The Core Knowledge Blog

If the authors of the draft national standards are unwilling to name specific works of literature children should read, they should at least name specific literary movements, writes Dan Willingham.

The draft ELA standards floated by the Common Core State Standards Initiative focus almost exclusively on skills–what students should be able to glean from written texts, for example–but remain silent on content.  Dan Willingham floats an intriguing way to split the difference in his latest post at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  He points out  it’s not a problem to specify what kids should learn in other subjects.  “In science, for example, we expect that students will acquire certain skills– methods of scientific analysis–but we also believe that there is a body of scientific knowledge that students will learn,” he notes. “The same is true of history and mathematics.”  Why, he wonders, should literature be any different? 

Perhaps a better method would be to select literary movements based on their influence.  Specifying literary movements (e.g., Modernism, The Lost Generation, Harlem Renaissance) rather than specific authors would better parallel standards in other disciplines.We might expect a national body to recommend that students study Colonial American History in 3rd grade. We would not expect that national body to specify the particular events that must be studied (and by inference, what ought to be excluded).

“Influence is likely a less arbitrary criterion than aesthetic value, and it is more useful to students. Influential movements changed how future authors wrote, their subject matter, how they thought about literature, and so on,” writes Willingham, who argues understanding something of various literary movements is a key to understanding individual works of literature.

Is it really impossible for literature experts to agree on a set of major literary movements with which American high school graduates ought to be familiar? It would not be an easy task, surely, but I think that, if given the chance, a group of literature experts (teachers, editors, professors, writers, and critics) could rise to the occasion, especially if the criterion—literary influence—were made clear.

There is more at stake in getting the balance between process and content correct if the national standards movement is to succeed.  “A stated goal of the common core standards is to prepare students for college,” Willingham concludes.  ”If the standards leave the selection of literary works utterly to chance, they are unlikely to meet that goal.”