What goes around comes around is an expression that can apply to many areas. The field of education is one of them. The new Common Core standards for reading place an increasing emphasis on non-fiction selections. This is obviously an important approach but really not a new one. Go back maybe twenty years and you will probably find this idea being discussed.
In an op-ed piece, Professor Mark Bauerlein of Emory University laments the fact that the new standards appear to crowd out “high-quality fiction, poetry, theater and other imaginative texts.” He points out the the New York City Department of Education on their “Tasks, Unit & Student Work” resource page, offers very few pieces of literature to correlate with the standards. But the site does give numerous units on non-fiction topics like DNA and crime detection, European imperialism, vertical farming, among others.
He fears that curriculum designers are going in a direction that critics of the Common Core standards warned about last year. Literature is being relegated to a back seat in the classroom. Yet so many literary works would lend themselves to any number of units. A study of adulthood could balance current news stories and studies with classics like “Jane Eyre,” The Red Badge of Courage,” or “Almos’ a Man.”
He closes his piece with this sentence. Literature “ought to be at the very center of high-quality public education.”