning a LOT of liberal values from the classics I read in school. Plus I got to read beautiful sentences and increase my vocabulary. I mean you can learn that cancel culture is wrong from The Scarlet Letter and that the rich don’t give a crap about anyone else from The Great Gatsby. (I don’t know what you can learn from Catcher in the Rye. It sucks IMO.)
That idea that language arts should not be focused (decentered is such a crap word) on reading books and writing essays is absurd.
Catcher in the Rye fan, here. My takeaway from that book is a fitting one for this essay: namely, if you are going to find any peace in life, you will eventually need to grow up. (Great comment on a great essay, by the way.)
As writers who honor and uphold the impressive works set forth by our predecessors, we need to raise our creative output to the standards set by great literature. Condemning the lesser products of the present while redirecting to the achievements of the past is not as strong an argument as producing and showcasing monuments of our own.
We need to think and operate as great artists, not as peevish pedants.
Thank you! I agree with everything you wrote. I was an English major in school. I went to a small girl’s school in Philadelphia. We read and we read and we read. Homework took some time. Politics didn’t enter into the curriculum. My grandson is a Sophomore in college now. I don’t think he has read an entire book in years. He writes grammatically and I don’t know where he learned to do so. Certainly not from his teachers. Luckily, he’s bright. I hustled feel so badly that he knows almost nothing of the Western canon.
I'm as pro-fiction as the next person, and I wish more people read the classics. But at a time when our nation's leaders are trying to memory-hole slavery, deny climate change, shut down any sort of compassion for suffering Palestinians as antisemitism, and turn the military loose on our city streets, I find this writer's continual carping about how the left has ruined publishing and education to be facile, even comical. There are much greater threats to our kids than reading Trevor Noah's book—a book that might actually get them thinking about what's happening in their world.
I agree with you. I have read quite a few of her pieces and although at times she makes good points (and I am by no means apart of the woke crowd) she is joining this wave of demonization of anything considered left-of-center. The main argument she makes seems to be that merely by being in association with this whole other group of people who have created this cult of victimization, everything that is considered left is either fundamentally irrational or is Soviet apologist.
Weird how much I agreed with the author in concept, but how irksome and assuming some of the specifics were. I find great joy and worth in Coates, Noah as well as Salinger, Dickens and all the authors mentioned. Seems to me the problems aren’t centered in the schools bit on a society that has widely abandoned text, reading, listening, anything but making loud pronouncements through metaphorical megaphones.
Funny enough, I agree with her in concept, too. I just think she could make her point without slagging "the left." Left-wing politics are not responsible for all our failures in education, and saying "writing has become synonymous with (woke) political activism" is so generalized and simplistic as to be ludicrous.
You’re a dyed in the wool liberal. I so hope you’re not a teacher. I don’t notice anyone denying slavery. I do notice that it is being talked about as not exclusively a black experience. Clearly, you’re not Irish or you would know there were more Irish slaves than black slaves. I would bet you have never been to Israel. I have and you’re wrong. You’re probably someone who says you don’t hate Jews, you just hate Zionism. They’re the same thing. You’re an anti- Semite. As far as the military in the streets, it stops Antifa from behaving in an uncivilized manner. By the way, why did you respond to this essay? It is about the death of the Western canon of literature, and has nothing to do with slavery, soldiers, or war- mongering Palestinians. You need to read. Why not start with william Buckley? He writes beautifully, and definitely got a good classical education. Maybe his work will broaden your narrow horizons.
I so agree with you. I think it is because the teachers educated in this very social justice movement replaced learning the great art of literature with social action, our children stopped reading books. Before my older son began middle school, he was an avid reader. We read together every single night before going to bed, and the favorite past time was either a bookstore or a library. Enter middle school, and the books have become about incarceration, teenage boys becoming fathers, rape and incest in families, and most of all - the transgender kids. At that stage of development, children are not yet ready for this kind of introduction to adult life, they get scared and disgusted. I am not saying children should be shielded from the problems of society - they just haven’t yet reached the level of maturity to what they are assigned. By the time they start reading Shakespeare or what have you, it is already too late.
And yes, the obsession with the religion that puts on a pedestal climate change, Palestinianism, abortion rights, etc has a lot to do with the decline in reading literature, and the development of comprehension and analytical skills.
Gee, Ronnie. You sure have inhaled a lot of misinformation, and you sure are good at name-calling. I didn't express hatred for anyone; I guess you can't have compassion for civilians being killed? I guess it's okay to erase slavery from our past? Perhaps you're seeing a lot of Antifa action on your farm? Or are you just hearing about it from Fox News?
Maybe you should do some reading, too. Why not start with Colson Whitehead? He writes beautifully—and, fyi, if you start with The Underground Railroad, you should know that it wasn't really a railroad!
Who is erasing slavery from the past? In every social studies and English class throughout middle and high schools both of my kids - one in public school, one in private - cover slavery every single year. They have a vague knowledge of world history or, say, military history of WWII, but they surely cover slavery, and mostly as a unique and brutal sin of the West. The suffering of the Palestinians is front and center of every mainstream media and obsessive celebrities - Coates and others including - who all ignore the fact that much more brutal and bloodier conflicts are happening right now in many parts of the world. But no matter! Our teachers receive professional development training based on the infamous race hustler Ibram X. Kendy’s anti-racist “literature.” Yeah, there are much greater threats to our children…and that’s inability to think because adults in a room clearly can’t.
Yes, of course, absolutely. But you have to see that Catcher in the Rye is part of the problem, not part of the solution. When Catcher in the Rye replaced David Copperfield, the rest was just one long slide downhill. And you have to see also that as long as literature is presented as being about ideas, then why this idea and not that? And why does it matter how sophisticated the language with which the idea is expressed, as long as the idea gets across?
The problem in the universities today is not that the students lack for ideas. Their heads are full to bursting with ideas. The problem is that they have such a deficit of experience that they can't tell a good idea from a bad one. The only available cure, since in real life, adventures have been replaced by vacations, is good books that are long on experience and wisely mute on ideas. A steady diet of such stories would make students wise enough to see through the ridiculous ideas they are being taught.
Recently, I was speaking to a woman about the education her two children received in Ontario, Canada. She told me that, in their English classes they read only books by indigenous writers. No Austen, Dickens, Orwell, Homer, or even major Canadian writers like Margaret Atwood. And not a single Shakespeare play. I was shocked. While I have no problem with including contemporary books (including by non-white writers) in the English curriculum, and I don't know the quality of the books they were reading since she didn't mention the titles, this narrow, race-based approach is ridiculous. These students will have missed most of the major works of English literature and likely read nothing written before World War II. When I explained why I was concerned about this, she suggested that exposure to the literary canon could come from English Literature class (which is typically a grade 12 elective course in Canada which only a few students take). If a student has never read an old book, and has never encountered Shakespeare, why would they take English Lit? And how would they handle suddenly being asked to read Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, or King Lear?
This guy Homer needs to work on his world building. No one has explained to me who all these gods are or how this war started. And why are all these soldiers Greek men? Be more inclusive!
I can’t help but wonder if what you are noticing is not also impacting the quality of literature that is now being written. Not all great literature was popular at the time it was written, but a fair amount of it was. Looking at the current best sellers, what’s happening appears somewhat analogous to what has happened with movies during the past decade. So much that is being written seems to be formulaic, in that it’s written so as to include certain attitudes, characters, or narratives (and by certain kinds of preferred people) - how is this not lowering the probability that any great literature is presently being generated? Is this a time and place that we might not want to remember, and memorialize?
So undeniably true, Liza! Students absolutely are reading garbage! It's no wonder we have a literary crisis in this country when you have students reading garbage like Born a Crime and Between the World and Me and using Chat GPT and the NCTE is saying book learning should no longer be the focus of English education. The result of this is that you get students who don't know to read, write or spell and come to think that literature is all about fighting social injustices like racism, sexism, economic inequality, homophobia, ableism, etc. rather than the profound universal moral messages contained within them. Our students need to be reading great works of literature like Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Adeventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, Monster, Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, Crime and Punishment, The Diary of Anne Frank, Night, The Sound and the Fury, Moby Dick, Of Mice and Men, A Midsummer's Night Dream, 1984, Brave New World, The Count of Monte Cristo, and David Copperfield. Reading trash like Between the World and Me, White Fragility, How to Be an Antiracist, Bad Feminist, Born a Crime, The Nickel Boys, The Hate U Give, and The Underground Railroad won't help them become good writers or better critical thinkers. All it does is poison their mind with toxic ideas that right at this very moment, are helping to destroy western society. Worse still, students are getting dumber, more close minded, less able to express themselves in a civil or adult way, and more and more illiterate and able to spell even the most basic of words properly. If we want to reverse the literary crisis in this country, we must re-focus English education on book learning and give our children and young people actual works of literature to read. I think it would also be a good idea to restrict the use of Chat GDP and flunk students who use it. Also, critical race theory, ethnic studies and gender ideology should be pulled from the curriculum at all public schools. It's very important that Generation Alpha and the generations that follow them know what real literature is and is not. Real literature is William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Theodor Geisel, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Rudyard Kipling, Zora Neale Hurston, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Ian Fleming, Margret and H.A. Rey, Norman Birdwell, Marc Brown, and R.L. Stine. It is NOT Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Edward Said, Mychal Denzel Smith, Angie Thomas, Dr. Cornel West, and Karl Marx!
I am not a native English speaker. My grasp of the English language leaves a lot to be desired. In the last few years, 3 to 5, I have had to correct both spelling and grammar on many occasion. When I am the one correcting grammar and spelling of adult native speakers, the situation is dire.
Your source for the deterioration of English, the NCTE, is not as anti-literature as you make it out to be:
“While updating our curricula beyond the canonical classics that have historically been taught may be necessary, media education need not displace the study of literature. A growing number of teachers value the opportunity to help students make connections between classic literature and contemporary media texts to advance multicultural understanding and address issues of equity. “
Yes, I agree. With friends of my own era ( I am almost in my eighth decade) we use descriptive words in conversation that actually tell the listener where we have been, what we have said, what we have seen and what our thoughts are. We don’t describe everything via a four letter word derived from the name of a Norse Goddess or a five letter one that describes a slaughter house. The lack of reading skills, the lack of understanding simple words and phrases, the inability to harness and describe the fruits of wide ranging imagination and experience is tragic. Even worse is a return to the Nazi Era of book banning and book burning. I am actually quite grateful that I am age destined not to see the final end of true written and spoken human communication.
I'm a middle school teacher. In my experience, students aren't reading anything, except those specific school-related items they're assigned. Even asking them to review a textbook page and pull information out is simply too daunting. They look at me with a kind of helplessness. I tell them to attend to the bolded terms and the titles and the text boxes, but it's just too much. They're functionally literate (at least most of them) but they're not READERS.
The values and myths they're absorbing from school and the culture is a different matter, but also a source of concern for me.
Something even worse is happening with the consumption of SM substituting for reading books: students lose narrative competency and the ability to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. Narrative competency is crucial to the normal functioning of the brain (see Jonathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal). But SM posts are not properly structured stories, so it's like children learning to speak by listening to an impoverished and broken language. And fictionality (the "as if" game) is why most people understand the difference between Dexter and Ted Bundy. But this is also being erased, and the result may be simply catastrophic. I would not force my students to read Anna Karenina, but good genre fiction is much healthier than activism slop. My students loved seminars on SF and horror, even when they were assigned longer novels, such as Dracula or Dune.
It’s really weird too, because I remember learning a LOT of liberal values from the classics I read in school. Plus I got to read beautiful sentences and increase my vocabulary. I mean you can learn that cancel culture is wrong from The Scarlet Letter and that the rich don’t give a crap about anyone else from The Great Gatsby. (I don’t know what you can learn from Catcher in the Rye. It sucks IMO.)
That idea that language arts should not be focused (decentered is such a crap word) on reading books and writing essays is absurd.
I dislike “decentered” too. I’m not sure it’s even a word. I rank it with “unalive”.
Catcher in the Rye fan, here. My takeaway from that book is a fitting one for this essay: namely, if you are going to find any peace in life, you will eventually need to grow up. (Great comment on a great essay, by the way.)
As writers who honor and uphold the impressive works set forth by our predecessors, we need to raise our creative output to the standards set by great literature. Condemning the lesser products of the present while redirecting to the achievements of the past is not as strong an argument as producing and showcasing monuments of our own.
We need to think and operate as great artists, not as peevish pedants.
For Exhibit A: https://wildsonnets.substack.com/notes
Thank you! I agree with everything you wrote. I was an English major in school. I went to a small girl’s school in Philadelphia. We read and we read and we read. Homework took some time. Politics didn’t enter into the curriculum. My grandson is a Sophomore in college now. I don’t think he has read an entire book in years. He writes grammatically and I don’t know where he learned to do so. Certainly not from his teachers. Luckily, he’s bright. I hustled feel so badly that he knows almost nothing of the Western canon.
I loved the alliterative “ Peevish Oeasants”
No, to be clear, the phrase was “Peevish Peasants “ that amused and actually made me laugh. Obviously in my previous post Ganesh was watching.
I'm as pro-fiction as the next person, and I wish more people read the classics. But at a time when our nation's leaders are trying to memory-hole slavery, deny climate change, shut down any sort of compassion for suffering Palestinians as antisemitism, and turn the military loose on our city streets, I find this writer's continual carping about how the left has ruined publishing and education to be facile, even comical. There are much greater threats to our kids than reading Trevor Noah's book—a book that might actually get them thinking about what's happening in their world.
I agree with you. I have read quite a few of her pieces and although at times she makes good points (and I am by no means apart of the woke crowd) she is joining this wave of demonization of anything considered left-of-center. The main argument she makes seems to be that merely by being in association with this whole other group of people who have created this cult of victimization, everything that is considered left is either fundamentally irrational or is Soviet apologist.
Nothing can be achieved politically by those mired in the present, because they have no realistic views of how things can be achieved.
How many proposals I have seen for things that have been tried over and over and proven a disaster every single time.
Weird how much I agreed with the author in concept, but how irksome and assuming some of the specifics were. I find great joy and worth in Coates, Noah as well as Salinger, Dickens and all the authors mentioned. Seems to me the problems aren’t centered in the schools bit on a society that has widely abandoned text, reading, listening, anything but making loud pronouncements through metaphorical megaphones.
Funny enough, I agree with her in concept, too. I just think she could make her point without slagging "the left." Left-wing politics are not responsible for all our failures in education, and saying "writing has become synonymous with (woke) political activism" is so generalized and simplistic as to be ludicrous.
Her claim that some authors can’t string a cogent sentence together was a bit much for me.
I thoroughly agree.
You’re a dyed in the wool liberal. I so hope you’re not a teacher. I don’t notice anyone denying slavery. I do notice that it is being talked about as not exclusively a black experience. Clearly, you’re not Irish or you would know there were more Irish slaves than black slaves. I would bet you have never been to Israel. I have and you’re wrong. You’re probably someone who says you don’t hate Jews, you just hate Zionism. They’re the same thing. You’re an anti- Semite. As far as the military in the streets, it stops Antifa from behaving in an uncivilized manner. By the way, why did you respond to this essay? It is about the death of the Western canon of literature, and has nothing to do with slavery, soldiers, or war- mongering Palestinians. You need to read. Why not start with william Buckley? He writes beautifully, and definitely got a good classical education. Maybe his work will broaden your narrow horizons.
I so agree with you. I think it is because the teachers educated in this very social justice movement replaced learning the great art of literature with social action, our children stopped reading books. Before my older son began middle school, he was an avid reader. We read together every single night before going to bed, and the favorite past time was either a bookstore or a library. Enter middle school, and the books have become about incarceration, teenage boys becoming fathers, rape and incest in families, and most of all - the transgender kids. At that stage of development, children are not yet ready for this kind of introduction to adult life, they get scared and disgusted. I am not saying children should be shielded from the problems of society - they just haven’t yet reached the level of maturity to what they are assigned. By the time they start reading Shakespeare or what have you, it is already too late.
And yes, the obsession with the religion that puts on a pedestal climate change, Palestinianism, abortion rights, etc has a lot to do with the decline in reading literature, and the development of comprehension and analytical skills.
Gee, Ronnie. You sure have inhaled a lot of misinformation, and you sure are good at name-calling. I didn't express hatred for anyone; I guess you can't have compassion for civilians being killed? I guess it's okay to erase slavery from our past? Perhaps you're seeing a lot of Antifa action on your farm? Or are you just hearing about it from Fox News?
Maybe you should do some reading, too. Why not start with Colson Whitehead? He writes beautifully—and, fyi, if you start with The Underground Railroad, you should know that it wasn't really a railroad!
Who is erasing slavery from the past? In every social studies and English class throughout middle and high schools both of my kids - one in public school, one in private - cover slavery every single year. They have a vague knowledge of world history or, say, military history of WWII, but they surely cover slavery, and mostly as a unique and brutal sin of the West. The suffering of the Palestinians is front and center of every mainstream media and obsessive celebrities - Coates and others including - who all ignore the fact that much more brutal and bloodier conflicts are happening right now in many parts of the world. But no matter! Our teachers receive professional development training based on the infamous race hustler Ibram X. Kendy’s anti-racist “literature.” Yeah, there are much greater threats to our children…and that’s inability to think because adults in a room clearly can’t.
Yes, of course, absolutely. But you have to see that Catcher in the Rye is part of the problem, not part of the solution. When Catcher in the Rye replaced David Copperfield, the rest was just one long slide downhill. And you have to see also that as long as literature is presented as being about ideas, then why this idea and not that? And why does it matter how sophisticated the language with which the idea is expressed, as long as the idea gets across?
The problem in the universities today is not that the students lack for ideas. Their heads are full to bursting with ideas. The problem is that they have such a deficit of experience that they can't tell a good idea from a bad one. The only available cure, since in real life, adventures have been replaced by vacations, is good books that are long on experience and wisely mute on ideas. A steady diet of such stories would make students wise enough to see through the ridiculous ideas they are being taught.
Beautifully written books will still blow students minds. Write Conscious is really good on this.
Recently, I was speaking to a woman about the education her two children received in Ontario, Canada. She told me that, in their English classes they read only books by indigenous writers. No Austen, Dickens, Orwell, Homer, or even major Canadian writers like Margaret Atwood. And not a single Shakespeare play. I was shocked. While I have no problem with including contemporary books (including by non-white writers) in the English curriculum, and I don't know the quality of the books they were reading since she didn't mention the titles, this narrow, race-based approach is ridiculous. These students will have missed most of the major works of English literature and likely read nothing written before World War II. When I explained why I was concerned about this, she suggested that exposure to the literary canon could come from English Literature class (which is typically a grade 12 elective course in Canada which only a few students take). If a student has never read an old book, and has never encountered Shakespeare, why would they take English Lit? And how would they handle suddenly being asked to read Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, or King Lear?
The Canterbury Tales … man that guy Chaucer couldn’t spell for beans 😂
This guy Homer needs to work on his world building. No one has explained to me who all these gods are or how this war started. And why are all these soldiers Greek men? Be more inclusive!
And, to clarify: this woman was white and her children attended a normal public high school in an urban area. This was not a school on a reserve.
I can’t help but wonder if what you are noticing is not also impacting the quality of literature that is now being written. Not all great literature was popular at the time it was written, but a fair amount of it was. Looking at the current best sellers, what’s happening appears somewhat analogous to what has happened with movies during the past decade. So much that is being written seems to be formulaic, in that it’s written so as to include certain attitudes, characters, or narratives (and by certain kinds of preferred people) - how is this not lowering the probability that any great literature is presently being generated? Is this a time and place that we might not want to remember, and memorialize?
Coates is many things—quasi illegible is not one of them
That’s a matter of opinion.
So undeniably true, Liza! Students absolutely are reading garbage! It's no wonder we have a literary crisis in this country when you have students reading garbage like Born a Crime and Between the World and Me and using Chat GPT and the NCTE is saying book learning should no longer be the focus of English education. The result of this is that you get students who don't know to read, write or spell and come to think that literature is all about fighting social injustices like racism, sexism, economic inequality, homophobia, ableism, etc. rather than the profound universal moral messages contained within them. Our students need to be reading great works of literature like Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Adeventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, Monster, Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, Crime and Punishment, The Diary of Anne Frank, Night, The Sound and the Fury, Moby Dick, Of Mice and Men, A Midsummer's Night Dream, 1984, Brave New World, The Count of Monte Cristo, and David Copperfield. Reading trash like Between the World and Me, White Fragility, How to Be an Antiracist, Bad Feminist, Born a Crime, The Nickel Boys, The Hate U Give, and The Underground Railroad won't help them become good writers or better critical thinkers. All it does is poison their mind with toxic ideas that right at this very moment, are helping to destroy western society. Worse still, students are getting dumber, more close minded, less able to express themselves in a civil or adult way, and more and more illiterate and able to spell even the most basic of words properly. If we want to reverse the literary crisis in this country, we must re-focus English education on book learning and give our children and young people actual works of literature to read. I think it would also be a good idea to restrict the use of Chat GDP and flunk students who use it. Also, critical race theory, ethnic studies and gender ideology should be pulled from the curriculum at all public schools. It's very important that Generation Alpha and the generations that follow them know what real literature is and is not. Real literature is William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Theodor Geisel, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Rudyard Kipling, Zora Neale Hurston, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Ian Fleming, Margret and H.A. Rey, Norman Birdwell, Marc Brown, and R.L. Stine. It is NOT Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Edward Said, Mychal Denzel Smith, Angie Thomas, Dr. Cornel West, and Karl Marx!
Most of those activist books like White Fragility are not really literature but propaganda or worse corporate training materials 😳
Yes. And throw in some poetry while you’re at it.
I am not a native English speaker. My grasp of the English language leaves a lot to be desired. In the last few years, 3 to 5, I have had to correct both spelling and grammar on many occasion. When I am the one correcting grammar and spelling of adult native speakers, the situation is dire.
They should read Ralph Ellison not Coates!
Bravo. As a father of three children attending an elite private school in the US, I can attest to this issue as a major problem.
Your source for the deterioration of English, the NCTE, is not as anti-literature as you make it out to be:
“While updating our curricula beyond the canonical classics that have historically been taught may be necessary, media education need not displace the study of literature. A growing number of teachers value the opportunity to help students make connections between classic literature and contemporary media texts to advance multicultural understanding and address issues of equity. “
Yes, I agree. With friends of my own era ( I am almost in my eighth decade) we use descriptive words in conversation that actually tell the listener where we have been, what we have said, what we have seen and what our thoughts are. We don’t describe everything via a four letter word derived from the name of a Norse Goddess or a five letter one that describes a slaughter house. The lack of reading skills, the lack of understanding simple words and phrases, the inability to harness and describe the fruits of wide ranging imagination and experience is tragic. Even worse is a return to the Nazi Era of book banning and book burning. I am actually quite grateful that I am age destined not to see the final end of true written and spoken human communication.
I'm a middle school teacher. In my experience, students aren't reading anything, except those specific school-related items they're assigned. Even asking them to review a textbook page and pull information out is simply too daunting. They look at me with a kind of helplessness. I tell them to attend to the bolded terms and the titles and the text boxes, but it's just too much. They're functionally literate (at least most of them) but they're not READERS.
The values and myths they're absorbing from school and the culture is a different matter, but also a source of concern for me.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/class-lessons
Something even worse is happening with the consumption of SM substituting for reading books: students lose narrative competency and the ability to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. Narrative competency is crucial to the normal functioning of the brain (see Jonathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal). But SM posts are not properly structured stories, so it's like children learning to speak by listening to an impoverished and broken language. And fictionality (the "as if" game) is why most people understand the difference between Dexter and Ted Bundy. But this is also being erased, and the result may be simply catastrophic. I would not force my students to read Anna Karenina, but good genre fiction is much healthier than activism slop. My students loved seminars on SF and horror, even when they were assigned longer novels, such as Dracula or Dune.