Melville House ruined my morning with this story:
The Common Core guidelines, which have been adopted in 45 states and three territories, call for schools and teachers to boost reading of nonfiction, so that by twelfth grade most students are reading more ‘informational text’ than fictional literature. By 2014, the required ratio will be 50% nonfiction to fiction in elementary school, and that should grow to 70% by grade 12.
Get a load of this speech by David Coleman, one of the “brains” behind the Common Core guidelines:
Forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with … [that] writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a [expletive] about what you feel or what you think. What they instead care about is, can you make an argument with evidence, is there something verifiable behind what you’re saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me? It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’
This is very bad. This paragraph kind of makes me queasy when I read it. Fiction is very important, especially to developing minds, but the problem is that there’s no way to quantify how important it is, and America’s educational philosophy has become so quantification-based that I think fiction in American schools is probably doomed. And if that’s true, I’d say we’re probably doomed. Fiction is the best way we have to put ourselves in the bodies of others, to feel what other people feel and to experience what they experience. Fiction is the best way we have to expand our imaginations, and humans are useless without imagination. If we as a society are going to teach our children that the best they can be is grey-skinned middle-managers, we’re totally fucked as a nation.
What can I tell ya’? We’re a nation of philistines, and that’s in spite of the fact that all of us were forced to read Ray Bradbury and George Orwell in high school. The learners will continue to learn on their own, and most of humanity will grow up to be something disappointing.
The asshole quoted is wrong about something in particular, though; creative people tend to do very well at winning arguments, and better at putting evidence to work for them in making their points. What that has to do with fiction, I’m not exactly sure.
In Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem–I know, it’s fiction–there is a passage that talks about how people’s days used to be FILLED with stories (think “avoiding death by tiger and/or starvation”), but it’s bad for modern employers when their workers have stories. If you have a story about your day, it’s because something unexpected or unwanted happened on the job. They want you to have a boring, predictable day, so you are productive. So instead of having stories of our own, we immerse ourselves in others’, like reality TV or professional sports.
This article/issue is about shutting off one more source of stories that will make us unproductive.
If you found *this* alarming, how did you feel about the courts saying that schools could strip search children over Advil?
Or that time where schools were giving kids laptop computers with webcams and spying on them in their own home? Even busting a kid for drugs in his bedroom when he was eating mike-and-ikes?
But yeah, god forbid the schools stop having kids read shitty books.
Just what the hell do you think the purpose of modern schools is? (tip: It ain’t about education any more.)
“Look at my incoherent argument that makes no sense at all that I use to try to prove that schools suck.”
Yeah, go ahead and hold your shitty self up as an example of how schools suck. You do that. Your argument negates itself, and you look like a blithering idiot.
As someone who works closely with the mathematics Common Core State Standards, I can tell you that interpreting them is not always the easiest task. I agree that fiction should have a prominent place in education. If you read the standards, the intention is for the burden of teaching nonfiction to fall on all teachers so that English teachers don’t have to cut out as much (from the WP article):
“Social studies teachers, for example, could have students read the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” while math students could read Euclid’s “Elements” from 300 B.C.”
English teachers should not cut back on fiction – but other subjects should pick up some slack on reading and writing subject-relevant nonfiction. I personally enjoy reading nonfiction – and the analysis of it all. I would have enjoyed more of that in school and less multiple choice memorization tests.
Hey guspasho, let me just reword my point: public schools don’t give two shits about educating young people. Schools are just trying to push out productive workers, not educated citizens. This rather trivial article about the degrading quality of education shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, unless you’re a Constant moron. If you think public schools are there to educate young people, then you haven’t been paying attention to what schools are actually doing. As an example:What percentage of high school freshmen graduate after 4 years in this city? Is it still half? And if that’s the case, does it fucking matter what fucking books they read? No! It doesn’t, this concern is completely bullshit.
Put this ordeal in perspective.
This probably wouldn’t be an issue if fiction writing over the past 20 or so years wasn’t largely forgettable. Even the Pulitzer folks have given up on the genre these days. Once fiction comes back, readers will likely come back too, including schools and students.