Thomas Jefferson Hated Kids Reading Novels
Over two hundred years ago - in 1818 - Thomas Jefferson penned a letter responding to a question regarding how to best educate young women.
Jefferson would warn “A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels” saying the habit lead to a “bloated imagination” in which “reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected.” Context: youth novel reading had been a point of contention for adults since 1774
The original letter in the founding fathers very own handwriting is below, along with a transcription of the relevant section:
“A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. when this poison infects the mind, it destroys it’s tone, and revolts it against wholesome reading. reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy; and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. the result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life. this mass of trash however is not without some distinction: some few modelling their narratives, altho fictitious, on the incidents of real life, have been able to make them interesting and useful vehicles of a sound morality.”
Jefferson would make an exception for some novels - that he said were realistic with good moral lessons - unlike the majority ‘mass of trash’ available at the time. He appeared to apply the same logic to poetry when he said:
“for a like reason too much poetry should not be indulged. some is useful for forming style and taste. Pope, Dryden, Thomson, Shakespeare, and of The French Moliere, Racine, the Corneilles may be read with pleasure and improvement.”
This is another good reminder that some of histories great thinkers weren’t immune from pessimistic tropes about kids these days, or in the case of Einstein: the lump of labor fallacy…
Einstein Blamed Automation for the Great Depression
Amid the turmoil of The Great Depression, one of history’s great intellectuals shared a very unintellectual hot take: he blamed automation for taking all the jobs and causing the economic chaos that would define the 1930s.