Moral Panic - Tumblr Posts
How many of those “escape human traffickers” TikTok’s are made by people who have four foster kids for the tax breaks do you think
Is there a way to say "there's obviously a crisis of epic proportions in education and especially literacy" and "this is the most hilarious moral panic shit I've read all week" at the same time, because damn. This is the most hilarious moral panic shit I've read all week.
Ppl on the other hellsite losing their minds over this in every imaginable direction lmao
Yeah that's the part I agree with, caught up in the gears of the machine shit, for real. But, for me, "Kids today don't appreciate the classics of (art form), all they respond to is (popular iteration)." is just never going to pass the sniff test.
Also, I remember being the kid who read a lot more than my peers and I definitely remember how that was alienating even 25 years ago. I remember thinking how book-dumb other kids were, like how many more words and contexts I was familiar with, I absolutely returned their disrespect based on that feeling of superiority, I clung to it sometimes as I was ostracized for all the other things kids hate about other kids. I can absolutely see a lot of people who were kids who read a lot more than other kids growing up into these teachers and professors, and idk if that's being considered here.
Ppl on the other hellsite losing their minds over this in every imaginable direction lmao
I feel like that was all of us, I read Jurassic Park when I was ten and Starship Troopers when I was nine, that Percy Jackson scare piece seems to be cutting directly to the soft nougatty center of the brains of every single kid who read ahead in the history book and asked the teacher for books that were longer. It's embarrassing.
Maybe it’s just me, but I always wanted to read books for “older people” when I was younger - like I full on brought “The Girlfriends Guide to Pregnancy” with me to my Catholic private school in like second or third grade and lied and said my mom wanted me to understand her pregnancy when asked about it. I was reading Shakespeare and Tolkien in fourth and fifth grade, and same with Orwell. Like I never wanted to read at or below where I was at but always wanted to go higher, more mature, more interesting and even uncomfortable.
“It definitely broke our spirits,” said Brittany Harris, 17, a junior and the co-president of the club, when she heard that the board didn’t want to accept the grant that students had worked on for weeks.
LGBTQ teens won a grant for their school. Adults sent the money back.
Yes, but: those skills have recently been shown to be a) particularly necessary and b) systematically undervalued in a way we don't see in STEM skills. There's a broad consensus that science, math, and engineering are Useful Today--which is absolutely true! But the accompanying pivot away from critical analysis of texts has, I think, done a great deal of harm. The was journalists create, and the public consumes, narratives of false equivalency and the way queer and fan spaces (overlapping, of course) have been subjected to this neo-puritanicalism that can't separate an author from a narrator from a character, are both examples of this.
In sum: most people don't need to know how to fix their car or understand Finnegan's Wake. Most people do need to know when statistics and verbal statements are honest or disingenuous manipulations or outright lies.
I mean, I agree at least with the minimal claim that some sort of study of literature and the surrounding disciplines (whether in school or autodidactically) would enhance the critical thinking skills of many STEM majors, but not really more than taking science and math classes would do the same for many humanities majors. I don't think English is distinctly the critical thinking discipline in the way tumblr at large seems to be increasingly coming to believe. I'd say the closest to such a class would probably be philosophy or logic, but even those are far from complete in that respect.