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What's your harmless/low-stakes conspiracy theory?
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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The way literature is taught in school is designed deliberately to make people hate reading + studying the subtext and paratext.
By forcing kids to read books that aren't just old, but were written by 40 year olds for other 40 year olds, and then mandating them write reports about the symbolism of a book they didn't even want to read in the first place, you ensure that like 80% of people will inherently associate reading and interpreting media with every negative emotion at once.
Meanwhile you look at fandom dorks on every site and you see how invested on themes and subtext they are, and you realise people kinda naturally want to overthink media... Provided they like that media.
But people who can read subtext and understand it are less susceptible to propaganda. So.
I grew up in Canada.
My high school English teacher let us choose books to write essays on from a selection of a dozen or so that he was intimately familiar with and could tell whether someone was BSing or not.
I don't remember all of them, but I chose The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I also remember reading 1984 in his class.
I kinda got this privilege in my Jr, and Sr years of high school. I had the same teacher both years because AP English, and when it came time to read either Les Miserables or Pride and Prejudice, I informed her that I had already read the book, and provided her with an oral synopsis. Instead I read Dante's Inferno, (I was attempting to finish the entire Divine Comedy, but it took me too long to finish Paradisio, so I just did a report on the first third.) and handed in parallel work on that book instead. The same thing happened with all the required reading books, but Mrs. Sparks wasn't surprised. I was one of those kids that read several hundred books a year.
This one resonates with me. I fucking love science fiction, and when they forced me to read The Giver, the closest they every got to science fiction, I actually enjoyed it. And then the rest of the time I hated it all.
If I had actually been given the chance to read some good science fiction, I would have been reading a lot more as a kid.
Damn. Good one.