And i agree with you. An important different between any live, functioning religion and fiction is that people live the religion. I would say that what we call “myth” is kinda the corpse of religion, it’s religious writing stripped of the people who live it. And I’m okay calling writings of living religions myths, just like I’m okay referring to human bodies whether the person is alive or dead. But i wouldn’t call any myths “fiction” unless they are part of a fictional world. So the myths that Tolkien write are also fiction. But the ones that Ovid wrote about really aren’t, even if Ovid didn’t take them seriously.
Yes. The distinguishing feature of a myth is at some point, people did believe in them. Whether it’s a religious myth, urban myth or some other type of myth, the word is consistently used to refer to something that people do or did believe in.
I’m trying to think backs to books we read as a class, like The Giver or Lord of the Flies or 1984, or stories we didn’t read but learned about, like The Illiad or the stories from the Bible and the Quran.
I don’t remember a single time where the teacher paused to say “Now, remember, we don’t think that these stories are literally true”, in any of these contexts.
I read a lot of mythology in elementary school, and i can’t remember anyone telling me it wasn’t true.
I do have a Christian friend whose child believed a little too much in Santa Claus, and who sat the child down to explain that Santa isn’t real, and Jesus is.
But Greek myths? Norse myths? Sally Dick and Jane? Pride and prejudice? No one ever told me those weren’t true.
Yep. I think kids have a pretty good instinct for this stuff. I haven’t asked my daughter if she thinks that Santa is real (my wife would be pissed if I ruin the illusion lol) but I’m 90% sure that she views Santa the same way she views Mickey Mouse or any other TV character.
We did have a tangentially related talk about animals that are real that you can see at the zoo; animals that are real but extinct meaning there aren’t any more, like mammoths and dinosaurs; and animals that are imaginary, like unicorns or dragons.
(She was very upset to hear that unicorns are imaginary and told me that when she grows up she’s going to become a scientist so she can create them)
Gotcha. A nice idea.
I have long advocated that whenever a teacher does a “lie to children” for legit pedagogical reasons, they take time first to make a disclaimer along the lines of “What I’m about to explain is a very simplified version of reality. There is a LOT more complexity we won’t talk about until some other year in your schooling. This is a sketch of the reality, not a high res photo. So don’t take this as the entire story; you’ll learn more and different later.”
Kids eyes will glaze over, but if they get the message repeated to them enough times in front of enough topics, many of them will become less doctrinaire about everything by osmosis. I hope.
I hold out zero expectation any such thing will ever become part of common practice.
There’s a chapter in Roald Dahl’s The Witches where the narrator pauses to explain that witches still live among us, and who knows - perhaps your schoolteacher who is reading these words to you right now is actually a witch in disguise! (Kind of a dick move, IMO.)
In junior high English, my class read “Daniel in the Lions’ Den” and “David and Goliath”, both King James version. In high school, my class read the book of Job, also King James version. Neither teacher referred to it as fact or fiction, just by the titles. (My junior high teacher complained about having to teach them, because she said the King James version was “too difficult to understand”.)
Now that I think of it, I don’t think I read anything that could be called non-fiction in any English class after elementary school. I did read some in college, but they were about the history and criticism of the novel.
I do that a lot in my high school math classes, because I’m ideologically opposed to lies to children. Advanced classes end up having to waste way too much time un-teaching wrong ideas that students were taught in earlier classes.
We literally read this book in elementary school in class, with the teacher reading it out loud for the most part and occasionally taking turns. That line sounds very memorable to hear from your teacher, and it would probably have been, but I didn’t speak English very well yet at that time so I barely remember anything from the book beyond the fact that we did in fact read it.
Shakespeare is categorized under Literature, not Fiction.
What library or bookstore has both “literature” and “fiction” as separate categories?
Literally every school or public library I’ve been to has Shakespeare in the 800s of the Dewey Decimal organized section while “Fiction” is a separate section organized alphabetically by the author’s name and sometimes by subgenre (my local library has a separate section for “Science and SciFi” or “Young Adult” fiction for example)
Same with Barnes and Noble and similar bookstores.
Huh. It’s been ages since I’ve seen a library use the Dewey Decimal system at all. Possibly because if you’re going to abandon the system for half of your collection, why bother using it for the other half?
How do your libraries organize their nonfiction section then?
The Library of Congress system, usually.
Absolutely not true. The only difference between religion and what we now call mythology is that religions have influence today over what society thinks. Mythologies are dismissed only because their adherents and advocates are dead. Otherwise they are indistinguishable.
Right. 822.33 is Shakespeare.
Library of Congress-classifies Shakespearean works primarily within the PR 2750–PR 3112 range of its classification system, PR being English Literature.
Shakespeare himself poked some fun at the idea of classifying literature in Hamlet:
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.