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The Boston Globe reported recently that Michelle Wie, the 16-year-old Korean-American golfing phenomenon, not only speaks Korean and English, but has also taken four years of Japanese, and is beginning to study Mandarin. She is planning to apply early to Stanford University. I would be willing to bet, however, that in high school her academic writing has been limited to the five-paragraph essay, and it is very likely that she has not been assigned a complete nonfiction book.
For the last two years, and especially since the National Endowment for the Arts unveiled the findings of its large ($300,000) study of reading of fiction in the United States, I have been seeking funding for a much smaller study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools. This proposed study, which education historian Diane Ravitch has called “timely and relevant,” has met with little interest, having so far been turned down by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as a number of foundations and institutes both large and small.
Still, I have a fair amount of anecdotal evidence some of it from people who would be quite shocked to hear that high school English departments were no longer assigning any complete novels that the non-assignment of nonfiction books on subjects like history is unremarkable and, in fact, accepted.
A partner in a law firm in Boston, for instance, told me there was no point in such a study, because everyone knows history books aren’t assigned in schools. This was the case, he said, even decades ago at his own alma mater, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was assigned only selections, readings, and the like, never a complete book. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said when I lamented that I couldn’t find anyone who agrees that high school students should read at least one nonfiction book, “The only hope is parents introducing their kids to reading, and that’s a mighty slim hope.”
For the last two decades, I have been working to encourage the writing of history research papers by high school students. But it has become apparent to me that one of the problems involved in getting students to undertake such a task is that so many do not read any history, and so have little to write about. Even so, as I began to try to find out about the reading of nonfiction books, I found more and more apathy and acceptance of the situation. As long as the English department controls reading and writing in schools, the reading will be fiction, and the writing will be personal, creative or the five-paragraph essay.
Why is this important? ACT found last Spring that 49% of our high school graduates (half of the 70% who do graduate) cannot read at the level required by freshman college texts. Common sense, buttressed by such work as that of E.D. Hirsch, Jr., would lead to the conclusion that perhaps the reason so many students need remedial work in college and don’t return for sophomore year, is that they have never faced a nonfiction book, and thus have so little knowledge that they don’t know what their professors are talking about.
These days, of course, there is a great deal of attention given to many educational issues, and one of the current Edupundit maxims is that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality. So lots of attention and many millions of dollars go into teacher training, re-training, professional development, and the like.
The truth may lie elsewhere. The most important variable in student academic achievement is, in my view, student academic work. Those who concern themselves with teacher quality only assume that better teachers will lead to more student work. If they would care to look, however, examples of both lousy teachers with students who do well, and superior teachers with students who do no academic work are everywhere to be found.
Ignoring academic writing and the reading of nonfiction books at the high school level can only prolong our national bout of remediation and failure in college. Let’s find out whether our high school students are indeed discouraged from reading a history book and writing a serious term paper. Then we may be able to turn more of our attention to assigning the kind of academic work that leads to the levels of academic achievement we wish for our students.
Will Fitzhugh is the founder of The Concord Review, a journal of high school student research papers, based in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He also founded the National Writing Board, in 1998, and the TCR Institute in 2002, to encourage student writing in history. He can be reached at fitzhugh@tcr.org
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
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Three comments:
1. Teacher quality: Teachers who themselves are poor writers (many, if not most) do not assign adequate academic writing, and do not teach and assess writing in ways that build student skills. Quality teachers are quality writers and there are not many of them to be found.
2. Nonfiction books, read in their entirety, should be essential components of English and history curricula. Critical reading and analytical writing skills should be taught in all classes, not just English classes.
3. The No Child Left Behind mandate has shoved teachers and schools in the direction of rote learning, memorizing facts rather than analyzing text. Multiple choice high stakes tests assess how well students can find the details embedded in test questions. This is a test taking strategy, but not necessarily a good reading strategy: it compels readers to read the material through lenses contrived by the test makers rather than read the material in order to make critical observations, build on knowledge, and/or deconstruct rhetorical or logical patterns.
I’m afraid I cannot agree with what I consider a false dichotomy between fiction/non-critical thinking and non-fiction/critical thinking. And I cannot agree with the other false dichotomy of schooling either being rote learning/memorizing facts vs. analytical thinking.
I think both the arguments have been taken to unjustified and unjustifiable extreme. (Perhaps such like arguments can be used to prove that the U.S. educational decline is not recent but has been lousy for generations since the adults in the educational debates seem to have great difficulty engaging in rational discourse).
First, rote learning and memorization is essential — the first stage of any learning, For the youngest learners — it is memorization where their mental skills primarily lie. One certainly cannot move on to analysis if you have not first absorbed “facts”.
Critical reading and analysis is certainly not only within the purview of non-fiction. I remember critically reading and analyzing fiction both in high school and college, both for content and writing style. However, that was many years ago. Perhaps, today, there is no critical and analytical reading of fiction — I have read that teachers now “engage” students by first and only asking them their opinions about what they “feel”, because “everyone’s opinion of valuable”. (Really?)
As far is non-fiction and fiction are concerned, I don’t believe them to be antithetical. Doesn’t the (fictional) literature of a period reflect and enhance the non-fictional history of that time? How can one really understand history without reading its fiction? I vaguely, now, remember that Dicken’s Oliver Twist illustrated vividly the horrors of 1830 England’s treatment of children, especially orphans. And isn’t the fiction a period part of its history and affect it. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?