[Coda]

Originally Posted by Ava

Have you guys ever read that old article that proposes that people eat babies to control the surplus population?

I don't know why.... But we were forced to read it in high school.

In addition to it being a bitingly sharp work of satire, it's also an introduction to the philosophy surrounding the Malthusian catastrophe. (Indeed, it was written by Thomas Malthus.) It really does deserve to be required reading for people preparing to be adults, but it also needs the teacher to be competent enough to actually explain what it's all about, in no small part because it's satire. It is of course ideal if you can figure it out on your own because then you get the full rhetorical impact of the piece, but teenagers aren't guaranteed to have the necessary background to figure it out on their own.

If you've read and understood Malthus, then the character of Ebenezer Scrooge should make a lot more sense instead of just being an arbitrarily harsh and greedy villain.