Stop Common Core in Alabama Locking Out Liberal Learning. The Common Core emphasizes how to glean information from the written word--and other media as well. The catchphrase that the Common Core uses for the written words that students will mine for information is informational texts. Think of the recipe on the back of the soup can for turning soup into a tasty casserole. But not all informational texts present themselves as instructions. Information can be gleaned from all sorts of texts, including picture books, novels, poems, YouTube videos, works of history, and speeches by notables such as Abraham Lincoln. The trouble is that if you see the written word as mainly a device for conveying information, you miss many other things that writing can do. It stirs emotions; it points to truths beyond itself; alternatively, it conveys lies; it may possess beauty or it may be ugly; it can cause us to ask questions that the text itself does not ask; it possesses implications; it belongs to and participates in a larger context; it taps into secret memories; it rallies us to public causes. The Common Core slights all of these purposes. That is not to say it ignores them entirely. It gives some small space to mythology and literature--a space that retracts year by year as students progress through the Common Core. Why should this matter? We should surely want students to be able to read recipes on soup cans and to extract important information from texts. Thats a useful skill. But it is a skill that, cultivated at the expense of a more well-rounded form of literacy, cuts students off from the foundation of a liberal education. Students who know how to read informational texts, and to read every piece of writing as though it is an informational text, are ill-prepared for Platos Republic or Shakespeares King Lear. Indeed, they are ill-prepared for Goodnight Moon. This gap between how the Common Core teaches students to read and the kind of reading required in a liberal education is especially worrisome at a time when colleges have to a great extent abandoned their old core curricula. Students these days are lulled with the illusion that they can become critical thinkers by studying whatever catches their interest, rather than what their colleges have deemed the most important works. That whole do-it-yourself approach puts a premium on the capacity of college students to read with their eyes wide open and to get to places well beyond the information that a text lays out. With the Common Core, we will have the worst of both worlds: students who come equipped to read mainly for information and college curricula designed for students equipped mainly for independent intellectual synthesis.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 11:21:38 +0000
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