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Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Getting Lincoln Wrong: Ann Althouse, The New York Times, and the American Student
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Law professor and conservative blogger Ann Althouse, in a post (and follow-up post) in which she advocates discontinuing the study of fiction in schools, has drawn my attention to a report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which claims that American students are increasingly well-informed about American history. You may have read the optimistic New York Times article here.
The claim is based on a 2006 assessment test for students in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. The most politically significant results were gains by 4th graders, who entered school only slightly prior to the 2002 passage of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Althouse concludes, “quit bitching about No Child Left Behind.” What you may not know is that the answer to the showcase question from the 4th grade test—about Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 speech on slavery, and quoted by both Althouse and the Times—is completely wrong.
This is more than a matter of oversight. It is a matter of the fundamental relationship between ideology and practices of reading. Althouse’s real target is the kind of reading that calls ideology into question, including the study of fiction. She missed the flaw in a question designed for fourth graders for the same reason Sam Dillon missed it, at The New York Times: because the mistake was grounded in ideology, and that ideology is a comfort.
(thanks to tomemos for the link; he has responded to Althouse insightfully here)
Here is the question.
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided.
--Abraham Lincoln, 1858What did Abraham Lincoln mean in this speech?
a) The South should be allowed to separate from the United States.
b) The government should support slavery in the South.
c) Sometime in the future slavery would disappear from the United States.
d) Americans would not be willing to fight a war over slavery.
The correct answer, according to the examiners, is c: “Sometime in the future slavery would disappear from the United States.”
Here is the quotation from Lincoln in context. I beg your forgiveness for its length; if you read it from beginning to end, you will have done more than Althouse:
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation not only has not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. Have we no tendency to the latter condition? Let any one who doubts carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination—piece of machinery, so to speak—compounded of the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision.
All of the urgency in that address—its mood of grim determination in the face of tremendous uncertainty, and everything, in short, that secures its claim to greatness—belies the notion that Lincoln could already foresee an end to slavery. Instead, he predicted the possibility of victory in a decidedly partisan struggle against the doctrine of inevitable progress:
Senator Douglas holds, we know, that a man may rightfully be wiser to-day than he was yesterday—that he may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong. But can we, for that reason run ahead, and infer that he will make any particular change, of which he himself has given no intimation? [...] Whenever, if ever, [Douglas] and we can come together on principle, so that our cause may have assistance from his great ability, I hope to have interposed no adventitious obstacle. But, clearly, he is not now with us—he does not pretend to be, he does not promise ever to be.
It should be no surprise that the adjective used in the Times to describe the NAEP is “bipartisan.” The modern political myth of bipartisanship without appeal to principle is coded into the passivity of waiting for slavery to eventually end, the “correct answer” for which Lincoln furiously indicts his opponent. It’s this kind of over-writing (here, over-writing Lincoln) that produces ideology; the same kind of over-writing that ignores a group that has not made any significant improvement in scores since 2001, in any age group: African-Americans.
***
Where does this leave the attack on fiction? Althouse writes,
I’m saying that the reading materials used in teaching reading should be nonfiction, so that students are absorbing information and practicing critical thinking while they read. (first post)
Look, my main point is efficiency...I’m also not opposed to teaching history and science through the kinds of novels and storybooks that present the information accurately. (second post)
The debate hinges on the question of information—what qualifies as information, what standards are used to evaluate the accuracy of information, and above all how students will be tested on what they know. I was immediately reminded of Lionel Trilling, who in “Manners, Morals, and the Novel” had this to say about history in relation to art:
As we read the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that we are reading them without the accompaniment of something that always goes along with the formulated monuments of the present. The voice of multiplication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels, in slang and in humor and popular songs, in the way children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer....And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace—we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it.
Trilling is describing two different, related things here. First of all, the ability of literature to encode information very densely through the representation of everyday events. Second, the relationship between those uncountable events that escape history because they are mundane, and the larger kinds of undecidability produced by what philosophy calls “counter-factuals.” In fact, the kinds of information and habits gained from a lifetime of reading fiction are incompatible with multiple-choice exams, because such exams of necessity exclude a multiplication of voices, and have no mechanism for the kinder offices of doubt: curiosity, reserve, and toleration. The strength of Lincoln’s convictions came from the real historical uncertainties to which he opposed them. It is little wonder that he would be read so badly by thinkers like Althouse; her incurious zeal is of a piece with the exam that seems to give us such good news.
Comments
I’m not a big Althouse fan, but students—especially in grades 1 through, say, 7—need to read more non-fiction. Young adult literature isn’t all crap, but a good deal of it is. Far better to have students read well-written, informative, narrative accounts of science, history, etc., than another Walter Dean Myers novel. Something like Gombrich’s *A Little History of the World* (title?) would be perfect for younger students.
In later grades, students also need non-fiction units incorporated. They should be reading philosophy, essays, art criticism, and so on.
Of course, getting rid of fiction in schools is a moronic idea. But if our goal is literacy skills training (which it is in the earlier grades), you might as well kill two birds with one stone and have students practice reading skills with materials that will reinforce history and science lessons.
Actually, upon reading Althouse’s two posts, I don’t have much of an objection to her idea. She’s referring to the earliest grades, where students use storybooks to learn reading skills (word meaning from context, inference, predicting, finding main ideas, etc.). Students aren’t reading much “literature” of any value here, so why not have them read interesting, informative, non-fiction.
My main objection is simply: why not have them read interesting, challenging fiction and poetry? I loved mythology and folklore when I was in elementary school, and this material is essential for later reading in terms of allusions and such. And Kenneth Koch made a second career out of teaching very young children to read and write interesting poetry.
Basal readers are terrible. Althouse is right to want to replace them with good non-fiction. She is wrong that reading fiction is something kids can learn to do well on their own. She is also wrong that we can wait until students are old enough for English-qua-literature classes, in later junior high and high school, to teach fiction. Reading fiction is not some natural skill that can be reduced simply to pleasure.
E. D. Hirsch stole this point from the brilliant educational psychologist Jerome Bruner: there is no material so difficult that you can’t begin scaffolding—that is, building up to it—at the earliest ages. Let’s have all students, of every age, reading challenging texts from a wide variety of genres: non-fiction, essay, poetry, drama, fiction, political speech, courtroom speech, etc. There was nothing wrong with Lamb’s Shakespeare for children storybooks!
I’m not a big Althouse fan
Good lord, who is? Who could be?
I wonder what the cutoff date for nonfiction is for Althouse. I wonder if she has a heuristic for distinguishing between the two. Would she allow medieval “nonfiction”? John Mandeville? Marco Polo? Aquinas? The Prick of Conscience?
One more point (don’t you like when I have a conversation with myself?):
Althouse also shows her distance from what actually goes on in the classroom today.
History and math and science teachers ARE increasingly teaching literacy skills in their classes. At least in New York State, there’s been a big push to make basic reading an objective in EVERY class. One of my jobs in my current position is to “push in” to other content area classrooms and incorporate technology and literacy lessons. So we made PSA videos in health, and this week we’re analyzing “Strange Fruit” in a literacy skills class, and in a few weeks, we’ll be doing web research on immigration in a history class. My predecessor, before she went out on maternity leave, did a robotics unit with science classes in which students read stories about robots, did research on trends in robotics, and then had students build robots from kits. Our program is designed to make technology and literacy the content of every classroom.
Perhaps I wasn’t reading carefully but the Lincoln question seemed so obviously “none of the above” that I assumed that the point being made by Anne was that time “wasted” on Dick and Jane might be better spent reading something factually accurate.
I think all of us can probably agree that non-fiction and fiction are both essential for the early grades (and all grades, really), to encourage all kinds of reading and thinking. Whether there should be more non-fiction I’m not qualified to say, but I’m open to the idea. But the difference between “the status quo” and “more” is just a pedagogical question; Althouse isn’t advocating “more” but “exclusively,” which is a philosophical question that represents a philosophical objection to fiction.
I’m against mixing efficiency and education.
The early years are where you get your orienting myths. Arabian nights stories, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, David and Saul, Pocahontas, the Little mermaid, etc.
Efficiency should come later. Poetry, stories, song and the arts should definitely come first. Until little Emile is 12 or so. No tests. Plenty of recess. Crafts are good too.
Of course, given the world Althouse’s hero, Bush, is delivering us too, the kids on the coasts might want to learn how to swim in a flood, while those in the midwest should be taught to go into cellars during sun alert days.
"I’m saying that the reading materials used in teaching reading should be nonfiction, so that students are absorbing information and practicing critical thinking while they read.” (first post)
“Look, my main point is efficiency...I’m also not opposed to teaching history and science through the kinds of novels and storybooks that present the information accurately.” (second post)
Admittedly, I haven’t gone and read the entire posts from which these two excerpts are taken, but there are a couple things worth pointing out in the above statements.
In the first post, Althouse implies that students who read fiction are *not* absorbing info and practicing critical thinking while they read. I can’t speak for Ann, but I’m quite sure that most of us, young and old, do those very things *any* time we read a novel or play or poem.
In the second post, Althouse tacitly dismisses the value of reading texts whose info is presented *inaccurately* or ambiguously. Aren’t these the very texts that most develop a student’s ability to think critically, problem solve, and form logical conclusions?
See the discussion at Kugelmass’s place. The drive to try to find something reasonable in Althouse’s post—as if she was saying something about more nonfiction being useful in the early grades—is part of the general problem of how to deal with the banality of evil. Do you focus on how she evidently didn’t understand the Lincoln quote? Well, that’s a good deal more comforting than thinking about a professor repeating age-old anti-intellectual tropes about the uselessness of fiction.
"a professor repeating age-old anti-intellectual tropes about the uselessness of fiction.”
On the other hand, she’s right when she says this:
“I’m not saying fiction isn’t worth reading. I’m saying that it can be held for after hours pleasure reading. Frankly, I think this would increase the love of fiction. Here’s this shelf of books that you can read when you finish your other work. You can take them home if you like. I think this would give them an aura of excitement. There are lots of people who have fiction forced on them and avoid it once they’re out of school.”
I’d not use the term “pleasure reading"--which is condescending--but the notion that literature is ill-served when it’s forced on students--just because--is not unreasonable.
Luther Blisset, your comments here mirror some of my thinking in responding to the Althouse post. Your ED Hirsch references are also apt. My objection is to the dreary and boring readers (I keep thinking of the ones published by the Ginn company that we had to read so much stuff in during elementary school in the 1970s) and the less-than-stellar young adult novels that seemed like such a waste of time in middle school.
Roger’s point about “orienting myths” certainly sounds good, but I read few of those books in school--the ones I read at an early age were almost always outside of school. In elementary and junior high, I always read more interesting and worthwhile books outside of class.
Actually, upon reading Althouse’s two posts, I don’t have much of an objection to her idea. She’s referring to the earliest grades, where students use storybooks to learn reading skills (word meaning from context, inference, predicting, finding main ideas, etc.). Students aren’t reading much “literature” of any value here, so why not have them read interesting, informative, non-fiction.
My main objection is simply: why not have them read interesting, challenging fiction and poetry?
Essentially, if that’s your objection, you really are objecting to the substance of her argument. The question of whether Walter Dean Myers is a good writer doesn’t bear on the issue of teaching fiction in schools. I think you’re right about him; I hated Myers’s book Scorpions. On the other hand, a huge number of other books, from Where The Wild Things Are, to The Indian in the Cupboard, to the Dark is Rising series, to The Phantom Tollbooth, to Where The Red Fern Grows, were both influences on me and immense sources of pleasure. Some of them I read on my own, others for school.
Dan, it makes sense to point out that forced reading can be a grind. That really depends on the teacher, though; it’s not inherent to fiction or to imaginative literature more generally. My English teachers (I’m sure you know what’s coming) were a large part of my decision to continue studying English in college and graduate school. The way students receive literature is a function of their own aptitudes and the way it’s presented to them, but in any case they’re not more privileged arbiters of this discipline than they are of any other.
Synova,
Althouse never questions the Lincoln quote; she never suggests that “none of the above” might be the right answer. As for her criticisms of Dick and Jane—of course she’s right, but in the midst of a wealth of great books for children, she’s coming a bit late to the party.
***
Mike S, Karl, Luther, those are all great additions to the list of valid objections here.
Dan, it’s possible with enough strain and sympathetic reading to turn all sorts of unreasonable things into halfway reasonable things. That doesn’t mean that we should forget that her proposal was basically to get fiction out of the schools. I’m sure that LB could write a very interesting piece on changing the balance between nonfiction and fiction in the early grades, but that’s not what this was about.
As an ex-physicist, I should point out that science is ill-served when it’s “forced on students” as well—in fact, every topic that you describe as “forced on students” (i.e. taught) can therefore be said to be ill-served.
"That doesn’t mean that we should forget that her proposal was basically to get fiction out of the schools.”
I don’t think that’s such an unreasonable thing, either. The way fiction is taught in most schools, the occasional exceptions notwithstanding, is ultimately bad for *fiction*.
Ah, there it is.
One phrase I’m surprised we haven’t seen more in this multi-front discussion is “burden of proof.” As in, “Dan, you and Althouse are proposing a revolutionary change in children’s education. The burden of proof is on you.” What evidence do you have that teaching fiction in schools is bad for fiction? And if you just mean that students don’t like being made to read it: as Rich has pointed out, how is this different from any other school subject?
My problem is precisely with thinking of literature as a “school subject.” It’s approaching it as a “school subject” that’s drained all the life out of it. If you’re satisfied with high school graduates’ knowledge of/competence with literature (or college freshmen for that matter), then I guess you won’t see any need for a change, revolutionary or otherwise.
I haven’t read Althouse’s specific arguments, but, whether this argues against her or against a straw man that refers to an argument that actually exists, my tangentially relevant thought is that it’s obvious that fiction should be a part of the lives of children and that it should be taught in school. It’s culture. It’s not some second-hand, collectively approved representation of a given body of knowledge. This is true of the right kind of non-fiction too, but it’s not true of the kind of thinking that produced the Abraham Lincoln mistake on the test. I mean, it’s very fucking different for some twenty year old to stand there and tell a bunch of kids that imaginative story-telling has been a human practice since the dawn of whenever than it is to read to them and thereby, participate in that long-running human practice. I would argue that it breaks down barriers that people erect in their minds between themselves and people whose cultural markers identify them as outside the familiar.
And if you don’t teach it in school, it will die because children at a young age won’t build up the chops they need to read the good stuff.
By forcing/teaching a kid to read a bunch of novels you can send him or her off to nineteenth century england or russia or Japan or to America in the age of slavery and you can do that in a context where the kid is emotionally invested in the outcome. It sensitizes a person to a series of facts in a way that a litany of facts does not. I mean, think about Anne Frank--or Native Son. Also, I don’t know, I think there are lots of things you can say in fiction that you cannot say in exposition without draining them of their impact.
I hope I’m not putting out some philosophically naive distinctions, but if you distinguish between knowledge (raw information), mediated experience (fiction), and real experience, you have three spheres of increasing urgency and significance to a human being. The first time you’re in a scary car accident as a teenager, you start to understand admonitions against speeding in a new light. The first time you read As I Lay Dying and get it, you learn about the moral depth and complexity of the lives of hillbillies and you--maybe--are less inclined to refer to the stereotype the next time you encounter someone who fits the hillbilly mold. (Not that anyone I know well is likely to run into a hillbilly, but you know what I mean.) Also--and I guess I’m echoing a point above, it’s hugely important in my opinion to expose kids to something that, uh, engages their imagination and which leaves room for interpretation and argument. Because, uh, life leaves room for interpretation and argument. It’s made up of stories. People manipulate their representation of a series of events in order to send a message. For instance, if you fuck up at work and you need to explain it to your boss, you explain in such a way that makes your fuckup understandable. So it seems to me that reading fiction is great practice for becoming sophisticated when it comes to consuming and generating stories of our own, both true and untrue. And it would be good if we left some room in the curriculum for this practice, even if it won’t have an effect on GDP.
At the very least, if we forced this generation of students to read more novels, we’ll increase the chances that the movies we watch when we’re geriatric won’t suck.
Dan writes, “If you’re satisfied with high school graduates’ knowledge of/competence with literature (or college freshmen for that matter), then I guess you won’t see any need for a change, revolutionary or otherwise.”
But that’s not at all the point. No one is saying that the way students learn about literature (or any subject, for that matter) is perfect. But if you think there’s something in the essence of education that destroys literature, then why doesn’t it destroy every other field of study?
Instead, why not discuss what it might be in contemporary American education that might negatively affect children’s love of literature? And why not discuss if some negative affect isn’t necessary? That is to say, students *do* need to learn about things they might not enjoy. And there’s no guaranteed way of making all students enjoy all topics or materials. For example, students need to know a good deal about Shakespeare by the time they leave high school. They might not all like each of the plays studied, but they need to study them, if only for the “cultural literacy” factor.
Nancie Atwell, one of the most popular thinkers on writing and literature education, has her students read what they want and write what they want. It’s not such a revolutionary idea. The problems with the Atwell classroom are largely ones of time (38 minute periods are not long enough to accomplish Atwellian goals); behavior management (her classroom is decentered and leaves a lot of room for screwing around); and curricular (there’s no guarantee students will all cover the mandated material in any given year). The benefit is that students who learn this way tend to enjoy reading and writing.
Dan, I don’t see where you’re going with this one, other than reflexive contrarianism. Students complain about math classes all the time. They would equally well complain about having to read history or any other nonfiction subject as part of their education. So what? Is literature supposed to be a magical mystery way of looking at the world that can’t be taught in school without having the life drained out of it, while math is not? That would only show that you don’t have an aptitude or feeling for math.
And the “are you satisfied” bit is meaningless. People aren’t satisfied with any aspect of the education of incoming college freshmen. We could argue over whether this has some societal cause, or whether something is wrong with all of secondary education, or whether it’s due to a greater percentage of people making it to college, or whatever, but it’s not unique to literature.
And I have to also disagree with tomemos about the important point being burden of proof. The important point is what secondary education is designed to do. For many people in our society, secondary education is all the education that they will ever get. Althouse’s bit about how students can use fiction as leisure reading is a mirage, a typical bit of thoughtlessness from a person who can not imagine anything but an upper-middle-class life. For many students, if they don’t read fiction in school, they will never read it.
We all know that literature--as literature rather than philology, recitation, etc.--is a late addition to the “school” curriculum. A fight had to made to get into the curriculum precisely because it wasn’t seen as an appropriate “school subject.” It *was* special. As it turns out, those who resisted were probably right. Literature--like the other arts--is something to be experienced, not “learned,” and it works very badly as part of the curriculum unless you do bleed it of its essence and make it a “school subject.”
Daniel,
Leaving aside, for a moment, the distinction here between learning and experiencing a thing, I’m confused by the assertion that literature was a late addition to curricula. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad were practically the core of Greek pedagogy. Homer was certainly understood as a poet, and memorizing and reciting him was not merely an end in itself. Such exercises were preliminary to absorbing and understanding him.
Daniel, like it or not, the arts are learned: we aren’t born with an appreciation of what makes a good story, or what “realistic” means in fiction. They need not be learned in school, but as Rich pointed out many people have no other place to encounter them. Anyway, let’s not overstate the (undoubtedly high) value of coming to books on one’s own; I read voraciously all through my childhood, but I still had to be taught how to recognize a motif or a theme, and how to understand irony and symbolism.
The tendency to treat literature as a delicate flower that must not be disturbed by scholastic study purports to be a form of respect; actually, though, it is derogatory. It turns literature into pure sensation, dismissing the amount of cogitation that goes into conceiving and creating a novel or a poem as well as the amount we can learn and reflect by studying and talking about it.
Rich, my mention of burden of proof sprung from frustration with the lack of evidence produced by Dan, Ann, et al. They say again again how self-evident it is that reading fiction in school only makes students dislike reading; well, how the hell do we know? It sure wasn’t anyone’s experience here, so how am I to be convinced?
I think Dan’s point is that *English* is a late addition to the content areas. Our earliest schools in American—Latin Grammar Schools—did not teach vernacular literature. And they taught Roman literature more to give students mastery of the language and mastery over the information contained in the texts than for the artistic value of the works. (Translating Virgil, or Caesar’s *Civil War*, for example.)
Dan’s right that English as a discipline grew out of what one scholar called an unhappy marriage of Rhetoric and Philology, with Elocution as a bastard offspring. The earliest professors of English were preachers—going as far back as Hugh Blair’s lectures.
English as a discipline arises largely from three groups: the Scots, the American colonists, and the Separatist religious communities. (Just as, in the 19th c., English would develop in India before it was taught in England.) The margins took to English as a discipline to master the language and culture of the economic and cultural center. This was also a largely middle class movement, seeking to build cultural capital while displacing the classical training of the aristocrats. Thus the 18th c. rise of English style manuals and the formalization of English grammar along the lines of Latin grammar.
I’d say that it is only with the New Criticism, which trickled down to secondary schools, that schools focused on literature not as models of rhetoric or storehouses of cultural information but as art objects in and of themselves. So today, we have splits between Reading Skills classes, Literature classes, and grammar classes. Literature class is where students supposedly learn literary analysis (close reading, ‘tho there’s a movement—see the current issue of English Journal—to bring theory as critical lens into the classroom).
Where I disagree with Dan is that art is only to be experienced and appreciated. But we’ve been over that before!
Dan, I wonder what you’d make of Albert Murray’s ideas. What follows is a passage from his recent collection, *From the Briarpatch*. There’s nothing there I can’t get behind (it’s basically Dewey meets Victor Turner); but there’s also nothing there that precludes art being the subject of study. The question is *how* to study it. Murray:
“Art does what it does on its own terms or it is not art. Art should not be confused with propaganda, advertisement, ideology, or hype of any kind . . . Nor should this be confused with the old so-called ivory tower notion of art for art’s sake. On the contrary, the primary emphasis here is on art, which is to say aesthetic statement, as fundamental equipment for existence on human terms. The primary concern of art is not with beauty per se, as many people seem to think, but with the quality of human consciousness . . .
“Art as such is a means by which the raw materials of human experience are processed into aesthetic statement. In this instance, to process is to stylize. . .
“According to Suzanna K. Langer, what art as such really records is the life of human feeling, how it feels to be a human being in this or that situation . . . And Kenneth Burke suggests that art is really a stylization of a basic attitude toward human existence . . .
“Works of art are the product of an elegant extension, elaboration, and refinement of rituals that reenact the basic (and thus definitive) survival technology of a people in a given time, place, and circumstance . . .
“If any of this sounds the least bit elitist to any of you, ask yourself if you really prefer anything but the most competent craftsmen, doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, or even servants, etc. Most people obviously prefer all-star quality over mediocrity in sports. Why not in the arts?”
"We all know that literature--as literature rather than philology, recitation, etc.--is a late addition to the “school” curriculum.”
Which, again, has nothing to do with the original idea, which was to ban *fiction*, not the teaching of literature. I’m unfamiliar with any school ever that not make its students read fiction early.
But needless to say I’m unconvinced by arguments that depend on the history of American education, before it adopted the necessity of educating a wide range of people. Almost any educational strategy will work if all of your students come from the elite. Almost any educational strategy can be depicted as “failing” if you must also educate the rest of society.
There is a much larger problem with that test question. As we can see from our discussion, the problem is that the test writers have taken a quote, ripped it out of context, and asked students to interpret it. Obviously, then, the kids are not really supposed to be reading and interpreting the quote; rather, they are being asked to regurgitate the state-sponsored response based on their knowledge about President Lincoln. That is the absurdity of that question. We are supposed to be teaching students how to read and think. If they were responding properly to that question--in other words, if they were actually asked to read the original text--there would be a large set of potential interpretations for that passage, and they would all be supported by the evidence.
If you are trying to teach kids how to spew memorized garbage about American history, I agree that you are probably better off going with teaching students to read from a standard history textbook. You probably also want to show a bunch of horrid transparancies in front of class, and then give your students test that simply asks them to regurgitate information you provided on the overhead. But if you want students to learn how to respond to dense and complicated texts, you need to give up on encouraging this multiple-choice view of reality.
And that’s where fiction comes into play. :)
I think Dan’s point is that *English* is a late addition to the content areas. Our earliest schools in American—Latin Grammar Schools—did not teach vernacular literature. And they taught Roman literature more to give students mastery of the language and mastery over the information contained in the texts than for the artistic value of the works. (Translating Virgil, or Caesar’s *Civil War*, for example.)
This historical argument just doesn’t match the historical record, to the best of my knowledge. Acquiring language has always been one of the aims of teaching literature, but it is also historically associated with pleasure and with specifically literary forms: Samuel Johnson learning poetry young, and then writing poetic juvenilia. The reason that Virgil was taught over vernacular literature is that nobody thought vernacular literature was sufficiently good.
Compare St. Augustine, from the Confessions, written in the 4th Century:
Latin studies, on the contrary, I loved, not the elementary kind under my first teachers, but the lessons taught by masters of literature; for the early lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic had been no less burdensome and boring to me than all the elements of Greek....The early lessons in literacy were unquestionably more profitable because more dependable; by means of them I was gradually being given a power which became mine and still remains with me: the power to read any piece of writing I come across and to write anything I have a mind to myself. Far more useful, then, were those studies than others in which I was forced to memorize the wanderings of some fellow called Aeneas, while forgetting my own waywardness, and to weep over Dido.
(not that Althouse could ever have put it so eloquently and humbly)
The only thing really historically new here is the idea that students can’t be taught literature, that they have to seek it out and encounter it primally. That comes directly from a certain version of Romanticism.
Joseph: For an account of the institutional history of teaching literature as a “school subject,"--specifically as a university “discipline"-- see Gerald Graff’s *Professing Literature*.
Has anyone considered the possibility that the subtleties of the Lincoln passage are too sophisticated for the 4th graders for whom the test question was written?
Bill—I hadn’t, but you make a good point.
Dan,
That’s a very helpful reference, given my field of study, which is, in part, the relationship between pedagogy and literary culture.
Still, the fact of Graff’s book doesn’t make the passage from Augustine (and, of course, I just as easily could have picked another early writer) on what he learned from the “masters of literature” irrelevant or even ambiguous.
I don’t see how reading literature in school and reading literature for pleasure are incompatible. I did both; I suspect all the commenters did both. I admit that until college I was much more into my favorite pleasure reading (comics, sf, fantasy--in all of which I developed my own personal canon, with influence from my dad and others) than what I read in school, but that didn’t stop me from becoming an English major, etc.
Joseph, along with Graff’s book, you might check out these articles:
Silas Hertzler, “The Junior High School in Connecticut before 1872,” *School Review*, 35(10), Dec. 1927, pp. 751-55.
William Riley Parker, “Where Do English Departments Come From?,” *College English*, 28(5), Feb. 1967, pp. 339-51.
Thomas P. Miller, “Where Did College English Studies Come From?,” *Rhetoric Review*, 9(1), Autumn 1990, pp. 50-69.