Many educationists have, as usual, boarded the Band-Aid wagon, teaching the "personal choice" method. Fads are always popular with the educationists. But Diane Ravitch, professor of education at New York University, asks the pertinent question: "What child is going to pick up 'Moby Dick'?'" Or "Julius Caesar?" or even "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," once the staples of literature classes. Kids can learn good reading habits in elementary school to be prepared to read the best of the classics later.
But few schools teach a reading "core" any longer, and students graduate from high school with no collective body of knowledge in common, a problem made worse when they're encouraged to make their own personal choices for book assignments. President Obama passed up a good opportunity to tell the teachers, in an avuncular aside, that dumbing-down is not the rigorous discipline he promised to encourage in the campaign. A dumbed-down curriculum inevitably leads to dumbed-down state standards.
Reading time-tested literature should be about enjoyment, of course, and a good teacher should see to that. But it's about a lot more than enjoyment. A reader of fine literature develops critical thinking that is both aesthetic and moral, probing profound questions of life from different perspectives. These are lessons not found in social studies courses.
Reading the classics is about raising universal questions in an imaginative context, challenging the reader to evaluate ideas outside the passing popular culture. It's never difficult for kids to read the trendy fluff after school, just as there's no shortage of diversions from the rigors of homework. Guidance to good literature is an obligation of teachers. This is a presidential reminder Obama could have given at Wakefield High.
The president told the students that when he was a boy, his mother got him up at 4:30 in the morning to do his homework with her. When he complained, she reminded him, "It's no picnic for me either, Buster." Learning, as the president emphasized this week, is hard work for everybody. Reading Harry Potter is fine, but not when it's instead of Huck Finn. There will be time later to "light out for the territory." Only those who have read their Mark Twain would understand what that means.