"Fields once wide open to English majors — teaching, academia, publishing, the arts, nonprofits, the media — have collapsed or become less desirable."

"Facing astronomical debt and an uncertain job market, students may find majors like communication arts and digital storytelling more pragmatic.... And yet another important and dispiriting part of the story is that the study of English itself may have lost its allure, even among kids who enjoy reading. They are learning to hate the subject well before college. Both in terms of what kids are assigned and how they are instructed to read it, English class in middle and high school — now reconceived as language arts, E.L.A. or language and literature — is often a misery.... By high school, 70 percent of assigned texts are meant to be nonfiction. Educators can maximize the remaining fiction by emphasizing excerpts, essays and digital material over full-length novels... A typical high school assignment now involves painstakingly marking up text with colored pencils in search of 'literary devices' — red for imagery and diction, yellow for tone or mood, etc. Students are instructed to read even popular fiction at an excruciatingly slow pace in the service of close reading in unison. They’re warned not to skip ahead. You wouldn’t want anyone to get excited!"

Writes Pamela Paul in "How to Get Kids to Hate English" (NYT).

"[Chelsea] Clinton strives for relatability, offering stories about her grandmothers and her early life in Arkansas. They are all, unfortunately, dull."

"We open with a glimpse of young Chelsea reading the newspaper at home in Little Rock 'as I ate my morning Cheerios,' before discussing world events with her parents, which she did 'around the dinner table every night and intensely after church on Sunday over lunch.' As she grows up and moves on to trips to India and other global crisis spots with her mother, somehow the stories don’t get much more exciting. On the evidence we get here, she is a kind of humanitarian Tracy Flick, but there is no comeuppance or sudden twist of fortune on the horizon. As bighearted as she is, hers is not the kind of voice that makes for a riveting children’s book. Young readers crave emotional directness, and they appreciate a little buildup and suspense. As a glimpse at the children’s best-seller lists makes clear, they respond best to stories of people in extreme situations, people who face major problems, struggle and triumph, like 'I Am Malala,' a book that shares many of Clinton’s empowering goals. Chelsea Clinton, however, is not Malala (who also had an experienced co-author), and would have been wise to step back a little from the flow of the book."

From a NYT review of Chelsea Clinton's new book, which is (irritatingly) titled "It's Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!"

There's no "look inside" view at the above-linked Amazon page, so I can't form even a superficial opinion about whether it's like Hillary's first book, "It Takes a Village/And Other Lessons Children Teach Us." Why is it, after all these years, that a woman going into politics enters through the door marked "Children"?

Hillary's book purported to teach adults lessons that came from children. The lessons came from her, but the title told us she got them from children. Chelsea's book is aimed at children, getting them quickly up to speed with lessons from adults. Children should naturally resist that kind of instruction, but that won't stop adults from buying the book... if they want their kids politicized early and they have confidence in the Clinton brand. I hope there aren't too many adults like that. Not ones with kids anyway.

Children reading nonfiction.

Here's a NYT article — "English Class in Common Core Era: ‘Tom Sawyer’ and Court Opinions" — about the struggles of English teachers — who'd obviously rather be teaching the good old novels they love and inspiring or trying to inspire kids to get caught up in the love of reading through imaginary characters and the plots that beset them — and the mean old politicians who've imposed the requirement that some percent (50 at first and 70 later) of the reading be nonfiction. And now we've got weird reading plans like "articles about bipolar disorder and the adolescent brain to help them analyze Holden Caulfield" and "The Odyssey" with "sections of the G.I. Bill of Rights, and a congressional resolution on its 60th anniversary, to connect the story of Odysseus to the challenges of modern-day veterans."

Schools generally choose their own reading materials. For nonfiction, however, the Common Core standards specify that students should read certain “seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance,” including the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” as well as presidential addresses and Supreme Court opinions. Many high schools have added these to American literature classes.

There are at least 3 problems tangled up together here.

1. The relative value of nonfiction and fiction in early childhood education. This is a topic I've written about for a long time — under the tag children reading nonfiction — going back to 2005, when I said: "[I]f teachers are just trying to get kids to read, why shouldn't they provide a broad selection and give kids a chance to discover what they find interesting? It looks as though the biggest problem is that teachers are pushing too much literary fiction on kids. English teachers tend to be people who enjoy that sort of thing, but most people don't read it on their own. Why should we have an appetite for stories?" And in 2007, in a post that got a lot of outraged pushback:

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.

2. Government — especially centralized government — taking over too much of education and distorting the decisions of those who are closer to the process who now must check the boxes and meet the percentages.

3. Whether the nonfiction reading requirement needs to impinge on the literature class. It might be interesting to teach a class that combines fiction with relevant readings in science, history, or current events. But it's bad if the literature teachers feel they're just being used to meet a government requirement and there's less time to read the great books that belong in the class. I would think that the percentages could be met in the science classes and the social studies classes. Why should it even be difficult? I wonder if perhaps it's not difficult, but the NYT is trying to make Common Core seem especially idiotic by showing an awkward approach deployed by balky teachers and cherry picking grumpy students who say things like "We do so much nonfiction. I just want to read my book." That's from a girl with a name that sounds like it came from a novel, Karma Lisslo.

Teaching your children about the history of the United States — through reading and travel.

Is this something you've done or will do for your children? Did your parents do it for you? Mine did, a bit, with trips to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. I appreciate what they did, and I wish I'd done more. It's too late for me now to take any inspiration, but I was quite moved by a description I read yesterday of American History Parenting on a truly grand scale. I read it in in Robert A. Caro's "Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson)," but it's not something Lyndon Johnson did with his daughters. It's about Johnson's rival in the 1948 Senate election, Coke Stevenson. Stevenson had remarried (12 years after the death of his first wife) when he was 66, and a daughter was born 2 years later:

As soon as the little girl was old enough to understand (and she was old enough very young; at three and a half she was not only reading adult books but could speak fluent Spanish), Stevenson began telling her stories— wonderful stories— about the history of the United States, and of Texas— and of Greece and Rome. After she started school, on days when snow or ice made the roads impassable and she couldn’t get to school, he and Teeney would take over her education themselves, reading to her. And when Jane was nine, Coke and Teeney started showing Jane history for herself. They had read her the accounts of the Alamo, of course, and of the battles of San Jacinto and Goliad and Sabine Pass, and they took her to all those sites, but they also ranged farther afield. They took her to see the Oregon Trail, reading Parkman’s The Oregon Trail as they drove; the three of them followed the trails of Lewis and Clark. “And many of the other Western trails, too, trails we never hear of,” Teeney recalls. “Coke knew all the trails.” There was the Revolution and the Founding Fathers, and there were trips to Mount Vernon and Monticello, and there was the Civil War, and all the battlefields that made up part of the history that Coke Stevenson loved. By the time Jane was a teenager, she had been taken by her mother and father to every one of the forty-eight states, and to several provinces of Canada, also. And there was a trip to a place nearer home. Coming home from school one evening when she was eleven, Jane told her father and mother that her class had begun studying how the state government worked. Coke took her to Austin so she could see it work for herself; once again, there was the whisper in the halls of the Capitol, “Coke Stevenson’s here,” and people came out of their offices into the halls to see a tall, erect old man holding by the hand a skinny little girl in pigtails.

The little girl was Jane Stevenson Murr Chandler, who died in 2010. I can't find an obituary for her and I wonder what she did with her life. Perhaps she lived in quiet obscurity, endlessly reading history, walking the great trails, visiting the battlefields and landmarks. [UPDATE: Not sure where I got the info that she'd died in 2010, but as you can see here, she was still alive in 2017.]

We were talking just a few days ago about parents who travel with children, and the subject was more the way parents these days take pride in keeping up an adventurous travel program even after their children are born, how they'd like to jet to Europe, baby on board, and are a bit ashamed when they resort to resorts where one lolls about by a pool or on the beach. That looks so dismal and pathetic compared to what Stevenson did for Jane — did with Jane, because what he did was only possible because he loved reading history so much and he really believed in something about America.

"What are we doing when we teach fiction to kids?"

Asks Jaltcoh:

When we teach children fiction — reading it, writing it, understanding it, loving it — as important as those teachings are, I think they also have a negative side effect. By teaching fiction so often and beginning at such an early age, we condition children to expect the “just right” results to flow inexorably from the writing of those who are good and bright.

Before kids learn about economics or law, politics or psychology, they learn that we’re supposed to treasure writing not primarily based on how well it corresponds to reality, but primarily based on whether it makes us feel good. And I intend the double meaning of “good” as in both “contented” and “moral.”

This could explain why well-educated, intelligent people, all across the political spectrum, so often make the unspoken assumption that good intentions and well-crafted words are sufficient for making good public policy....

Hit with a book.

I was looking for an image to illustrate the previous post and Googled that phrase — hit with a book — and didn't get what I was looking for but was highly amused — especially in view of the blog's emerging theme today — to find "Open carry kids book becomes a hit after being mocked by Bill Maher."

Here's "My Parents Open Carry" at Amazon, where it's "#1 in Books > Children's Books > Education & Reference > Government." The comments there are interesting, for example:

I got really excited when I found out there was a sequel coming out for the really little ones: "Goldilocks and the Three Open Carry Bears"

SPOILER ALERT: This does not end well for the blonde moocher who commits a Breaking and Entering.

AND: Here's the kind of illustration I was looking for:



Of course, in today's America, it's going to be a young female hitting a guy with a book. That's from "Buffy Season 8" which means close to nothing to me:

Roden hands her the book he was holding a couple of issues back which has the Twilight symbol on, he tells Faith that he has been promised to be protected from the coming “purge” if he gets rid of Buffy and the book will tell them how. She looks at the book and smiles, “thanks” she tells him, then hits him round the face with the book, "but I never was much of a reader."

Trashing contempt for women with contempt for men.

I tried to read this WaPo column by Alexandria Petri called "Why Bustle.com doesn’t work for women." It's about how the male founder of a website for women has "ample contempt for the very market he was aiming at." I think Petri, aiming for the market he has contempt for, aims contempt at him. But she quickly dives into generic contempt for men, on the theory that men don't read "books," and by "books," Petri means novels, and somehow the general failure of men generally to read novels feeds back into the topic of why Bryan Goldberg's Bustle sucks.

Excerpt:

Reading is one of the few sure-fire ways to become better at being human. So it’s a problem when anyone doesn’t do it — and an especial problem recently, when boys are increasingly slipping behind, at least compared to their female counterparts.

As of 2009, boys lagged 39 points behind girls, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment. One of the suggested reasons that boys aren’t reading is that unlike girls, who are somehow fonts of empathy capable of leaping from one perspective to another at a single bound, reading books from male or female perspectives with equal vigor and ease, boys can only be summoned to respond to the stories of other boys.

Who suggested this reason? No one's name is stuck to that stereotype, it's just a "suggested reason." Boys can't read because "books" are those fictional stories told from a perspective that can only be understood if one possesses empathy and that's something boys lack or Goldberg lacks or who the hell knows? It's just a theory out there, not a theory Petri herself admits to embracing as she wanders about trying to aim at that man who takes aim at women.

"Young men in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada have also fallen behind."

"But in stark contrast to the United States, these countries are energetically, even desperately, looking for ways to help boys improve," writes Christina Hoff Sommers in The Atlantic.

"Why is the Nobel Prize in Literature almost always given to a novelist, never a scientist?"

"Why should we prefer our literature to be about things that didn’t happen? Wouldn’t, say, Steven Pinker be a good candidate for the literature prize?"

Good idea. (An idea in the form of 3 questions.)

This is related to my strong belief that schools should teach reading through nonfiction literature. This opinion was surprisingly controversial, and it heightened my suspicion of those who become adamant about the lofty regard that belongs writing in the fictional mode. It's funny that what's not true must control the highest position.

The 3 questions above are from the famously atheist Richard Dawkins, and my statement that begins with "It's funny" feels like an invitation to atheists to say something about religion.

And in my mind, I hear — though there is no sound — religionists and fiction lovers alike clamoring to talk about greater truths.

Purchase of the day.

From the March 30, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

A Child's History of the World [Hardcover]
V.M. Hillyer (Author), Carle Michel Boog (Illustrator), Mary Sherwood Wright (Illustrator)

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want, pay nothing extra, and make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. We can't see your name.

The Althouse Amazon portal: Now globalized with 40% broader exposure.

Purchase of the day.

From the February 14, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"Bats - Creatures of the Night" (All Aboard Reading: Level 2: Grades 1-3) [Paperback] Joyce Milton (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.60)


(image from Wikimedia Commons)

... and 55 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — that all together put a lovely smile on the blogger's beautiful face.  Many thanks!

"Be a Sadist."

Rule #6 on Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing a short story:

No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

This is a problem I have with fiction. Characters are created for you to care about and the author invents torments for them — for us to enjoy. Have you ever written a fictional story and experienced sick excitement as you contemplated what you were about to do that poor unsuspecting sympathetic character you created? Or do you only read fiction. If you're able to get into fiction, is it because you fully trust the author to deliver the titillation of bad things happening to this sweet leading character?

This is a line of thought that brings me back around to an opinion I've arrived at from other directions as well: Give children nonfiction to read.

Teaching kids to read using nonfiction works better.

Aha! Back in '07, I got all sorts of criticism for advocating teaching reading with nonfiction books — science, history, etc. — and now here's the evidence that it is the best method.

Why would the No Child Left Behind emphasis on math and reading leave less time to learn history?

I'm reading this Wall Street Journal article about new history history test scores:

The overall lackluster performance is certain to revive the debate about whether history and other subjects, such as science and art, are being pushed out of the curriculum because of the focus on math and reading demanded under the No Child Left Behind federal education law. The federal law mandates that students be tested in math and reading.

Why is this even a conflict? To learn reading,  you need reading material! Make the reading material nonfiction works about history. Problem solved.

I have discussed this issue before, and I know people have a problem with it, but schoolchildren don't need to read fiction to learn how to read. Let them choose their own fiction books for reading outside of school.

"I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways."

"It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes."

ADDED: And this is why those lefty teachers are so keen on getting kids to read fiction stories and not nonfiction as they learn to read. (Remember the great children-reading-nonfiction blog vortex of 2007?)

About that warning label on the reprint of the Constitution (and other documents from the Founding Era).

"This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work."

Why a warning label?
	Had you heard of Wilder Publications before? It's PR, plain and simple.
	It will help young people get into something they might otherwise reflexively reject.
	It's a cute way to get parents thinking about discussing the Founding documents with their kids.
	The Founding documents deserve (and invite!) critique, especially on the subject of equality.
	These documents live and evolve and it's good to cue readers to interpret them appropriately.
	Here's the edition for liberals to buy. They can see that it irks conservatives.
pollcode.com free polls

The perils of hands-on classroom activities.

WCBS-tv reports:

[A] Rockland County teacher [is] under fire for binding the hands of black students and having them sit under a desk during a lesson on slavery....

In a social studies class at Haverstraw Middle School, teacher Eileen Bernstein chose Gaby [Shand] and another girl for a demonstration of conditions on ships that carried slaves out of Africa....

Wilbur Aldridge, the regional NAACP director, went with the Shands Thursday to meet Bernstein.

"She said she apologized for causing any problems for the child, but she was not apologizing for using that simulation during the class," Aldridge said.

But Principal Avis Shelby apologized, calling the slave ship demonstration a "bad decision."

Emily Bazelon and I were just talking about the perils of hands-on classroom activities on Bloggingheads, and I suggested a return to good old-fashioned book-learning:

Does the 6-year-old boy want to be seen reading "Freakonomics" (the book) on Freakonomics (the blog)?

It is a cute picture, especially if you love kids reading, but:

My husband is K.C. and the kids are Jacob (10) and Jared (6). We live in Connecticut, and K.C. commutes into New York City to work as a portfolio manager. I am a stay-at-home mom with a medical degree.

A few months ago, I thought Jacob would like reading Freakonomics, which he thoroughly enjoyed. After he finished that, I thought he might also like Malcolm Gladwell, so he is now in the midst of Blink.

Our copy of Freakonomics was lying around the house, so Jared started to get interested as well...

I have to share a funny story with you. When I told/asked Jacob about being included in your blog, at first he seemed pleased, but then a slight cloud passed over his face, and he said, “Well, I don’t want to be recognized …” Whereupon my husband reassured him that he would not be followed by paparazzi.

First commenter, one "sunshine" says:

Weird, a child asked not to have his photo put up on a highly-read Web page and both the parent and the editor refused to honor his request. Nonconsensual blogging. This concern may seem like a trivial joke, but look for this issue to increase in coming years.

Is sunshine's criticism apt? Or can we see from the context that the child imagined that once his photograph appeared on a popular blog, strangers would accost him in the street?

And more generally, I do wonder about putting pictures of children up on line. People love to see pictures of kids. It's a nice, happy part of life to see children. Yet some people seem to think that children should not be seen -- that it's dangerous for their children to be visible at all.

On the subject of children reading: I can see why "Freakonomics" and "Blink" make excellent reading for the young. We're so intent on foisting fiction on children, but there is a lot of nonfiction out their to stir their thinking.

Radio alert.

I'll be on "Lake Effect," on WUWM, the Milwaukee public radio, some time between 10 and 11 Central Time today. Streamable here. The archive will be up here later. I've already recorded the interview, which is a fast moving ramble about blogging that mostly concentrates on my recent, controversial suggestion that it might be a good idea to use nonfiction books when teaching young children how to read.

UPDATE: You can listen to it here now. It's only about 5 minutes long.

Fiction and nonfiction daddery.

Cameron Stracher has a new book called "Dinner With Dad." Here's some discussion of it:

[H]e chronicles his path from a corporate workaholic to a dad who’s at home, cooking dinner for his wife and kids five nights a week.

Even though his schedule changed, Mr. Stracher writes that he still found his Type A personality hard to reign [sic] in. He scaled back at work, but Mr. Stracher’s energies went elsewhere — into making ambitious dinners, airing strong opinions about where the carrot peeler and spatulas should be kept, harping on his son’s messy homework and lecturing his daughter about not putting the caps on her markers. He writes that over the years, “my natural tendency to control things has become more pronounced . . . the only saving grace, from [my wife’s] perspective, has been my absence.”

I got a copy in the mail, and I'm actually going to read it. It's of special interest to me, because -- as you may know -- I was married to a writer back when my sons were young, and he not only stayed home with them, but he wrote a novel about the experience. Since it was a novel... and I know you're thinking so this is the reason for Althouse's anti-fiction program... since it was a novel, there had to be all sorts of personal conflicts, and I don't mean arguments about making dinner. I mean what's the first thing you think of happening, if you're thinking like a novelist, if the man stays home with a small child, let's say, in Park Slope, in Brooklyn. He takes the child to the playground, and all the other parents are women, and then.... Come on, it's Novel World! What happens? You know what happens. (And, no, that's not the reason we're divorced.)

I was trying to use Technorati to get a page of all the discussion of my recent posts about having young kids learn reading from nonfiction books and look what I got, which made me laugh. Let me approach this more scientifically: here.

And here's Cameron's blog, Dinner With Dad. I note that the blog like the book is nonfiction. Nonfiction, I tell you. WOOOOOO!

Sorry, just trying to scare the English majors again.