- A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace.
EDIT: I don't know how to do multiple tags.
I'm sorry, but until a more reliable source than the Telegraph appears, I'm going to point to an absence of evidence and ignore this.
I'm afraid the Common Core State Standards are real, and they really do insist that students spend no more than 30% of their reading time on literature. However, the standards do not appear to single out Shakespeare, Catcher in the Rye, or To Kill a Mockingbird.
They are, however, they emphasize literary non-fiction over literary fiction - not shop manuals over literary fiction. So - less Catcher in the rye, more The Feminine Mystique. Less To Kill a Mockingbird, more Silent Spring. I had a big wicked post on this but then my wife went into labor and it bad gatewayed me so now I"m drinking fuckin' Perrier Jouet Belle Epoque while my wife and hours-old daughter sleep it off in the next room. Here's the money passage: "Includes the subgenres of exposition, argument, and functional text in
the form of personal essays, speeches, opinion pieces, essays about
art or literature, biographies, memoirs, journalism, and historical,
scientific, technical, or economic accounts (including digital sources)
written for a broad audience " ...hardly "Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California's Invasive Plant Council."
Huge generalization here, but the guy on the left of the couch here seems more of the literary type while the guy on the right could probably recite the manuals his products come with. What type of humans do we want? The answer, all types please. We should have flexible curriculums that play to the teachers strengths and the classrooms needs.
I don't usually have a rooting interest in a debate, but I sure hope you're wrong and kleinbl00 is right. I love non-fiction, probably more than fiction, but we can't arbitrarily draw a line and impose quotas on what students read. No matter the subject matter, this is a form of censorship, and an egregious one at that. I would argue that a stories like The Trial and Brave New World, both books that I read for the first time in high school, can teach one more about totalitarianism than studying a history textbook. Administrators and bureaucrats should wake up to this, and stop trying to impose micromanaging controls over schools. Local control is a mantra of conservatives, but for some reason not on this issue. It can only be because they want to ruin public education (under the guise of "fixing" it).
I think literature is important for an education also, but the Gates Foundation, which is sponsoring the Common Core State Standards, seems to think schools should focus on making children either ready for the workplace or ready for professional training in college.
I am going to c/p some things I wrote on another forum quite some time ago, and a response I got. It's long; don't read it if you don't feel like it. -catering to the lowest common denominator
-massive and uncalled for cost of higher education
-teachers have no control over what they teach, and how
-standardized testing system is either pointless, broken or both
-mass cheating (if you haven't read Freakonomics, you should)
-lack of specialization opportunities Roughly prioritized. and The response I got was: So the rallying cry became accountability! Tests everywhere. Every student in every school takes the same test on the same day so we can see how they're all doing. But now the curriculum "teaches to the test". A subject is taught not in the natural way but in the way appropriate to pass the test: my high school English teachers complained that they had to teach us to write the wrong way because it was what they expected on the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test). I can't disagree with that assessment because my writing was always terrible in high school. As for math, my aunt gave me a book on complex analysis for my thirteenth birthday and I spent the next two years staying up at night trying to digest it. I have a skewed perspective on math. Now we cheat on the tests. It didn't work. Teachers are unhappy; instead of writing their own curriculum, they teach the standard curriculum. Assessment has grown from annually to many times a year. The most successful programs have involved something that looks like school choice. I went to a magnet school. Some magnet school programs, whether their focus is on technical disciplines or art, have worked pretty well. Conservatives have used this to argue for "voucher" programs where the government pays for kids to attend private schools, which obviously implies choices. Why conservatives want the government to spend more money is anyone's guess. Other countries have public education systems that work. There's no reason that it can't work. We have public services in America that work: the post office, the NHTSA, the IRS, the SEC. My first proposal is to charge rich people money for public schools. School choice helps by driving competition. I'd like to drive competition without wasting my money, so I say we spend the money of people who have money. If, above a certain income threshold, we start to charge money for public school -- maybe a family making 30k pays nothing, a family making 50k pays 1k per child, a family making 70k pays 3k per child, and a family making >100k pays 5k per child, it levels the field for private schools to compete: it's hard to compete with free. Competition has historically and in general been the best source of accountability for any industry. The students -- or the students' parents -- have more information on which to make choices than test scores. If the public school sucks, those who can will move their kids to a private school. If school funding is based on enrollment and enrollment alone, and the government covers the cost for poor kids, the public school is "motivated to improve" like any other capitalist thing. Yes, poor kids who go to bad schools still get screwed. They get screwed to begin with. It's harder for them to move; they don't have the legal or informational resources to figure out how to send a kid to a public school in another district. Rich people have these options today. But if the administration has to try to draw students to the school, we force them to focus on improving the educational experience, not to focus on improving test scores. The best thing we can do for the poor is to abolish the districts, so they can send their kids to whatever school they want, including one in a good neighborhood. If a bad public school really starts shedding students like blood from an amputated limb, we close it and move the kids to a different one somewhere else. My second proposal is that the testing system should be separate from the education system. Testing can be helpful: it provides the consumers -- students and parents -- a way to judge the quality of the education they receive from a school. Good test scores can be used, for example, as a criterion for admission to a specialized program. Testing should be available to people who want it or need it. If we give people the information they need to make good decisions, they are more likely to make good decisions. Government-run testing and private testing can both accomplish this; government-run testing can fill in gaps in an ecosystem where private testing does not exist. My third proposal involves birthrates. Specifically, we want a stable one, about 2. If we make it more expensive to have kids, people have less of them; see above proposal about paying for school. In order to compensate for the negative effects on birthrate of charging the rich for school for their kids, we give them the tax break per-child to pay for it. Europe and East Asia have a birthrate that is too low. Central Asia and Africa have one that is too high. Luckily ours is presently about 2.1, which is basically stable. My last proposal is encouraging local freedom to experiment. Things like merit pay and tenure reform aren't necessarily all-or-nothing: if we let some schools try them, we can see how it works. I tend to think it is a better idea to plant a seed than to build a tree. If we give people the tools to improve their own education, people learn about how to improve education.The main [problems] off the top of my head are:
No Child Left Behind led directly to lying and cheating spreading pervasively through the system. Given the generally low resources of state school districts, if a child is in danger of being "left behind," the most likely course of action is something being done to his scores quietly. In the meantime, children who are operating at the mean or slightly above it but with potential for much more are allowed to stagnate because all the meager funding is going to frantically making sure every student hits some sort of arbitrary benchmark, however impossible this clearly is. The answer is probably the early-specialization, socialist solution that you can see in action in places like Sweden, Germany etc. The insurmountable problem is forcing a new system on a resisting American public.
In the old days, we just had grades. Standardized testing happened at the end of high school, and that was it. But the system was unequal and people thought it was unfair. Schools in rich neighborhoods had better teachers and better education than schools in poor neighborhoods. And if the local school was bad, there wasn't much you could do about it, and it wasn't easy to call your Congresscritter and prove that it was bad.
What confuses me is this: when I went to high school, I took the required classes they told me to, plus a bare handful of others that I had time for. None of these included history of lit, study of lit, western lit, nonwestern lit, or anything remotely like that. We got our fill of books in "English" class, whatever the hell that means. If you remove the fiction books from "English" class, you are completely removing one of the pivotal parts of our culture from our entire schooling experience. We won't learn them before high school, and unless we choose certain areas of study we won't learn them after either. And the main way to choose your area of study is by doing a bit of everything in high school. I believe the article said 2014 -- I hope someone fights this and beats it by then.
No one will beat it before the implementation date, because no one will even try. One of the only things that Democrats and Republicans agree upon in the last decade is that we have to impose severe managerial controls on local school districts. Top down control will fail eventually, however. This will, too.