• @[email protected]
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    2073 months ago

    It’s wild that the U.K. doesn’t teach the Odyssey, I thought their whole thing was stealing other peoples’ culture and pretending they owned it now.

    • @[email protected]
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      1173 months ago

      Shakespeare invented literature, so clearly there’s no value in teaching anything from before him…

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      Well Greece wasn’t ever a British colony, so they didn’t have as many opportunities to steal artifacts and culture as they did with, say, Egypt or India

    • stebo
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      203 months ago

      I’ve heard of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, does that count?

    • @[email protected]
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      163 months ago

      Just looked it up, the Odyssey can be taught in the UK but it is rarely chosen because Shakespeare is easier to teach and students who pick Shakespeare get better grades on average.

      • @[email protected]
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        113 months ago

        We don’t like to brag about it but we fought the Brits in the War of 1812, one of the things we took from England was Greek literature. In turn, we Americans lost the definition of jams vs jelly and the superior spelling of “colour”.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          I rebel against this fact by being American and using the spelling of “Grey” for the color, autocorrect be damned.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 months ago

          In the UK secondary students study 3 bits of literature for the exam, modern (20th century+), victorian and classical which is everything before then, I think that’s how it works but that’s just from memory

    • @[email protected]
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      153 months ago

      ……………I did the odyssey at various points man I think the guy in the tweet is just Polyphemus or smthn like ‘I don’t know who this nobody guy is, ain’t never heard of no odyssey before bro’

      • fakeaustinfloyd
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        93 months ago

        Went to a mediocre high school in the US, and I had an English/writing course where the only materials were the Aeneid, Illiad, Odyssey, and Mythology by Edith Hamilton.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          That seems above average, but I don’t have too much to compare it to. I read all of this when I took Latin as my language classes. And the odyssey for fun.

      • Captain Aggravated
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        43 months ago

        My 10th grade English class studied a small section of it, like one self contained story.

        • @[email protected]
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          53 months ago

          This is what we did as well, in AP English. We also did Beowulf. We also had to read the first fucking Harry Potter book because the teacher liked Harry Potter. Imagine a group of the highest achieving 17 and 18 year olds out of 600 students their age writing papers about a book written for 10 year olds.

          Such a waste of time. We got college credit for this bullshit. I’m still mad about it.

          • @[email protected]
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            3 months ago

            I feel like there’s a way to do it that doesn’t suck - an examination of the book WRT the hero’s journey, picking out elements borrowed from English literary tradition to see how they’re deployed v. original texts, etc.

            Real talk though, I feel it comes from a place of not knowing how to appeal to young people. I ran into the very same thing once when asked about course ideas for first year students coming directly from high school. I had no idea (still don’t) what would appeal to kids, so I thought a course that used Harry Potter as a keystone text (everybody being familiar, using it as a bridge to more traditional lit) could work. But as I said the words I knew 18 year old me would’ve hated that, sooo…

    • @[email protected]
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      93 months ago

      Not in secondary school but I did the Illiad, the Anaed, the Odyssey and Ovids Metamorphoses in 6th form college.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 months ago

      I did study it at school but had to take Classical Civilisation for one of my GCSE options. Our default in English Literature was a Shakespeare work as previously mentioned (Merchant of Venice for me). I also recall studying An Inspector Calls?