George Saunders

You teach them to have confidence, their own reading ability, their own perception of the world.

I think that would actually be an amazingly powerful thing as a culture if you could somehow build that into the curriculum.

And, you know, I can say anecdotally, you know, our daughters went to a really good school.

And at one point, this fifth grade or sixth grade teacher was teaching Ambrose Bierce.

Some of those really dark Civil War nonfiction pieces, beautifully written, very ornate and tough, and the subject material was dark as hell.

And some parents objected to it.

It was too hard.

Okay, and they took it off.

They got rid of it.

Nobody was saying that calculus was too difficult.

Calculus was causing their kids trouble.

So I do tend to be a little bit of a stickler on that.

I think we could do better.

Yeah.

I think they're kind of like me in that it's the one thing that they really can do.

In my mind, there's a lot of thinking about just this topic, the decline of literature, the role of the writer.

But I recognize that as being a little bit of my kind of

everyday cloud mind that actually, if I go a step deeper than that, the real answer is it's the one thing I've been good at in my life.

And it's the one thing that really lights me up even now when I do it.

And I think my students have the same thing.