cracked:Even if your school assigns a hilarious and subversive...

cracked:

Even if your school assigns a hilarious and subversive book like Catch-22, it’s going to be hard for you to really fall in love with it, because you’re not thinking, “Let’s check out this book!” You’re thinking, “Shit, I have to read three chapters by Wednesday and there’s gonna be a quiz about it.” School puts reading three chapters of an amazing book in the same mental category of memorizing history dates and trying to crack calculus problems. That is, hands down, the worst fucking thing to ever happen to novels.

High school turns reading – a thing people do on the beach on vacation – into homework – a thing kids dread because it takes them away from whatever they’d rather be doing.

The way we teach history is totally bonkers too. High school and a history textbook taught me Grover Cleveland was our only president to serve two non-consecutive terms – the other books taught me that he staged a secret mouth surgery at sea over a 4th of July weekend so the American people wouldn’t find out that he had cancer.

High school and a syllabus taught me I needed to “get the right answers” on my Of Mice And Men quiz or else I’d be a failure. It’s not important as far as the class is concerned if I wept when I finished the book; what matters is what this book says about Great Depression-era literature. (I, uh … think?)

Dan O'Brien’s Guide To Bettering Our Schools

I wrote a column for the first time in many months, and you can read it right now if you want.