School Study Media/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


"Children are made to learn bits of Shakespeare by heart, with the result that ever after they associate him with pedantic boredom. If they could meet him in the flesh, full of jollity and ale, they would be astonished, and if they had never heard of him before they might be led by his jollity to see what he had written. But if at school they had been inoculated against him, they will never be able to enjoy him. [...] Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him."

Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951), p. 201.

"[...] [T]he habit of reading does as much, if not more, than Direct Instruction and the rigorous demands of the Common Core. All without boring kids to death or persuading them that they’re dumb."

Valerie Strauss, Why kids should choose their own books to read in school (The Washington Post)