Eductaion reform is a contentious topic, and everybody has their own ideas about the best ways to improve the teaching of basic skills. Some people favor a “whole language” approach, others think we should go back to teaching phonics and memorizing grammar rules. I’ve heard people speak of “diagramming sentences” as absolutely the worst idea ever, while others think it’s the key element missing from our students’ preparation.
It take a real outside-the-box thinker like Ann Althouse to suggest that the silver bulet is to eliminate fiction reading from schools:
And why does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school. They will be easier reading, and with well-developed reading skills, kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home. But even if they don’t, why should any kind of a premium be placed on an interest in reading novels? It’s not tied to economic success in life and needn’t be inculcated any more than an interest in watching movies or listening to popular music. Leave kids alone to find out out what recreational activities enrich and satisfy them. Some may want to dance or play music or paint. Just because teachers tend to be the kind of people who love novels does not mean that this choice ought to be imposed on young people via compulsory education. Teach them about history, science, law, logic — something academic and substantive — and leave the fictional material for after hours.
Really, this is a breathtaking suggestion. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else advocate that the key to education reform is to completely discard pretty much all of the humanities disciplines. (David Horowitz has argued for the elimination of humanities faculty, but not banishing their subjects from the curriculum.)
Like most cranky contrarian blog posts, this contains a tiny sliver of a good idea. There’s really no great shortage of people saying that non-fiction reading is an important part of learning to read, and groups like Jon Scieszka’s “Guys Read” project make non-fiction a major part of their strategy to encourage literacy among boys. Althouse is right to argue that reading non-fiction for content is an important skill.
The problem with this little outburst is that I’m not sure who she’s arguing against.
If there are educational experts out there saying that the whole problem with the public school curriculum is that kids just read too many damn facts, I haven’t run across them. I’m not aware of anybody saying that reading fiction is the only way to teach reading– the reading programs that I’m aware of use a mix of fiction and non-fiction sources.
That’s as it should be, because children are individuals, and what works to get one child to read may fail miserably for another. A proper reading curriculum should include all sorts of material, to appeal to the largest possible range of individual tastes and learning styles. Teaching exclusively through the use of non-fiction is as crazy as teaching exclusively through the use of fiction.
And there are good and important reasons to have students read fiction. Janet Stemwedel (from whom I got the original Althouse link) has a fairly comprehensive list, to which I’ll add just one point:Reading fiction is sometimes a better way of teaching people “something academic and substantive” than simply lecturing them.
To cop a line from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, “Story is a force of nature.” Stories are extremely powerful, and a well-told story can often make an important point more effectively than a well-reasoned lecture. This isn’t exactly a shocking new literary theory, either– pretty much every culture in the history of culture has used stories to teach lessons. Aesop wrote fables, Jesus taught in parables, the Grimm Brothers wrote gory little stories. We’ve got a big thick book of Jane Yolen’s favorite folk tales around here somewhere, and pretty much all of those stories have a point that goes beyond mere entertainment.
The same is true of more recent history. There’s a reason why Uncle Tom’s Cabin is held up as an important part of the abolitionist movement in the mid-1800’s, and books like Invisible Man are an important part of the Civil Rights movement of the Twentieth Century. Well told stories can make people understand reality much more effectively and immediately than pages of facts and statistics. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is almost entirely fiction, but on another level, it makes Vietnam more real than mere factual accounts. And for that reason, I first read it as a part of a History class in college.
Fiction is not just for recreation. And for that reason alone (let alone all the others that Janet lists), it has an important place in our schools.