No wonder Gatsby is frequently misunderstood: Most people won't have the experience needed to understand it until they're in their 30s, but we prescribe it for high schoolers year after year.
I think this is true of much of the traditional high school English curriculum. I was way ahead of most of my peers and still far too great an idiot to fully appreciate the novels we read. I have reread some of those classics as an adult and should probably read more of them.
I had similar questions regarding middle/high school literature studies. So many, so many ideas were out of reach from my soul when I was 15 (say the social contract by Rousseau). But maybe that was just emotional/existential immaturity on my part. Maybe some pupils, arguably a few, really had the maturity to connect with these themes. Maybe also, previous generations were more mature early on. I believe that in mathematics, in the 70s, it was expected to learn abstract algebra in high school, it college.
I suppose you could argue that it is a great book in terms of style and prose, which is why kids should be introduced to the work. I did not grow up in the US, so I have only first read it as a young adult and I vividly remember that the book was beautifully written. It was a joy to read, which I cannot say about all classics.
The article underlines that what you get out of Gatsby will change substantially with age, and even encourages a re-reading later to get a different understanding of the novel.
If a teenager’s understanding of it is ‘wrong’ according to you, that’s precisely the point. Perhaps the blame should be cast on a teacher’s poor explanation of it?
The skill american high schools actually teach is to confidently misunderstand the thing in ways that conform to current trends. I still remember the absolutely outrageous hot takes about The Divine Comedy that were taken seriously and encouraged by our Lit teacher.
There is a good ending to Game of Thrones: evil wins, everyone dies. All the fools who pursued their own interests rather than face an annihilating threat get annihilated. It's right there in the show's motto. "Winter is coming."
The writers just lacked the courage to do it. They tried to tack a Disney ending onto a tragedy.
Either that or Cersei being queen would've been the correct ending.
The Lannisters would've had the only real army left without that WWE-style defeat of the Night King. Cersei's consistently outwitted everyone (except Tommen, I guess), and they knew how to buy loyalty.
Instead we ended up with the usual plot armor, and a "twist" that the character that behaved like a tyrannical zealot for 7+ seasons was, in fact, a tyrannical zealot.
A lot of the time, the definitions peculiar to a subfield of science _don't_ require much or any additional technical background to understand. They're just abbreviations for special cases that frequently occur in the subfield.
Looking this sort of thing up on the fly in lecture is a great use for LLMs. You'll lose track of the lecture if you go off to find the definition in a reference text. And you can check your understanding against the material discussed in the lecture.
I think at this stage, most mathematicians recognize that formal proof verification is a real and interesting thing. We have extremely prominent mathematicians like Scholze & Tao making a point of using these tools.
But in many cases, it's extra effort for not much reward. The patterns which most mathemematicians are interested in are (generally) independent of the particular foundations used to realize them. Whether one invests the effort into formal verification depends on how hard the argument is and how crucial the theorem.
Y'all should read this, and make sure you read to the end. The last paragraph is priceless.