Teaching English via Common Core

Yesterday I offered my suspicions about what had produced the collapse of the college English major. I say suspicions, because I am woefully under informed about how English literature is being taught, for example, in high schools. I suspect that children are not being taught literature as literature, are not being taught by people who love and respect literature, but are being told to read poetry and fiction as sociological documents, designed to denounce the perfidy of Western civilization.

Soon after I ran across a Pamela Paul column in the New York Times. Paul is considerably better informed about these topics, and I am happy to report that her views align with mine.

As for what humanities students care about, one is not surprised to see that the list includes ideologically driven buzz words:

Yet many would-be humanities majors have turned toward, not more pragmatic degrees, but more esoteric, interdisciplinary majors, filled with courses that encourage use of words like “hegemony,” “intersectional” and “paradigm.” These educational tracks don’t exactly lead to gainful employment, either.

Perhaps more importantly, Paul reports that children are being disabused and disembarrassed of their love for literature in high school. Again, I suspected as much.

And yet another important and dispiriting part of the story is that the study of English itself may have lost its allure, even among kids who enjoy reading. They are learning to hate the subject well before college. Both in terms of what kids are assigned and how they are instructed to read it, English class in middle and high school — now reconceived as language arts, E.L.A. or language and literature — is often a misery. It’s as if once schools teach kids how to read, they devote the remainder of their education to making them dread doing so.

As for the source and origin of this horror, Paul traces it to the Common Core, an Obama-era aberration and abomination, instituted with the best of intentions, in order to enhance American children’s academic performance. We recall that Bill Gates-- who knows nothing about education-- joined up with the Obama team to foist this on America. We also recall that the math portion of the Common Core was more likely to make it more difficult for children to learn math. See my post about Berkeley math professor Marina Ratner, from eight years ago.

In the meantime, Paul reports that Common Core literary standards have been dumbed down, to the point where children are being taught to study texts, not poems or novels or even short stories:

This began largely with the Common Core, instituted in 2010 during the Obama administration. While glorifying STEM, these nationwide standards, intended to develop a 21st-century work force, also took care to de-emphasize literature. By high school, 70 percent of assigned texts are meant to be nonfiction. 

Educators can maximize the remaining fiction by emphasizing excerpts, essays and digital material over full-length novels. Immersing children in the full arc of storytelling has largely gone out that window as novels have increasingly been replaced by short stories — or shorter yet, by “texts.”

“The Common Core killed classic literature,” as Diane Ravitch noted in 2018.

So, Common Core opposed the classics, what we call the canon. It cared more about choosing texts that children could relate to, texts that echoed their own experience. And, of course, the chosen texts were carefully sanitized of triggering references:

To even be considered, a work must first pass through the gantlet of book bans and the excising of those books containing passages that might be deemed antiquated or lie outside the median of student body experiences. Add to that the urge to squelch any content that might be deemed “triggering” or controversial, the current despair over smartphoned attention spans and the desire to “reach students where they are.” Toni Morrison’s short first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” a coming-of-age story, tends to be assigned over her longer, more intricate, more provocative — and to this reader, anyway, richer — novel “Beloved.”

Citing the need to appeal to fickle tastes with relevant and engaging content, teachers often lowball student competence. Too often, this means commercial middle grade and young adult novels such as “The Lightning Thief” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” or popular fiction like “The Outsiders,” or on the more ambitious end, accessible works of 20th-century fiction like “To Kill a Mockingbird” — all engaging novels that kids might read on their own — in lieu of knottier works that benefit from instruction and classroom discussion. The palpable desperation to just get students to read a book doesn’t come across as the kind of enticement that makes literature soar.

This notion, that children cannot understand anything text that refers to an experience that they have not had themselves, diminishes their ability to imagine. Not to mention dealing with people who are not just like them.

Worse yet, is the approach to texts and the notion that all children must read at the same pace-- policy that dumbs down instruction:

A typical high school assignment now involves painstakingly marking up text with colored pencils in search of “literary devices” — red for imagery and diction, yellow for tone or mood, etc. Students are instructed to read even popular fiction at an excruciatingly slow pace in the service of close reading in unison. They’re warned not to skip ahead. You wouldn’t want anyone to get excited!

Back in the day, pre-Common Core, children were exposed to great literature. I will mention that when I was in high school, in the 1950s, we read Shakespeare, beginning in the ninth grade:

When I was in public high school in the olden ’80s, we read “The Red Badge of Courage” and “The Scarlet Letter,” with multiple forays into Shakespeare. We were assigned Faulkner, Joyce, Conrad and Henry James, authors whose work opened my mind and tested my abilities of comprehension and interpretation.

Nowadays, Paul explains, we expect nothing of children. We do not expect that they can profit from a good intellectual challenge:

By asking so little of students, schools today show how little they expect of them. In underestimating kids, the curriculum undermines them.

Tell me you are surprised.