I appreciate the detailed response. Gifted kids in my opinion waste a lot of their life on performative enthusiasm about stuff they don't care very much about.
> Parents and teachers will want kids to read books that challenge them.
You say "challenge" them but you really mean "belong to the tribe." Classical Russian Literature is a tribe. "Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote" are also a tribe, I will not make up a name for that tribe, but it is one. Playing in the orchestra is a tribe. LISP is Paul Graham's tribe. Fencing and crew are tribes. This is why people are so passionate about this: it's all about tribes.
The mistake the HN commenters are making here is they think their tribe means "the smart kids tribe." I don't know what their tribe means, but I can tell you now, no one group of people owns "the smart kids."
> You say "challenge" them but you really mean "belong to the tribe."
What I had in mind was more like books that are require some reasonable level of effort or ask something new of the reader, which will depend on them and what they're used to/practiced with. Here are some things I had in mind as useful challenges a book might present to a reader:
- including words they haven't seen before or using words they know in new ways
- hopefully this also means they are at least sometimes looking those words up
- describing precise logical forms in natural language
- a book that relies on this might push a student who doesn't normally feel the need to take notes to draw a diagram or create a glossary or table or taxonomy
- including sentences with complex syntactic structure
- may not be good writing, may not be enjoyable. Potentially valuable for the same kinds of reasons as the previous example, plus helping develop some appreciation for the relative ease of consisw language
- involving unfamiliar literary forms
- using language in narrow technical ways
- can help readers develop an intuition for quickly whether a term is being used conventionally or as a term of art
- presenting an opportunity (or demand) to empathize with a strange person or a strange situation
- being translated in a different way (more literal, denser with annotations, more liberal) than the reader is used to
- comparisons would probably be productive.
You get the idea. Considerations like this are already worked into school curricula. But what I meant was that generally people recognize an interest in reading that advances the learner's skills in some way. And that could look really different kinds of things for students with different talents, backgrounds, and interests.
It's also distinct from membership in any purported literary canon. I'm sure some kids could be productively challenged for an entire school year by works drawn entirely from some obscure fanfic community I've never heard of.
You're totally right that general notions of what texts are 'worthy' (sophisticated, substantive, difficult, beautiful, subtle, poweful, whatever) are culturally bound, and that choosing which books to praise or recommend or mandate goes deep beyond nationality or ethnicity into much finer ingroup signaling, too.
But that's not what I had in mind. I meant 'usefully challenging for some specific student at some specific time', not some metaphysically dubious concept of inherent sophistication.
I meant it more in the sense of making sure a student is coasting nor stumped— that at least some of their reading is really helping them grow. And I mean growth not just intellectually but also in a broader developmental sense. Emotional stuff, too. Even just figuring out how to connect with new settings or genres or why other people the like things they like. Trying to advance any of those would be a good reason to recommend a book for a student. (One genre I wish I'd figured out how to read and evaluate much earlier is math textbooks, for instance. But fiction genre-swap exercises between friends could be valuable, too. Say I don't like sci-fi, and you've not read much romance. We agree together to parallel missions to find each other a book in their disfavored genre that they actually connect with. Both the searching and establishing of such a new connection counts as one kind of useful challenge in this context, for me.)
Anyway I agree about why these conversations get so heated and unproductive. Many people either get too caught up in the cultural/affiliative dimension of the judgments involved or completely trip over them without acknowledging their existence.
> Parents and teachers will want kids to read books that challenge them.
You say "challenge" them but you really mean "belong to the tribe." Classical Russian Literature is a tribe. "Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote" are also a tribe, I will not make up a name for that tribe, but it is one. Playing in the orchestra is a tribe. LISP is Paul Graham's tribe. Fencing and crew are tribes. This is why people are so passionate about this: it's all about tribes.
The mistake the HN commenters are making here is they think their tribe means "the smart kids tribe." I don't know what their tribe means, but I can tell you now, no one group of people owns "the smart kids."