Nicholas Tampio, a professor of political science at Fordham University, dislikes David Coleman’s approach to teaching literature even more than Peter Greene. He believes that Coleman has no appreciation for literature.
Coleman writes about the joys of “wonder,” says Tampio, but the methods he imposes are sure to suffocate and penalize wonder:
Coleman’s pedagogical vision stifles this kind of wonder by imposing tight restrictions on what may be thought — or at least what may be expressed to earn teacher approval, high grades and good test scores. He expects students to answer questions by merely stringing together key words in the text before them. This does not teach philosophy or thinking; it teaches the practice of rote procedures, conformity and obedience.
The first standard is the foundation of his vision. “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it,” it reads, and “cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” According to Coleman, the first standard teaches a rigorous, deductive approach to reading that compels students to extract as much information from the text as possible.
Throughout the document, he reiterates that students need to identify key words in a text. He analyzes passages from “Hamlet,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the Gettysburg Address and an essay by Martha Graham. There is minimal discussion of historical context or outside sources that may make the material come alive. For instance, he suggests that teachers ask students, “What word does Lincoln use most often in the address?” rather than, say, discuss the Civil War. In fact, he disparages this approach. “Great questions make the text the star of the classroom; the most powerful evidence and insight for answering lies within the text or texts being read. Most good questions are text dependent and text specific.”
A recurrent defense of the Common Core is that the standards are good but the implementation has been bad.
As a professor, of course I demand that my students provide evidence to support their arguments. Coleman’s pedagogical vision, however, does not prepare students for college. He discourages students from making connections between ideas, texts or events in the world — in a word, from thinking. Students are not encouraged to construct knowledge and understanding; they must simply be adept at repeating it.
His philosophy of education transfers across disciplines. After analyzing literary passages, he observes, “Similar work could be done for texts … in other areas such as social studies, history, science and technical subjects.” Like a chef’s signature flavor, Coleman’s philosophy of education permeates the myriad programs that the College Board runs.
Computers can grade the responses generated from his philosophy of education. Students read a passage and then answer questions using terms from it, regardless of whether the text is about history, literature, physics or U.S. history. The Postal Service sorts letters using handwriting-recognition technology, and with a little tinkering, this kind of software could seemingly be used to score the SAT or AP exams.
Coleman’s vision will end up harming the U.S. economy and our democratic culture.
The U.S. should be wary of emulating countries that use a standards-based model of education. In “World Class Learners,” the scholar Yong Zhao commends America’s tradition of local control of the schools and an educational culture that encourages sports, the arts, internships and other extracurricular pursuits. In diverse ways, U.S. schools have educated many successful intellectuals, artists and inventors. By contrast, the Chinese model of education emphasizes rigorous standards and high-stakes tests, pre-eminently the gaokao college entrance exam. Chinese policymakers rue, however, how this education culture stifles creativity, curiosity and entrepreneurship. The Common Core will lead us to the same trap. Educators should not discard what has made the U.S. a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Democracy depends on citizens’ treating one another with respect. In perhaps his most famous public statement, Coleman told a room of educators not to teach students to write personal narratives, because “as you grow up in this world, you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” This statement expresses, albeit more crassly, the same sentiment as his essay on cultivating wonder. He demands that students do what they are told and not offer their own perspectives on things. Ideally in a democracy, by contrast, citizens have a sincere interest in what other citizens have to say. As John Dewey argued in “Democracy and Education,” the purpose of the schools is to create a democratic culture, not one that replicates the worst features of the market economy.
A recurrent defense of the Common Core is that the standards are good but the implementation has been bad. Even if Coleman’s educational vision is perfectly actualized, it is still profoundly flawed. Under Common Core, from the time they enter kindergarten to the time they graduate from high school, students will have few opportunities to ask their own questions or come up with their own ideas. It’s time for Americans to find alternatives to Coleman’s educational vision.
Nicholas Tampio is associate professor of political science at Fordham University. He is the author of “Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political Theory.” He is currently researching the topic of democracy and national education standards.
a non-lit person has no idea how to appreciate the diversity in literature. Stories and essays are not written to be analyzed, they are written to glean from and to enjoy. Without a creative mind, we have nothing. No engineers. No firemen. No policemen. No space explorers. no entrepreneurs.
It is almost as if they want to strip away creativity and replace it with a cookie cutter worker ant mentality. Instead of individuality and diversity, they want strict conformity and rigid tasking. Humanity is not built for that. It thrives on creativity and innovation.
As a writer, I know every possible variation of every story I wrote, am writing, or will write. analyzing them does not allow the reader to enjoy or learn. It only serves to cause the story to lose relevance. Key words? there are no key words purposefully written into any story. Lessons, maybe, but not key words.
Most parents I know classify common core as common crap. For good reason. It serves no other purpose than to frustrate children and parents alike by creating a deep hatred for education. We are “teaching” away all our future leaders. We are “testing” away all our future managers and business owners. All because those who want to reform education have no clue how to fix the problems without making a bigger one.
Coleman is trying to remake American school children in his own image.
We all know his type. They are the ones who bragged about their SAT score in high school to anyone who would listen — and even people who didn’t want to hear it. (Bill Gates is another)
For 40 years, Coleman’s very identity has been tied to a single stupid test.
So Coleman’s “test mentality” (close reading, one right answer, etc) should not come as a surprise.
It’s actually very sad.
Jay, do you know Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation”? You would appreciate it.
They seem to think that creativity is somehow in limited demand and they want those spots reserved for their own children, who continue to learn in ways which develop creativity.
The quote attributed to Coleman, “People don’t give a shit about…you.” is evidence that he doesn’t perceive his world to be a safe place. It’s virtually impossible for a person to become a leader, from that mindset. The person can occupy a leadership position, but he can’t inspire nor, implement the requisite values and vision to be a leader.
I will add that that quote indicates that Coleman is arrogant and has no sense of empathy for other human beings. Then again, he’s of the 1% and all of his actions are for the benefit of the 1%.
Linda,
I think you are right that Coleman’s statement is a window on his psyche.
The statement comes out of left field, is nothing less than bizarre in the context of a speech about national standards for writing and sounds like the cry of a little boy directed at those who have failed to protect him.
What makes it especially interesting is that Coleman’s father was a psychiatrist.
Poet,
The perspective that a person must believe the world is a safe place in order to have leadership ability, derives from management literature. The potential influence of a father, who is a psychiatrist, is interesting and merits review but, it isn’t my field.
Thomas Meader interviewed 200 children, who had parents in the psychiatric/psychotherapist profession. Meader wrote, “The unfavorable effects of the psychiatric profession in parentage (is) attributed primarily to their character flaws or emotional problems.” He explains that often “the analysts’ choice of profession tends to foster (their) Narcissism, verging on a God complex”. (We could speculate a grown child’s arrogant behavior models the parent’s behavior, witnessed while growing up.) Meader asserts, the analysts, “do not relate easily to their children”. He describes the adult “children as bright and articulate but lacking in sense of self.” In this context, it appears Meader’s research provides a causal factor for the leadership prescription.
Your poetry, thoughts and viewpoints are a valuable part of the comment threads in “Diane’s living room”. Thank you for them.
I agree with what Nicholas Tampio says. My class just compared an excerpt from Pericles’ Funeral Oration with the Gettysburg Address. Because we had just learned about the Peloponnesian War, they understood why the pieces were compared. They really liked the connections and fully understood the purpose of both speeches. They noted that the occasion of events was critical to “getting it.”
Tampio is exposing what all of this reform is about. It’s about tests. Tests. Tests. Tests. Tests. Race to the Top is the race to the top of the PISA tables. Everything is invested in tests only. PISA tables, school quality, district quality, teacher evaluation, third grade promotion. Tampio is revealing that unpleasant spectre through his discussion of education and its purposes.
My state is likely to pass an A-F grading system which slots schools into a grade based ONLY on state assessments. Only on state assessments. Nothing else. This is a total perversion of education. It makes every school engage in a contest of who can get the best test scores. This is a strategy, not a process.
I’ve taught AP European History for 20 years. I want my students to pass that test for the college credit. We work on the skills necessary to pass the test, many of which I think have value. But when we get to the week before the test, students start strategizing what they need to get a “3” or a “4.” This is unrelated to their knowledge of the course. And this is what is happening everywhere now.
That’s why the smart students pass the test. They know the difference in “playing the game” and acquiring an education, so they only waste a week with “game” skills. But the poor normal students are forced to substitute testing skills and test knowledge for education for the entire semester. Then the forget what they have learned immediately
“I’ve taught AP European History for 20 years. I want my students to pass that test for the college credit. We work on the skills necessary to pass the test, many of which I think have value.”
And that attitude is a major part of this whole testing “problem”.
Resist it, give that bullshit up, quit advancing those educational malpractices.
Oh!! Everyone does it!!
Yeah, and my mom used to say if everyone jumps off the cliff you’re gonna do that to????????
Grow some cojones, boy!!
“Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it . . . . cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.”
This strikes me like breaking down the act of putting on a pair of pants into 16 bullet points. How about “read the thing carefully, make an argument about it that makes sense, and use some examples.”
Yes, Flerp. Because my school has bought CCSS hook, line and sinker, I have to fight to make my history classes read in that bullet pointed manner. Students get good at it because it a repetitive, rote approach. They can master the “breakdown” of any passage with little difficulty. But they don’t truly think and reflect upon what they are reading.
I teach a night class at the the local community college (Intro to Modern World History). All of my questions related to documents are connected to the preceding lecture and notes. They ask the students to make hypothesis and reflect on connections. The most recent class just concluded. They complete student surveys after they complete the final exams. Here was my final question:
“What work did you find most enjoyable?”
The most common community college answer was a variation of this: “I really liked that we had background and context on primary documents and then were asked to make judgments and evaluations of those documents. I was able to express an opinion or idea and support that opinion through the information and documents provided. (Key part here) It was fun and refreshing to work WITH information in a meaningful way rather than simply absorb information in a prescribed manner.”
And if I did that with my students at the high school, my administrator would question my technique because it doesn’t help with CCSS.
What your students appreciate being able to do is exactly what an informed citizen in a democracy has to do. We not only have to analyze details; we have to be able to make connections, weigh and measure ideas, and make a judgment based on that information. When we synthesize ideas from multiple sources, we are engaging in a more complex cognitive process than just “close reading.” It is like comparing a snapshot to a film or a chapter to the whole book.
So now they are task analyzing reading comprehension. That is essentially how we teach self care skills in special ed, break it down into small steps. Yes, we do break down putting on a pair of pants into at least 16 steps.
Carol Burris got Mike Petrilli to admit that David Coleman loves New Criticism, the dominant school of literary criticism from the mid-20th century which contends that the text is a stand alone object for analysis. This perspective and his love of it is infused into the CCSS ELA standards from high school all the way down to Kindergarten. Any other perspective on the purposes for reading and writing have no acknowledged place at the table. Essentially, the only purpose for reading and writing in the ELA that Coleman recognizes is the purpose of writing a successful College English 101 essay — so long as the professor is a new critic.
I believe that Mr. Coleman basically wants to be America’s College English 101 professor — from 1955.
YUP. Let’s put the entire country onto the wayback machine.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for your comment. Aaron Barlow made a similar argument on the Academe blog.
I hesitate to say that David Coleman has any scholarly basis for his views. His Cultivating Wonder does not cite any secondary sources on pedagogy, philosophy, etc.
He is an ex-McKinsey consultant whose essay justifies computer grading.
“… rote procedure, conformity and obedience.”
It’s training, not education. Training for the authoritarian, low wage workplaces that Coleman and his ilk seek to prepare students for.
I was discussing the conformity and standardization with a colleague this week. It makes us turn out automatons instead of thinking people. My 7th grade students have trouble doing anything independently, they are paralyzed at the thought of doing something on their own. I believe it is due to all of the very structured teaching that we have to do in order to comply with the CCSS and testing.
I wonder why we keep listening to people who were not teachers ever. Why is that ok in education? When will it change?
“It makes us turn out automatons instead of thinking people.”
Then why do you do “it”???
You don’t have to do what you believe are educational malpractices. RESIST, RESIST. Make the edudeformer machine break down from thousands of little resistances.
Thank you, Nicolas!!!! It is long past time for professional academics to call out the Philistine amateurishness of the CCSS in ELA.
David Coleman’s notions about teaching literature can most charitably be described as New Criticism Lite (that is, New Criticism without the subtlety one finds in the New Critics). I refer to the primary mode of the CCSS for ELA as New Criticism for Dummies. Coleman seems blissfully unaware of the fact that much of the hermeneutics (the art and science of interpretation) of the twentieth century was a devastating, agonistic CRITIQUE of the preposterous overreaching by the New Critics.
Texts exist in context. Consider the text, “Better tie up those loose ends.” This means one thing if spoken by a macrame instructor and quite another if spoken by Tony Soprano in reference to a mob hit. Way back at the beginning of the twentieth century, Saussure made clear that even at the level of individual words and morphemes, meanings are dependent upon their relations to one another. The category of thought “heterosexual” could not exist without the category of thought “homosexual.”
Texts do not exist in their own little worlds. This is a fiction with some limited use for analysis, but the metaphor breaks down quite rapidly and disastrously. Such a fiction can be sustained neither for serious thought about meaning as intention nor for thought about meaning as significance (a fundamental distinction that Coleman and company seem to have been entirely ignorant of).
Interpretation as recovery of intention depends upon knowledge of much that is extra-textual–the genre of the work and its conventions, the modes of thought and particular learning of the author, the period in the author’s career, the sociopolitical milieu in which the text was created, the Zeitgeist that produced the text and to which it is a response, the conventional meanings of words and phrases in the period in which the text was created, the haunting of the text by traces of the opposite poles of the binary categories of thought privileged by the text, textual studies and editorial decision with regard to which of the variants of a text will be privileged, and much more. Extratextual studies relevant to the hermeneutics of intention include the author’s biography, the history of the period, historical linguistics, genre studies, and much, much more.
Interpretation as determination of significance to the reader depends, as well, on extratextual matters–upon the reader’s familiarity with the foregoing; on the reader’s skill and level of education; on the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief and have an imaginary experience–to take the author or speaker’s trip as he or she perceives it; on the reader’s own privileged and unexamined interpellations; on the standard operating procedures of those interpretive communities to which the reader belongs; on the critical lens through which the reader chooses to view the text (formalist? New Critical? Aristotelian or Thomist? structuralist? Freudian? Marxist? feminist? historicist? new historicist? deconstructionist? from a post-colonial perspective? from that of Kulturkritik?); on the reader’s own sociopolitical and cultural background; and much more.
In short, Coleman didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He wrote these amateurish “standards” in almost total ignorance of the last century of thought about approaches
to literature. It’s shocking, really, that any professional teachers of literature take the amateurish drivel of the CCSS for ELA at all seriously. Those “standards” are not worthy of a D in a freshman English methods class.
The proper response to those “standards” is not revision but derision. Coleman and company should have been laughed off the national stage long ago by people who actually know something about the teaching of English.
If someone had handed David Coleman copies of Galen and the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new standards for the medical profession based on those, then the result would be similar to what he gave us for English studies.
If we had “standards” like these for teaching high-school physics, then they would call for teachers to describe the luminiferous aether, the role of phlogiston in creating fire, and how bodies use up their inherent motive force until they come to rest and tend to move toward their “natural” positions in the hierarchical cosmic order of things. If the new science standards were anything like Coleman’s ELA “standards,” then biology teachers would be told in them to explain to their students that life is characterized by the presence of an ineffable élan vital. Psychology students would be doing “faculties” and phrenology with a little Behaviorism thrown in.
A wag on my blog wrote that it was as though someone had interviewed a bunch of small-town businesspeople and asked them to come up with a list, based on their vague memories, of “stuff to study in English class” and made that into the new national “standards.” Those standards can most charitably be described as a partial compendium of prescientific folk theories, or misconceptions, about the teaching of English, heedlessly prepared overnight and issued with no professional vetting whatsoever by people with neither the learning nor the experience required for the job.
Wonderful as usual. A former student of mine teaches art in an elementary school. Her planning time is now pre-empted by te demand that she coach students on reading as precribed by the CCSS. These students are in grade 4 and learning English.
She gave a hilarious account of trying to assist them in reading snippets of informational text that referred to a tape recorder. This technology for recording was known to her, but not known to the 4th graders. The result of her effort to provide a referent for the word was a game most of us know as a charade or a perfomance we have witnessed during a night of improvisation at a comedy club.
Being an ESL teacher is a lot like playing a rather long game of charades, especially at the beginning level. Learning English with all of its homophones, homonyms, homographs and spelling that is about 84% regular is a challenge. These challenges should be addressed gradually within a context. Trying to force ELLs to handle material significantly above their level will not yield the best results. It sounds a though your student has been placed in this situation by the powers that be. Research shows that it will take five to seven years for ELLs to achieve what is considered “proficiency.” We cannot wave a “magic wand” and make students proficient.
Bob – Thanks for your insights. Perhaps I may share one of my favorite ideas about books and how to read them. The source is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (p. 4).
“A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.?”
Awesome quotation. And a thousand thank yous to you, Nicholas, for your article.
I have long wondered where the university-level scholars–the linguists and literature professors and professors of history and rhetoric and cultural studies who ought to be appalled by the CCSS in ELA. It’s been shocking to me, for example, that linguists haven’t pointed out the obvious fact that the language strand in the CCSS is extraordinarily backward–prescientific, as though we had learned nothing in the past hundred years about how people acquire the vocabulary and grammar of a language.
Chomsky was right in saying that intellectuals have a duty to offer critiques of the dominant power structures when those structures are bringing about serious harm. The silence from academics on the subject of the regressive nature of the CCSS in ELA has been deafening, so your piece was cool, clean water in the desert.
Robert,
Excellent discussion about text, meaning, context, words, sounds, interpretation, etc. . . .
Well put! Muchas gracias.
When I was in college New Criticism was the thing to do and I enjoyed it, but it was never presented as though the text existed in a vacuum, though it is clear when one reads the New Critics that many of them seemed to think that. I think they were reacting against a way of reading that gave the text itself less importance and they kind of over reacted. But I think in many ways most theory is limiting. You mention a whole gamut of theoretical approaches that all have value, but are each only a sliver of all that is present. When I look into a book I see the importance of the language, but I also see the political, psychological, feminist, cultural, and the like but the work itself is not any one of those things, it incorporates all of them. It seems to me that to adhere too closely to a single theoretical approach is to close our eyes to other things that are present.
It seems to me there is something a bit medieval here (in Coleman, not in you), where everything has a little box it fits into and nothing can stray outside its box, as was the practice of the medieval Scholastics (or so I was told in school). One of the greatest attractions of literature for me is that it enlarges the world I live in, takes me out of the small world in which I have been placed that influences so much of my experience. I think there is something in human nature that wants things small and manageable, but the wonder of the universe is that it is large and beyond our powers to manage it.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
What Coleman is promoting is actually the opposite of the skills students need to be successful in college. At universities, typically, to support their assertions and back up their arguments, students are required to cite evidence from BOTH within the required reading AND from relevant outside sources. That is necessary if students are to make sense of new information, integrate course content and form EDUCATED opinions, not simply state personal views. So, while complaining that no one cares about how students think and feel, Coleman is actually robbing them of opportunities to engage in complex learning experiences that will enable them to expand their perspectives, thereby assuring they will remain fledglings who express amateur, uniformed opinions.
I think this is just one more indicator that education “reform” is Bizarro World, where everything stated actually means the opposite. In what other country do the leaders, including the president, say that everyone should get a rich education and go to college while funds for that are regularly diverted away from students to corporations?
Education “reform” in America is a total sham. It benefits only those who are connected to the elites that are calling all the shots, like non-educator Coleman and his backers. It is all about promoting their hidden agenda for personal, political, economic and ideological gain which, contrary to all the PR spin, is NOT in the best interests of students nor the public good.
Let’s stop pretending that David Coleman has a “vision” of the study of literature, that he has any “theoretical” underpinning to his approach, such as New Criticism. He was not the “architect” of the Common Core, but the subcontractor working for Pearson and the other testing companies. His “context-free” approach is merely the way to get students to write what can be graded by a machine.
Chris Cotton, Ohio English teacher
yup
That’s exactly right.
I agree entirely.
Agree. Thanks for emphasizing the disconnect between the education reform plot and authentic student learning goals.
Here’s a connection between “close reading” and legal “textualism”.
Mercedes Schneider criticized “close reading” (writing about the granting of a charter to a 22 year old in NY) because “the text stands as its own unchallenged authority.”
Terry Gross (Fresh Air) interviewed CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin about the courts and ObamaCare.
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/03/368228244/president-obama-and-the-courts-a-shift-in-balance
Toobin said that conservative attorneys attacking ObamaCare are using the concept of “textualism” to interpret the law.
(According to various online site definitions, “textualism” is used by religious groups who believe in the strict adherence of Biblical text.)
The Supreme Court will be hearing the case against health insurance subsidies. According to Jeffrey Toobin, Justice Antonin Scalia is considered to be a “textualist”.
The argument against ObamaCare will be that only the exact words of the law and not the intent of the legislation is to be considered.
Sounds a lot like “close reading.”
Of course words derive meaning from context which may or may not be provided within a text. Go look up the word “cup.” If a simple every day word can be interpreted in several ways, what happens with those words that most of us cannot even pin down with a common meaning? The most painful place I used to run into such words was when my struggling students asked me what a word in some standardized test directions meant, and I was not allow to tell them.
My batty friend was batting a bat while batting her eyes.
Insert “on the quilt batting”
. . . a bat on the quilt batting. . .
“always historicize”
: )
and remember that a) that historicizing is a two-way process–the times influenced the lit, and the lit influenced the times; and b) that we say we’ve “understood” historical events when we have applied some hermenuetic technique to them–as when, for example, we view those events as having a narrative structure with heroes and villains.
One can excuse presumption from adolescents. Adolescents are often very, very sure of their opinions and at the same time very, very ignorant. Of course, they are often so sure of their opinions BECAUSE they are so ignorant. Fortunately, immature kids who are both arrogant and ignorant are not running things. Coleman has no such excuse. His presumption is unpardonable.
Gates and Pearson appointed him (by divine right?) absolute monarch of ELA instruction in the United States–empowered him to overrule every English teacher, state or district language arts coordinator, state language arts committee, scholar, and ELA curriculum developer in the country with regard to what should be taught to whom, when, and how. It’s shocking that someone with absolutely no relevant experience–an ELA education theorist ex nihilo–should have been so empowered, but here we are.
I can’t watch any more of Coleman’s videos. Listening to someone this ignorant of the field lecture to the rest of us about how we should do our jobs is simply sickening.
It would have been one thing if he had hacked together some voluntary guidelines and tried to make a case for them. He would have been a part of an ongoing conversation that he knows precious little about. But that’s not what happened, was it?
“I have spoken here at a high level of abstraction,. . .”
Not really, Robert. Anyone (and my assumption is that the majority reading and responding to this blog probably have at least an undergrad) who has completed an undergrad should at least have a notion about these things. If not then they should demand some money back from whatever university they attended-ha ha!!
Coleman’s theories are counter intuitive. Why would anyone want to read anything in order to rip it to shreds?
The New Critics from whom Coleman takes his notions, even if only in a highly devolved version—folks like Ransom, Wimsatt, Beardsley, Tate, Brooks, and Warren, and their precursors Richards and Empson–did not see themselves as ripping works to shreds but rather as taking a scientific approach. Theirs was a movement, like Behaviorism, very much in the positivist spirit of the times (the early to mid twentieth century) in the U.S. and Great Britain. They saw themselves a rigorously attending only to the facts as provided in the text and avoiding what they considered to be “fallacies”—discussion of the possible intentions of the author (the so-called “intentional fallacy”) and discussion of the reader’s response (the so-called “affective fallacy”). So, New Criticism was very much in keeping with the scientism (as opposed to science) that prevailed in academia in these countries at the time—a time that also saw the heyday of the psychometrician—the widespread adoption of the use of intelligence testing and standardized aptitude and achievement testing in our schools.
Of course, the New Critics’ ideas went down under devastating and definitive critiques of which Coleman seems to be completely unaware. A decisive blow against the approach was made by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., in his masterful Validity in Interpretation, which makes quite clear that one cannot think clearly about texts out of context, provides a central distinction between meaning as intention and meaning as significance, and makes strong arguments for the former as preserving the very idea of literature as a means for communication from one consciousness to another. And several other major schools of hermeneutics in the late twentieth century offered powerful alternatives—archetypal criticism as described (among other approaches) by Northrup Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism; reader response based on phenomena experience as championed by Susan Sontag or based in the practices of interpretive communities, as propounded by Stanley Fish; deconstruction as practiced by Derrida, de Man, and their many imitators; the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and others; feminist criticism as variously practiced by Butler, Gilbert, Gubar, and others; and other approaches too numerous to recount here.
Again, the CCSS in ELA take us dramatically backward. Having learned one little trick, the novice, the amateur, Mr. Coleman, presumes to tell everyone else, no matter what his or her level of refinement of his or her alternative approaches, precisely how the reading of literature must be done in classrooms. His ignorance of the current state of literary studies is abundant everywhere in his videos and writings and is particularly evident in how often he makes an extraordinarily pedestrian, hackneyed assertion as though it were new revelation. Yes, we should attend to the evidence of the text, but no one needs to be told that, especially not by an amateur like Coleman, and such attention is only a tiny part of reading well. There are many, many ways in and out of texts of which Mr. Coleman is entirely, breathtakingly ignorant.
I have spoken here at a high level of abstraction, so let me take this down to a concrete level for a moment. As a practical matter, in classrooms, it is extraordinarily valuable to teach kids about archetypal structures and motifs in literary works because knowledge of these helps kids to see works as something more than an undifferentiated mass, gives them tools for interpretation, and, importantly, gives them techniques for creation of works of their own–provides them with a toolkit for literary production. But one looks in vain in the puerile CCSS in ELA for attention to archetypal elements in orature and in literature, though such attention is POWERFUL pedagogically, as most English teachers know from their own practical experiences, of which Coleman had NONE.
cx “phenomenal experience of course
Coleman’s ignorance of the current state of literary studies, of standard operating procedures in ELA classrooms, and of the standard organizational features of ELA textbooks and curricular ladders is abundant everywhere in his videos and writings and is particularly evident in how often he makes an extraordinarily pedestrian, hackneyed assertion as though it were new revelation that he has carried down the mountain.
It’s TYPICAL of Coleman to imagine, for example, that literature instructors have not had their students attend, in the past, to textual evidence, despite the fact that that’s what we’ve always done and what has for many, many decades been the primary organizational feature of standard basal literature anthologies, which have long presented selections with text-dependent questions printed in the margins of the works and questions following the works organized taxonomically into recall questions (just the facts from the selection), analysis questions (generalization about those facts), and synthesis and evaluation and extension questions calling for pulling the learning together and applying it . It’s no exaggeration to say that explication de texte and New Criticism (though often not called by those names because they had become so common as no longer to be even recognized as chosen approaches) have been the default approaches in literature classes for much of the century, though such was commonly and rightly done AFTER setting the context for the selection and AT THE SAME TIME AS serving as amanuensis for the students’ imaginative EXPERIENCING OF THE SELECTION, but Coleman simply didn’t have the experience to know that this was so. And it was always the poor teachers who ignored the context (sometimes due to ignorance of that context) and the students’ imaginative experiences of the works and concentrated ONLY on close reading in vacuo, which, at any rate, CANNOT BE DONE except on the basis of UNEXAMINED EXTRA-TEXTUAL ASSUMPTIONS. Let me repeat that: Close reading of the text and only the text, of the text in vacuo, can only be done on the basis of unexamined extra-textual assumptions. Coleman, who studied philosophy, ought to have learned that in his own studies. It’s shocking that he has degrees in philosophy and doesn’t know that, for most of 20th-century philosophy, in both the analytic and Continental traditions, which agree in little else, has been about exposing such extra-propositional assumptions.
It’s as though some had new standards for the medical profession and were running about the country saying that it’s time doctors started paying attention to patients’ symptoms and, to add insult to that ignorant injury, further claiming that THAT’S ALL THE DOCTOR SHOULD DO. And so we get these endless exercises in pointless, decontextualized analysis of snippets of text that one finds in the CCSS materials to which students are being subjected. All this was entirely predictable. I wrote E.D. Hirsch saying precisely that a couple of years ago.
HG Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and others inspired more people to pursue science careers than all of the standardized test writers who ever lived. No one ever got excited about science through multiple choice items. Ever.
Amen
Thank you
Bob, in response to your discussion above in which you mention the word “fallacy” in relation to New Criticism, could you illuminate for us your understanding of RI 9-10.8? that standard uses the words “fallacy” and “fallacious reasoning.” This is a perplexing standard if one interprets “fallacy” to mean the opposite of or perversion of sound reasoning. identifying “fallacies” and “fallacious reasoning” require instruction outside the “four corners of the text.” Your analysis of “fallacy” as related to New Criticism needs to be broadcast clearly, widely, and often. When teachers and parents understand that language has been hijacked, they may wake up. thanks for the epiphany.
Identifying “fallacies” and “fallacious reasoning” requires instruction outside the “four corners of the text.” Of course it does. It’s that kind of thing that makes me call the CCSS New Criticism for Dummies. One also finds in the document references to the author’s intention, and intentionalism and New Criticism are violently opposed approaches. Coleman gets a D.
Nimbus, I wrote a little essay on this particular “standard”–or rather on the “anchor standard” (the “standard” across the grades) to which the one you mention corresponds. I’ve posted it below. Warm regards, and thanks for asking.
“how this education culture stifles creativity, curiosity and entrepreneurship. The Common Core will lead us to the same trap.”
And few believed me when I said that M. Rhee was a North Korean agent sent to destroy American public education!!
Professor Tampio… I cannot thank you enough for being vocal about the common core fiasco. Every time I hear a teacher repeat “… the standards are good but the implementation has been bad…”, I want to scream!!! I feel like teachers who robotically state this mantra are really just afraid to anger an administrator or they are totally ignorant.
Yes, that one particularly grieves me. Garbage in, garbage out.
Appreciate the comment.
Wanted to leave a shout-out to Bob Shepherd for the terrific commentary. And to Nicholas Tampio for the original piece. I agree with Bob that New Criticism has been — if not outright replaced — certainly challenged, questioned, and complicated by later critical approaches. But I think it bears repeating that David Coleman is NOT a New Critic and not deserving of a place in the company of folks like Cleanth Brooks or Robert Penn Warren, who prized ambiguity and tensions within a poem. They were reacting against earlier strains of historical/biographical criticism in which the purpose was to lionize the author as a great genius, rather than attempt to discern and communicate what made his or her works so good. That idea that we should care whether or not a literary work is good seems to be absent from Coleman’s questions. And indeed, the CCSS talk about the “complexity” of “texts” (measurable by a computer, apparently), rather than their aesthetic or ethical value for readers.
You would think that even rhetorical analysis, which I guess is what Coleman is attempting, would have to take into account the rhetorical situation. But the whole idea of standardized tests is that they can somehow measure “skills” without background knowledge, so Coleman has to try to demonstrate how someone can be a skilled reader without knowing anything about the people, places, or events described in a literary work. Which would be nonsense even to the New Critics, who relied on an extensive background in reading the Western literary canon that enabled them to notice when one work was referring or responding to an earlier work(s), or was offering an alternative interpretation of a widely shared myth, etc.
Yes, this is why I have referred to the debased variant of New Criticism that informs the CCSS as “New Criticism Lite” or “New Criticism for Dummies.” One cannot have any familiarity with 20th century hermeneutics without dissenting emphatically from many of the claims of the New Critics and feeling horror at the prospect of elevating New Criticism in the debased form championed by Coleman to the status of the primary theory informing K-12 literature instruction. I too, when I was younger, read Richards and Empson and Brooks and Warren with a delight matched by the repugnance I have felt recently in my encounters with the naivete and arrogance of the work of Lord Colman. They were reacting against an effete and shallow tradition of criticism as “literary appreciation” and in a spirit of high seriousness about their undertaking. Theirs was not the utter heedlessness that characterized the whole process of development of the CCSS in ELA, and they were careful thinkers, as Coleman clearly is not.
Cleanth Brooks or Robert Penn Warren, who prized ambiguity and tensions within a poem
yes yes yes
Dear Lord Coleman:
Look, if you want to drive a nail, use a hammer. But if you want to measure a tiny distance, the hammer will not do. Use calipers or a micrometer.
Just a bit of advice from an old tinkerer in the cultural woodshed.
The only wonder that Lord Coleman’s latest has cultivated in me is my curiosity about how anyone could possibly think that the approach to literature instruction modeled there, taken by itself or made into a common practice, would do anything but completely alienate and disengage K-12 students. Can you imagine a 90-minute block of this crap? 90-minute blocks of this crap day after day? The sage on the stage asking his endless questions with his predetermined single correct answers?
Why is anyone taking this crap at all seriously?
Fearful?
Ignorant?
Apathetic?
Path of least resistance?
Ambitious?
Deluded?
Why indeed.
I posted this to another posting last week, but I think the sentiments are equally, maybe more equally, valid here.
The problem I have with any of these standards that are imposed on teachers by those outside of education (and some inside education, I suppose) is that they are predicated on a belief that teachers are lazy and will do as little as they can get away. The “reformers” believe that if they do not impose a standard on teachers there will be no standards. (This is giving the benefit of the doubt I suppose because I know there are some whose chief interest has nothing to do with education but with breaking units, but as I said I am giving the benefit of the doubt.) Every profession has those in its ranks who are lazy and lack industry and I suppose education is no different. But as with most professions this is the exception and not the rule (and in my experience it is the rare exception, but as Montaigne has instructed us, it is madness to judge the true and the false by our own experience). Also, as a professional, all I have to bring to what I do is my knowledge, my skill and expertise, and my professional judgment. If my knowledge, skill, and judgment are not to be trusted, I have nothing to offer.
It seems that as a culture we are losing sight of what is important in a well-rounded education; why it is we educate our children in more than just a set of skills. As an English teacher I have always believed there was more to the Literature we study (be it fiction or non-fiction) than just the enjoyment they stories give or the ideas the poems and essays provoke. There is more to reading than just reading for pleasure (though that is certainly an important element). The study of Literature does more than tell stories and explore ideas. It encourages us to reflect on the characters and issues that are being explored by the writer and asks us to look at ourselves in light of these characters behaviors and experiences, in light of the ideas that are presented. We learn many of our values from stories. We learn, for example, more about injustice from the treatment of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird than we do from reading the definition in the dictionary. We learn more about courage from Henry Fleming’s experience in The Red Badge of Courage than we do from the dictionary. My ninth graders are reading The Hobbit and in that book good and evil, generosity and greed, courage and complacency, sacrifice and comfort, selfishness and benevolence are contrasted throughout the story. Part of what attracts us to Bilbo is his basic goodness, and of course the story, which most students enjoy.
But reading good books does more than this; it develops the imagination. Books are written with words, which are just black spots on a white surface (usually). The imagination gives shape and substance to these words; brings them to life in our minds. Philip Ball wrote an article a year or so ago “Why Physicist Tell Stories in the Dark” that talks about the stories physicists tell themselves to begin work on difficult problems. He wrote:
“Theories at the speculative forefront of physics flesh out this unseen universe with parallel worlds and with mysterious entities named for their very invisibility: dark matter and dark energy. This move beyond the visible has become a fundamental part of science’s narrative. But it’s a more complicated shift than we often appreciate. Making sense of what is unseen—of what lies “beyond the light”—has a much longer history in human experience. Before science had the means to explore that realm, we had to make do with stories that became enshrined in myth and folklore. Those stories aren’t banished as science advances; they are simply reinvented. Scientists working at the forefront of the invisible will always be confronted with gaps in knowledge, understanding, and experimental capability. In the face of those limits, they draw unconsciously on the imagery of the old stories. This is a necessary part of science, and these stories can sometimes suggest genuinely productive scientific ideas.”
Usually the stories they tell themselves do not prove to be true, as was the case with myth and folklore, but they give them a way of working before the have the concrete materials with which to work. Many, perhaps most, of the scientists that worked on the space program in the 1960’s and 1970’s had their interest in science provoked by reading science fiction.
There is also value in training the mind to think in more than one way, to think mathematically as well as humanistically. Galileo changed the way people of his day looked at the moon. In an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Faking Galileo” Massimo Mazzotti writes about Galileo’s discovery. He tells us Galileo was successful not because he had better telescopes than other astronomers of his day (well he did, but they did not make that much difference when it came to looking at the moon). Thomas Harriot, an English astronomer, published a book shortly before Galileo. His observations confirmed the belief of the day that the moon was smooth, pristine surface. He saw what he was trained to see as an astronomer. Galileo, though, had been trained as a draftsman. Mazzotti tells us, “Young artists in training during this period were drilled on treatises designed to, in effect, reshape their perception, so that they unthinkingly interpreted certain configurations of two-dimensional light and dark shapes as the surfaces of three-dimensional figures hit by a light source.” He saw the moon differently because he looked differently, as an artist, rather than an astronomer. The article itself was about a forged book and it is ironic that the forgers of the book depended on the experts authenticating the book to make the same kind of mistake Thomas Harriot made, in looking at the book they saw what they expected to see, what they had been trained to see and they did not question their training.
Not every student is going to be attracted to Literature just as every student is not attracted to mathematics or science. I was never very good at math or science but I was curious so I always got something out of these courses even though they were never going to be play a significant role in my life’s work. It is my experience that where you can provoke curiosity you are more likely to provoke interest. The Common Core the way it is being delivered, at least in my school (and this is true for most standards based reforms as they are implemented in my experience, but remember Montaigne) kills curiosity, it does not nurture it. We do not question Algebra or Geometry being taught in math class even though it is difficult and many students do not like it. Yet, there is an assumption that if students do not like a particular book, they shouldn’t have to study it. I believe it is important to incorporate the cultural heritages of our many students and the different backgrounds from which they come. It is important to incorporate the cultural values of the community, but we do this by exposing students to the best those cultures have produced.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
delight piece!
“Theories at the speculative forefront of physics flesh out this unseen universe with parallel worlds and with mysterious entities named for their very invisibility: dark matter and dark energy. This move beyond the visible has become a fundamental part of science’s narrative. But it’s a more complicated shift than we often appreciate. Making sense of what is unseen—of what lies “beyond the light”—has a much longer history in human experience. Before science had the means to explore that realm, we had to make do with stories that became enshrined in myth and folklore. Those stories aren’t banished as science advances; they are simply reinvented. Scientists working at the forefront of the invisible will always be confronted with gaps in knowledge, understanding, and experimental capability. In the face of those limits, they draw unconsciously on the imagery of the old stories. This is a necessary part of science, and these stories can sometimes suggest genuinely productive scientific ideas.”
See, for example, Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception:
Click to access interface.pdf
Brilliant stuff, and Mr. Wilson, you are spot on.
What Happens When Amateurs Write “Standards”
I am having a lot of fun identifying the howlers in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] for English Language Arts. Here’s one for your amusement:
This is reading “anchor standard” 8:
I am having a lot of fun identifying the howlers in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] for English Language Arts. Here’s one for
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
Amusingly, the “literature standards” tell us, over and over, that this anchor “standard” is “not applicable to literature,” that it applies only to “informative text.”
That would be news to the speaker of Milton’s Paradise Lost, who invokes the Holy Spirit, at the beginning of the poem, and asks this Christian Muse to help him, in the poem, present an argument to “justify the ways of God to men.”
Maybe it’s been a while since you read or thought about Paradise Lost. Go have a look at Book I. You will find, at the beginning of it, something the author actually calls “The Argument.” It’s a brief preface that serves as an abstract of the claims, reasoning, and evidence to be presented in the book.
Did the folks who put together these amateurish “standards” actually think that literary works never present arguments, make claims, use reasoning of varying degrees of validity, nor present evidence of varying degrees of relevance and sufficiency?
Do they actually think that Ambrose Bierce‘s “Chickamauga,” Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” or “The Man He Killed,” Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” do not present implicit and explicit arguments against war, do not advance specific claims, and do not employ reasoning and evidence in support of those claims? And what on earth would they imagine such poems as Hesiod’s Works and Days, Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Pope’s “An Essay on Man” and “An Essay on Criticism,” Wordsworth’s The Excursion, and Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature to be if not, primarily, arguments?
And do they really think that arguments are not put forward in, say, Rumi’s “Like This,” Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” “Gray’s “Stanza’s Wrote in a Country Church-Yard,” Burns’s “Song Composed in August,” Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” Wallace Stevens’s “Credences of Summer,” MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” Frost’s “Directive,” Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus,” Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” and Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry”?
Really? Seriously? I know, it’s almost unimaginable that they do.
But let’s do a little CLOSE READING of the “standards” to see what EVIDENCE we can find to help us answer those questions. Inquiring minds want to know.
If you turn to the writing “standards,” the suspicion will grow in you that the authors of these “standards” were, indeed, that naïve. The breathtakingly puerile Common [sic] Core [sic] writing “standards” neatly divide up all writing into three “modes”–narrative, informative, and argumentative–and encourage teachers and students to think of these as DISTINCT classes, or categories, into which pieces of writing can be sorted.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are reading an exposé on this blog that tells the story of how some people got together in a backroom and cooked up a bullet list of “standards” and foisted these on the entire country with no learned critique or vetting.
Perhaps such a piece would only SEEM to be an informative narrative told to advance an argument. Perhaps writing consists entirely of five-paragraph themes written in distinct modes and we’ve been hallucinating JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE EVER WRITTEN, which doesn’t fit neatly into the categories advanced in the “standards.”
LOL
And, standard after standard, one encounters the same sort of simple-mindedness about literary types and taxonomy. One gets the impression, reading these “standards,” that a group of nonliterary noneducators–some small-town insurance executives perhaps–got together and made up a bullet list of “stuff to learn in English class” based on their vague memories of what they studied in English back in the day. (I don’t intend, here, BTW, to disparage the literary sophistication of all insurance executives; Wallace Stevens was one, after all, and he may well have been the greatest American poet of the twentieth century.)
Of course, what the folks behind these “standards” really did was hire an amateur who hadn’t taught and who knew very little about the domains he was going to work in to hack together a bullet list based on a review of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink in the previously existing state “standards.” In effect, a few plutocrats appointed this person (by divine right?) absolute monarch of instruction in the English language arts in the United States. My feeling is that similar results would have been obtained if a group of plutocrats had handed David Coleman a copy of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new standards for the practice of medicine.
And, of course, the plutocrats hired this guy to do this because they wanted ONE set of standards for the entire country to which to correlate the products that they planned to sell “at scale.” In other words, the single bullet list was a necessary part of an ed tech business plan. One ring to rule them all!
And that ought to be obvious enough, for surely no one who thought even a bit about these matters would conclude that
a) this CC$$ ELA bullet list is the best we could come up with or that
b) one list is appropriate for all students and for all purposes or that
c) these matters should be set in stone instead of being continually rethought and revisited in light of the discoveries and innovations made by the millions of classroom practitioners, scholars, researchers, and curriculum developers working in the domains that the “standards” cover.
Obviously.
Of course, it’s typical of a certain kind of philistine to divide the world neatly up into the objective (informative works) and the subjective (literary works) and so to think that simple-minded categorizations like the ones to be found in the Common [sic] Core [sic] make sense. The same sort of person thinks that one can reduce learning to a bullet list in a stack of Powerpoint slides.
And, it’s typical of such people to have a rage for order and an inclination toward authoritarianism. Such people admire regimentation and expect others–all those teachers, and curriculum coordinators and curriculum developers out there–simply to obey. In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines arrayed as “drawn up and given an orderly disposition, as a rioter hanged from a lamppost.” I suspect that the people behind these “standards”–the folks who claim that standardization, centralization, and regimentation will lead to innovation, as Bill Gates just did in a speech to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards–would approve of Bierce’s definition. And they would probably like to see folks like me so arrayed. LOL.
D. H. Lawrence has a poem, “The Third Thing:
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
but there is also a third thing, that makes it water
and nobody knows what it is.
The atom locks up two energies
but it is a third thing present which makes it an atom.
This is how I think of literature, it is the search for that third thing that makes us more than the sum of our parts.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Christophernorthjr.,
From prior post, “There is something in human nature that wants things small and manageable” and, from the most recent post, “…more than the sum of the parts.” Five decades of personality profile research, indicate 75% of people in business, gather information by analysis, looking at parts, e.g. dissecting a frog. The reverse ratio is true for professors. To understand information, they look at the whole, e,g. the frog interacting in its environment.
The failure of organizations, most frequently correlates and is caused by, the strategic mistake of appointing a person who understands parts but, not the whole, to top positions. General Motors, once dominant, in market share, fell far behind other auto makers when bean counters, notorious for narrow analysis, became the car company’s decision makers.
Researchers say that we are unable to use both methods. One or the other will dominate, based on our personality profile.
Top positions require people who see the forest. Most people in business see the trees and are unable to see the forest. Statistically, a business consultant will look at parts and, be unable to see the whole.
Cutting to the chase, when decision makers seek to serve Wall Street, as their over-arching motivation, IMO, their skill sets are irrelevant.
Sorry about the cut-and-paste error at the beginning of that last post! I bit of it got picked up twice. My apologies!
Close reading within the confines of the text is insufficient for mere explanation of the text. And beyond that, mere explanation of the text falls far short of understanding, such requires internalization of the text as experience.
Psychopaths can explain. But they cannot understand in the sense just described.
If it has seemed to you that there is something pathological in the New Criticism Lite approach to literature instantiated in the Common Core, that’s why. But I suspect that most readers of this blog already knew that.
A couple slight corrections of that:
Close reading within the confines of the text is insufficient even for simple explanation of the text.
But even if close reading within the confines of the text could achieve that goal, simple explanation of the text falls far short, itself, of the goal of understanding the text, which requires internalization of the experience of the text and processing of the significance of that experience.
Psychopaths can explain. But they cannot understand in the sense just described.
If it has seemed to you that there is something pathological in the New Criticism Lite approach to literature instantiated in the Common Core, that’s why. But I suspect that most readers of this blog already knew that.