Ban Fiction Books to Improve Schools? Really?

If you’re an aspiring education thinker – not a policy wonk, not a teacher, not a scholar, not a thoughtful parent, but one of those “I want to be considered an unconventional, cutting edge intellectual” types – you need to take common sense, evidence and the time-tested tenets of education and kick them to the curb.

Education headlines are no place for tradition.

Richard Whitmire has done some very good work in the last few years showing us that boys have trouble with literacy. In an article co-written by William Brozo, we find that boys continue to underperform internationally relative to girls:

“Conventional wisdom holds that boys excel in math and girls in reading. Truth be told, boys excel in neither, according to a report released this month by the Center for Education Policy. The report, which analyzes test results from 40 states, reveals that boys lag well behind girls in literacy skills – while only tying them in math.

That gap is why many colleges are overflowing with women, while guys are becoming scarcer and scarcer on campus.

American boys, we tell ourselves, must be falling victim to anti-academic influences: hip hop, mind-numbing video games and too much time watching SportsCenter.

But the issue is far more complicated. Earlier this month, results of 65-country comparison called the Program for International Student Assessment revealed that girls tie boys in math while soaring ahead of them by an astounding 39 points on reading skills. SportsCenter, last time we checked, has a limited audience in Albania, the country with the largest gender gap in reading.”

Caroline Courneyer at EdWeek notes that Whitmire and others hold that making reading more enjoyable for boys – such as assigning reading that more closely matches the interests of the average boy – will close this gap. It can’t hurt.

ASCD blogger and education consultant Grant Wiggins, however, has a different solution: “Ban fiction from the curriculum.”

“No, I am not kidding. I think it is absurd that the bulk of reading making up the ELA curriculum involves fiction. There are few good reasons for retaining so much literature and many good reasons for dumping most of it.”

We might need to change the balance between fiction/non-fiction in English curricula not just to increase the literacy proficiency, analytical skillsets and raw knowledge for boys, but for students overall. Can Wiggins defend his claim?

“Plato famously banned poetry from The Republic. And who is the author of the above quote who agrees with me? None other than Thomas Jefferson.”

Plato having banned poetry is one out-of-context data point almost wholly divorced from today’s education problems – but it does let you know that Wiggins is familiar, at least on a superficial level, with the classics. You probably aren’t, and he wants you to know it.

Invoking Jefferson is another pseudo-intellectual trick. In a letter, Jefferson warned of the dangers of reading too much useless fiction:

“A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed.”

The fiction of Jefferson’s day – the quality, the availability and the sheer volume – differs from 2010. Jefferson’s generation didn’t even have a popular American novelist; James Fenimore Cooper, the United States’ first homegrown novelist, published The Last of the Mohicans in 1826 – the year Jefferson died. Wiggins fails to note that the letter was regarding the education of women, who tended at that time to read the less serious print available.

Wiggins links to a series of articles, many of which touch on the theme of fiction as ‘dangerous,’ published between 1820 and 1869 as evidence of his thesis’ weight. To put that timespan in a historical perspective, the great Charles Dickens novels, which were astute commentary on the social aspects of modernity, were written around 1860.

If only linking were the same as real evidence, we wouldn’t have to bother ourselves with reading those pieces and comparing the literature they’re discussing – again, in terms of availability, volume and content – with the available literature in a 2010 public school.

Wiggins does make some points worth considering, namely that much of the assigned reading is of less interest to boys than to girls. He recalls with pain his difficult childhood years:

“I recall with horror having to read Jane Austen and Nathaniel Hawthorne as a student. Worse, look at current favorites in younger grades, such as Sarah Plain and Tall [sic]: utterly boring, with no action and endless overly-fine detail for page after page.”

Horror indeed. It’s a wonder that Mr. Wiggins survived under the weight of Jane Austen literature long enough to cultivate that dignified white-silver crown. (After reading this, I fear for my own future, having been made to read Sarah, Plain and Tall in elementary school.)

But this shows Wiggins’ lack of understanding – not just of this particular issue, but of the educational process as a whole. Sarah, Plain and Tall will appeal to some children naturally and not to others. The rub to his argument: Sarah, Plain and Tall, and thousands of other less-than-classic novels, can be made interesting, relevant and beneficial with a good teacher. (Personally, Sarah, Plain and Tall didn’t interest me, but my teacher made it something I looked forward to each day.)

A good teacher uses a work’s irrelevance or misgivings as part of the learning process; a bad teacher depends solely on the merit of the work. That isn’t to say that we need to choose flawed fiction or pieces wildly inapplicable to our own culture to increase literacy skill and knowledge, but it does mean that a great deal of value in reading comes from examining the work – the characters, the plot, the style and that lost art, vocabulary – and putting it in context. Working through those bits tends to make them stick in one’s mind.

Wiggins’ invocations of Plato and Jefferson on their own do little to advance the argument. Looking closely at each man, his statements and their collective context – and then juxtaposed to ours – has real value.

No matter, says Wiggins – the real problem is that reading fictions means we aren’t prepared for all the non-fiction in the future:

“Secondly, the reading all of us are required to do in our adult responsibilities involves heavy doses of nonfiction, for which our students are totally unprepared. Look at NAEP and state assessment results on tests of reading where the questions involve non-fiction passages – the results are grim. Typically only about half the test-takers can identify author purpose, main idea or author perspective.”

Wiggins assumes that facility with non-fiction in adulthood comes from facility with non-fiction in childhood. He’s right about the NAEP results – our students find questions on non-fiction passages difficult. But is it because they don’t read enough non-fiction? Is it because they read work that isn’t challenging? Is it because they don’t read enough period? Will a switch to high-quality non-fiction do the job?

If you’re waiting for Wiggins to answer those questions with hard evidence, don’t hold your breath.

“… with modern writers like John McPhee, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Jay Gould, and Roger Angell why are we still leaning so heavily on old novels in a genre that has little to do with our future needs?”

Here, Wiggins is flat-out wrong. In addition to raw knowledge, the soft skills valued in that vaunted “21st Century global economy” are creativity, adaptability and collaboration. One could argue – as I would – that using fiction in literacy/English education better prepares the mind for the unknown. Our future needs won’t be met by familiarity with the great 2010 writers, they’ll be met by our ability to digest material in 2011, 2012 and beyond.

Wiggins ends by quoting Will Fitzhugh, whose work with The Concord Review (a journal of serious student scholarship in history) is truly remarkable. Mr. Fitzhugh, with whom I’ve spoken about K-12 academics in the past and is as sharp as they come, laments the lack of non-fiction in curricula. It’s an excellent, sobering essay about the dearth of non-fiction in our schools and how students miss out because of it.

It’s a solid argument, but it doesn’t support Wiggins thesis. As Fitzhugh notes, we bring together students and good texts – and we need to require those students to create quality academic work around those texts. By eliminating all non-fiction, we’re ignoring a huge body of valuable material. Banning all fiction would be the same folly.

But pageviews, notoriety and consulting dollars come from headlines like “Ban fiction from the curriculum,” not from headlines like, “Hire Smart Teachers, Choose Good Texts and Create Challenging Assignments.” You just don’t get to be an ASCD blogger – and you surely don’t get to call yourself a “professional educational troublemaker” – by depending on evidence or using common sense.

Ban all fiction? Nope. Create curricula around the best texts, fiction and non-fiction, that humanity has to offer? Sounds good, even if it means you don’t get to give yourself a cool, edgy title.