Suppose this should focus upon when and how schools – so board members should be considering – open safely. Except I’ve no special insight other than noticing polls are pointing to a likelihood of 40% of parents planning to continue to home school. Interesting.
For some time though I’ve been thinking about the importance of literature and how our students have little to no exposure to it at school any longer. Why? Much of the blame goes to Common Core. CCSS (Common Core State Standards) programs prefer “Reading for information.” Really. Hello? If you can read at all, you can read ‘for information.’
So, the purpose it seems is to prevent our children from knowing and appreciating genuine and long ago history along with learning and recognizing thoughtful and powerful writing. Why? My best guess is – and my best guesses when it comes to CCSS are based on much research, its evident disastrous educational results, common sense too – that denying important knowledge and the very best authors, replacing them with more current topics not necessarily well written is but another opportunity to indoctrinate rather than educate.
One hundred plus years ago our seventh and eight graders were reading: Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling, Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Courtship of Miles Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfield, Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe, Stories of Heroic Deeds by James Johonnot, Stories from Dickents by Charles Dickents, Old Ballads in Prose by Eva March Tappan, Knickerbocker’s History of New York by Washington Irving, Grandmother’s Story of Bunker Hill and Other Poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper, Stories of the Olden Time by James Johonnot, Adventures of a Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper, The Young Mountaineers by Mary Noailles Murfree and Harris’s Stories of Georgia by Joel Chandler Harris.
This is from a curriculum reading list writer Annie Holmquist discovers from an 1908 manual at the Minnesota Historical Society for an article she publishes on Intellectual Takeout (https://www.intellectualtakeout.org) within which Ms. Holmquist determines to compare with a more recent list of a highly rated school district.
The differences are astonishing.
(continued at forthcoming Part Two of this post).