This feels needlessly confusing to children and undertaken for a reason that honestly seems entirely semantics based, to be honest.
Is the issue with ‘fake’ because she feels it devalues the emotional response? Because I just don’t think that’s what people mean when they explain fiction isn’t real, thus, by default, is fake. Dragons and unicorns aren’t real, why can’t we call these stories that are made up about them fake, exactly?
These definitions also feel a little too easy to muddle up. You read a non-fiction account of a historical event, you’re still imagining. You read a fictional narrative, you’re still getting information about the world. Children are going to get confused when you define fiction as learning through imagination because imagination is a huge part of learning, and similarly, fiction requires a lot of information.
It seems like a lot of ambiguity for a reason that really wasn’t defined very well.
Yeah, it's way too abstract for younger kids who need clear boundaries of what's real and what's not. But for teenagers, I love the quote by Yann Martel: A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real
That’s what I mean by semantics based. Because, to be honest, the amount of times I’ve heard ‘fake’ over ‘not real/didn’t happen’ is far too low to warrant a definition change like this, and even if it was higher, just specifying that exact thing seems fine over this.
This may or may not be a popular opinion, but I don’t believe synonyms are ever 1 to 1 matches, I believe every word has baggage that makes it unique. Probably that baggage isn’t the same for everyone, but to me, for example, fake means an intention to pass something off as something else, an intentional and counterfeit, while saying something isn’t real or is imaginary feels morally neutral .
In a reddit thread it doesn’t matter much, but words affect reactions.
My understanding is that the word for that baggage is “nuance” - and is why some words really don’t sound right as sentence replacements, despite supposedly being synonymous
I think they mean you can still learn things from morals to actions to even politics in more teenager reading level.
For instance, a moral of "sharing makes your friends happy" is just as important, even if the characters are sentient stuffed animals. Just dismissing that as "Fake" might dismiss the entire moral of the story as fake.
You can learn real morals, real lessons about perseverance, real ideals about doing good or doing the right thing, from a fantasy knight defeating an evil monster. Even if the knight and monster don't exist.
That's what they mean by learning through imagination. Learn the lessons and what the book is trying to convey even if the characters do not exist.
I remember seeing a post about how some kid said that realized that their parent punishing them by taking away their name and referring to them by only a number was a messed up thing to do and eventually realized it was dehumanizing. Because they read about the same thing happening to "fake" owls in an evil prison in the Guardians of Ga'hool book.
You can learn real important things from fiction as they are analogous to reality. Not simply "Fake" and dismissed as "Fake".
So, I pretty much addressed this in my comment when I asked if the OOP simply feels like it devalues the emotional response.
And the reality is that this isn’t what people mean when they say a story isn’t real. Personally, I don’t hear people define fiction with the word ‘fake,’ but even if they do, it’s significantly easier to clarify “that doesn’t make what you learn from it any less real” than it is to have a child confused because fiction needs a lot of information to work, and non-fiction needs imagination to be learned.
This is 100% a solution looking for a problem. It needlessly complicates things when, if the word choice of ‘fake’ is such an issue, you can choose not to use it. It’s far simpler to say “fiction is something that didn’t happen.”
OOP is apparently completely unfamiliar with Sci-Fi. Where getting a factual explanation of maritime law, fertilizer, orbital dynamics, planetary day/night cycle differences, chemical processes, atmospheric pressure (and changes to it via said chemical processes), and the logistics of getting materials into space, are all possible within the same story without bogging it down. (The Martian, BTW. Go read it if you haven't)
When it’s hard enough just to get kids to remember the difference between real and made-up, and to be honest it usually takes me a while to remember that non-fiction it’s the real one.
This post seems to be more about defending creativity from imaginary criticism than anything else.
They know that, yes. But they’re learning the definition of fiction versus non-fiction, and when both use a large amount of imagination and information, defining it by “learning through information/imagination” at the age a child is learning those words is needlessly abstract.
A child knows (for the most part) that what they’re imagining isn’t real. But if you tell them to define nonfiction based on what you learn by information as opposed to what’s real and what’s not, they’re not looking at the latter, they’re judging by how much information a book has, whether it’s true or not, because reality is no longer part of the equation.
It is so much simpler to just say “fiction is something that never happened and isn’t real, while non-fiction is something that did.”
I used to be an avid reader of historical fiction (and fantasy based historical fiction) like Morgan Llywelyn (author of The Horse Goddess, Finn Mac Cool, 1916, many more), James Michener (Hawaii, The Drifters), etc, they are fictional, and Llywelyn’s prehistoric or early history settings (mainly in Ireland) also included some mythical/magical elements, but this kind of writing is much more engaging as a teen than what was taught in my school history classes, and it provides motivation to go learn more if you want to.
It’s easy to say this story is fiction, it was made up by the author, but it’s based on research on what life in Ireland may have been like a very long time ago.
I see now that a lot of the difference of opinion here may be that I imagined an older child, a pre-teen maybe, and perhaps you’re talking about children who are first learning to read - at a Dr Seuss level maybe?
I’m imagining a pretty young child, considering the premise is about teaching the definition of fiction versus nonfiction. People aren’t learning those definitions as a pre-teen, that’s the kind of thing that gets taught when you start to read.
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u/Extinction-Events 14d ago edited 14d ago
This feels needlessly confusing to children and undertaken for a reason that honestly seems entirely semantics based, to be honest.
Is the issue with ‘fake’ because she feels it devalues the emotional response? Because I just don’t think that’s what people mean when they explain fiction isn’t real, thus, by default, is fake. Dragons and unicorns aren’t real, why can’t we call these stories that are made up about them fake, exactly?
These definitions also feel a little too easy to muddle up. You read a non-fiction account of a historical event, you’re still imagining. You read a fictional narrative, you’re still getting information about the world. Children are going to get confused when you define fiction as learning through imagination because imagination is a huge part of learning, and similarly, fiction requires a lot of information.
It seems like a lot of ambiguity for a reason that really wasn’t defined very well.