There has always been contentious debate about what or who or exactly how much we should teach the children of our nation. Logically, we want the next generation to be educated the right way. The problem is that the world is such an enormous and unpredictably diverse place; who is to say what would properly prepare our students best?
The earnest academics and educators in the Common Core State Standards Initiative were bold enough to venture an answer. And as a gesture of good faith, America is trying to apply their attempt at a thorough, uniform curriculum in every public school in the nation.
Common Core produced its set of benchmarks and requirements as part of the ongoing federal attempt to set standards and equalize education across states—thus ensuring no individual state has an inordinate edge when it comes time for national quiz bowl season. (Here's looking at you, Vermont.)
So far 45 states and half of Minnesota have adopted the standards and nine states, including North Carolina, are using them for the 2012-2013 school year.
The basic concept of mandating the same standard and curriculum is controversial and has attracted much criticism. One specific requirement has angered many, especially among the relatively small, but impressively articulate, demographic of English teachers.
The Common Core mandates a new emphasis on informational readings as opposed to literary ones, and so has set new guidelines concerning the material assigned to students. In elementary school, students should be reading 50 percent nonfiction material and 50 percent fiction material, and by twelfth grade students should be reading 70 percent nonfiction material and 30 percent fiction material.
Naturally, there has been backlash. Book lovers everywhere reacted in disgust, worried kids might not be given the chance to develop an appreciation for literature. Scholars had the chance to bond over the preposterous implication that any textbook could teach history better than "The Great Gatsby." And proponents of the liberal arts lamented the growing utilitarian trend in education policy, which gives marketable technical skills priority over general cultural knowledge and critical thinking.
The standards were more than a little misunderstood, and the writers of the Initiative were quick to make announcements saying as much. This isn't to say those concerns are no longer valid, however.
The Common Core reading requirements were not meant to apply only to English classes nor to force teachers to take classic literature out of the curriculum. The intention was to bring more complicated and diverse reading materials into all classrooms and to push science and social studies teachers into making students read more and write essays, too.
But regardless of the creators' intentions or the knee-jerk reactions of literature junkies across the nation, what matters is how it's put into practice. Judging from the current practices in the nine states that have already adopted the standards, the people who make the decisions misinterpreted the standards as well. Many of the experts who fashioned the standards have spoken out against this widespread misinterpretation, often taking the opportunity to criticize school administrators' reading comprehension skills.
However, many education experts contend administrators will continue to place the majority of this burden on English teachers. Science and history classes can't fill up 70 percent of the students' readings on their own; even with the corrected interpretation, English teachers are still left to tighten their belts and selectively excise large parts of their ordinary curriculum.
But we shouldn't be too quick in dismissing this trend as one that ruins English education and forever shatters any chances these students had of developing a real lifelong love for reading. Does our current English education end up teaching much more than how how to use SparkNotes or find pirated copies of "The Crucible" film online? Maybe the inclusion of an interesting and appropriately literary nonfiction piece here and there would interest otherwise bored students and remind them that literature isn't so distant from historical facts and modern social issues.
But the unavoidable question at the core of this heated issue concerns the purpose of English education itself. What is reading in school supposed to do for students? Does it teach them certain skills, specific or general, or is its product much less quantifiable? Is the purpose of literature in education to sow the seeds of intellectual growth—to cultivate the beginnings of a rich internal life in these students?
For the Common Core, the goal is clear. The big idea, as it always is, is to prepare kids for college and careers. David Coleman, an architect of the standards, has said in various public appearances that kids are very rarely prepared for the complexity of college reading. Even for kids who do a lot of reading outside of class, he says, the material tends to top out at around a fifth grade reading level.
As well as increasing the amount of primary documents and nonfiction texts that students work with, Coleman focuses on the increased complexity of texts, which he believes students need.
And maybe he has a point. Perhaps one of the reasons university life causes so much stress and severe mental anguish is that students are suddenly expected to work closely and regularly with dense academic texts that they've never had to deal with before. Maybe reforming education in primary and secondary school is what we need as a country.
But is intensely ramping up academic standards across the nation really the right way to do this? Shifting the academic stress backward onto the students who might already be falling behind doesn't seem like the most logical step toward a solution. And what about those kids who are already hopelessly behind by middle or high school—do we just expect them to start catching up if pushed hard enough? It doesn't seem to have worked so far.
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