Politician Wants Sci-fi To Be Mandatory In School 295
Avantare writes "The first sci-fi novel I read was A Wrinkle in Time; the next was Dune. Why don't more people read these extraordinarily imaginative books? Delegate Ray Canterbury, who represents Greenbrier County in southern WV, wants to help with that. Canterbury introduced House Bill 2983, which reads, 'To stimulate interest in math and science among students in the public schools of this state, the State Board of Education shall prescribe minimum standards by which samples of grade-appropriate science fiction literature are integrated into the curriculum of existing reading, literature or other required courses for middle school and high school students.' For decades, walking around with a paperback sci-fi novel in your back pocket at school was the quickest way to find yourself permanently excluded from the cool-kid clique. But what if it wasn't just the geeks who read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke? What if science fiction was mandatory reading for all students?"
If you want to kill a piece of literature... (Score:5, Interesting)
Please no (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to kill a kid's joy in something, make it a school assignment. If you want to make absolutely sure, make them write a paper on it. For extra credit, give them a reading assignment they absolutely do not have the background to understand (e.g. Slaughterhouse 5 before they've even heard about WWII).
Let's let the schools continue to ruin horrid bits of literature, like Willa Cather and Herman Melville. Leave the SF to people who like reading.
Re:If you want to kill a piece of literature... (Score:3, Interesting)
I opened this /. article to make a similar kind of argument. If you want people to like Sci Fi, this is not the way. Schools will find a way to make you hate it.
They can make ANYTHING totally dreadful. Even things I studied in my spare time while at school, I hated the classroom version of the same issue. A good example is Quantum Mechanics, with its weird and interesting phenomena. In QM at school I was told to memorize some stupid patterns that I never saw again (my profession is not even close to physics though), not even touching the really interesting stuff. They will find a way to do the same thing with Sci Fi. I think this has to do with the idea that "everyone should be able to learn" every subject. They make it into stuff that has no more "understanding" in it, only some method or ruleset to memorize and repeat parrot fashion. And maybe it has to do with it having to be something that can be taught for a specified x hours and then be tested thoroughly in a formalized test.
Well, that, and the fact that now all your classmates also know the stuff, so it no longer makes you feel special to know it I suppose :)
Re:No - that is called Fantasy. (Score:3, Interesting)
You could have saved yourself some typing by just stating that good fiction focuses on the characters, no matter what the genre.
Re:By Science Fiction, does he mean.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm quite interested in Dune not being sci-fi, because that's so ridiculous it should be on a meme.
This one puzzles me as well. As a general rule, you are allowed one "impossible" thing in sci-fi. In Dune, that one thing is the spice. Admittedly, it both warps perceptions of time and space in addition to allowing the Spacing Guild to warp space to match their imposed perception, but that's still all tied to to one thing.
Everything else I can think of is scientifically credible, though much of it requires more discipline than today's human race can generally summon. But that was Herbert's genius. His humans 10K years into the future were evolutionarily more advanced, but still fundamentally humans and not, for example, aliens in human costumes or vice versa.