The Common Core has been big news in the world of education
for the last couple of months. Proposed
by the Federal government, the Common Core is an effort to impose a general
standard on local school districts, with the stated goal of halting the
performance slide of American school children. Most states, including Michigan,
have already passed it. On the English side of things, the Common Core standard
requires that about 70 percent of the material assigned to high school students
be nonfiction. Kids that grow up reading gems like “Executive
Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,”
or “Recommended Levels of Insulation” from the Environmental Protection Agency,
will have a head start when it comes to the kind of reading comprehension that
will be required in the actual job field.
It should come as no
surprise that journalists, teachers, and activists alike have voiced scorn and
frustration even as the Common Core program has found wide acceptance among lawmakers.
But after peeling away the program’s very bulky dustcover of “informational
texts,” a quantitatively slim but qualitatively substantial blessing emerges.
The fiction, drama, and poetry that does make the cut for high school includes
Homer, Ovid, Voltaire, O. Henry, Steinbeck, Bradbury, Michael Shaara,
Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Donne, Poe, Emily Dickinson,
Auden, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner,
Hemingway, Austen, Oscar Wilde, Thornton Wilder, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.
In other words, a lot of really good stuff; books that have become pillars of
the Western imaginative subconscious, many of them written by Christians. No kid
wants to read “FedViews” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, but even
some of the informational texts were penned by real people—Lincoln, Chesterton,
Reagan, Frederick Douglass, de Tocqueville, Mencken, Thoreau, and Jefferson, to
name a few.
Few
would deny that Michigan public schools have not done a great job educating
their students. Just look at test scores and dropout rates. But as things
stand, there is a deeper issue, an imagination drain that targets the good
students, the ones who do want to read. In her much maligned Wall Street
Journal editorial titled “Darkness too Visible” (2011), book critic Meghan
Gurdon attacked the industry of young adult literature for exploiting the
teenage vulnerability to egoism and dark fantasizing. “How dark is contemporary fiction for teens?” she wrote. “Darker than
when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and
incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels
directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.”
As an example of adult approval for this badness,
she cited the 2010 novel “Scars,” by Cheryl Ranfield. The novel, she wrote, which “the School Library Journal inexplicably called ‘one heck of a
good book,’ ran into difficulties earlier this year at the Boone County Library
in Kentucky, but not because of its contents. A patron complained that the
book's depiction of cutting—the cover shows a horribly scarred forearm—might
trigger a sufferer's relapse. That the protagonist's father has been raping her
since she was a toddler and is trying to engineer her suicide was not the issue
for the team of librarians re-evaluating the book.” The New York Times noted
that this trend continues on into adulthood, in a 2012 article titled “Beyond
Wizards and Vampires, to Sex”: “Publishers and
authors say they are seeing a spurt in sales of books that fit into the
young-adult genre in their length and emotional intensity, but feature slightly
older characters and significantly more sex, explicitly detailed,” NYTimes
writer Leslie Kaufman wrote. “They’ve labeled this category ‘new adult’ — which
some winkingly describe as Harry Potter meets ‘50 Shades of Grey’ — and say it
is aimed at 18-to-25-year-olds, the age group right above young adult.”
The public schools’ failures have created a
market-share that the private businesses of the YA book world have been quick
to fill. Not surprisingly, the businesses have been more effective than the
government in their education. It’s an evil education, however, not the
“leading of the mind out of obscurity” suggested by the word’s Latin etymology,
but a leading into darkness. I hesitate to say that the Federal government
getting more involved in our day-to-day lives can ever be a really good thing.
But if it means that a 16-year-old kid picks up “Pride and Prejudice” or “King
Lear” instead of “Looking for Alaska” (A NYTimes Top 10 seller in the YA
category, about a group of college kids living the sweet life of drugs,
blackout, vomit-drunk parties, sex, and suicide), it’s at least worth a second
look.
