Thankfully I didn’t go to catholic school until high school and went to solid public schools before then 😭 but I vividly remember reading that and being obsessed and so moved lol
me too! such an eye opener. I was a pretty voracious reader on my own, so I bypassed my school. and they had some fiction in the library that I don’t think they knew was subversive, like the His Dark Materials trilogy. I felt like I was really getting away with something, haha
Yes there are a solid 6 or 7 books I read in school that I’ll just always think about. It’s no surprise I loved reading 1984 when I was in high school!
In middle school I was assigned to the “gifted” SpEd group, and we met in lieu of Reading period to do unstructured learning. As a consequence, none of us in the group did much reading. I suspect that was the school system’s own little way of promoting “sameness.”
We read and wrote reports on Grapes of Wrath in hs. Not really dystopian per se but it made an impression on me.
I don’t remember when I read 1984 and Animal Farm (hs or college) but I was naive enough to believe they were sort of fantasy-based rather than forward thinking/predictions
I have a kiddo in 7th who is currently reading The Giver. I think there’s a ~70% understanding of the content based on our conversations over daily homework.
We read The Giver, Brave New World, and Animal Farm in middle school and 1984 in high school... can't remember if there were other dystopian titles, but The Giver is still one of favorite books to re-read
in grade 5, our teacher would read books out loud to us during "silent reading time" sometimes, and The Giver was one of these and had everyone in the class begging her to read it every reading time
We never really read that in school but I sure read it alone around that time, I was absolutely obsessed with dystopian books back then and still am, that book started it all (turns out once again that none of my life experiences are original)
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I don’t remember when I read 1984 and Animal Farm (hs or college) but I was naive enough to believe they were sort of fantasy-based rather than forward thinking/predictions
We read some pretty bullshit stuff in those classes too. You can definitely tell the anti-communist sentiment behind those literature.
Indoctrination at its finest.