In response to an earlier post about the decline in teaching fiction since 2011, and to the limits on fiction set in the Common Core standards (not more than 30% of instructional time in high school), a reader named Laura responded in a comment. Why limit fiction? Why does it matter? I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Laura writes:
“The study of literature (i.e. fictional texts) is essential to the development of critical thinking. When a student engages with a piece of literature, the student must step into the shoes of someone else and evaluate the decisions made and the actions taken by that character. When we teach literature, we teach students to hypothesize by making predictions, and we teach students how to synthesize different pieces of information in a way that makes sense. With literature, students learn how to understand and how to make analogies, thereby developing their ability to compare and contrast ideas as well as to evaluate those comparisons and contrasts.
“Literature provides the opportunity for students to understand human relationships as well as historical events in a way that is more personal and more accessible. I know a student is hooked when the student says, “This character is just like X in my life.” When a student can identify with a character and with a story, then a reader is created, and that reader will go on to read anything else they encounter in the world. Therefore, literature allows students not only to develop their vocabulary and their reading comprehension skills but to develop a consciousness as a member of a larger community of people. It allows students to access different perspectives, and especially on controversial issues, this can sometimes be the only point of access that a student might have.
“Gates, Walton, Broad, Zuckerberg, et al are not interested in critical thinkers who might question their decisions. They want human drones who have enough tech skills to produce but not enough critical thinking skills to challenge the way things are.
“Anyone who views literature as an option is misguided. Literature is absolutely and fundamentally essential to an educated populace and to democracy.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Although I agree with this reader’s enumeration of the values of literature, I think she left off the most important reason to teach it, the same reason that ought to be at the top of our lists supporting arts education: literature (and art in general) is valuable for its own sake. Literature has been part of the human condition for as long as there has been writing–perhaps it has always been part of being human if we include oral traditions. It is intrinsically valuable, and that inherent worth is wrapped around all of the other worthy benefits Laura describes.
I worry sometimes that we too readily take up utilitarian arguments to support our education goals. Some things, in addition to being valuable as means, are simply ends in themselves.
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We need more empathy (acquired through literature) and less psychopathy (acquired through Pearson testing) in our schools and society in general.
“The Path Not Taken” (apologies to Robert Frost)
Two paths diverged in a public school,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, help and tool
I looked down one, like a teaching fool
To how it lent to the student growth
Then took the other, as much more fair,
And having for taps the better claim
Because it was psycho and wanted power,
And as for empathy and care,
Had torn the students apart for game,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this for the Fates
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two paths diverged, and for Billy Gates,
I took the one of Norman Bates,
And that has made all the difference.
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By the way, lest there be misapprehensions: unlike in the original, the “I” above does not refer to me personally. 🙂
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Being well read opens the door to being a member of a common culture. Shared experiences with classic literature create common language, experience and community. Literature is embedded in our language and provides ways to describe large ideas with a single reference.
We say things like:
“How long does she have to wear the scarlet letter” which immediately invokes an understanding that someone is being shamed due to breaking community mores (and that it is not ok despite the mistake)
“Ooh… That’s a catch 22” immediately invokes an understanding being in an impossible position.
“Wily Wonka, you can walk!” uses 5 words to impart giddy surprise, relief and wonder after ones expectations and thrill has been dashed.
Cutting down on literature not only removes the endless benefits to the individual, it tears apart our common language and creates a generation without access to our culturally shared references.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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And then there is this assuming “error is the norm in all teaching and learning http://massp.org/downloads_massp/the_main_idea/teach_champion.pdf
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I agree with Laura but would add this. ALL literature is essential. I taught music and great literature abounds there too with all the humanitarian developments inherent in the great minds of those preceding and concurrent with us.
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Two examples: What did the rainbow coalition mean to those who had not read the bible story? Some were limited to multiethnic.
And why is Harriet Tubman the Moses of her people? Difficulty in reading stems from lack of some basic literary knowledge.
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The recent PSAT exam was a sad commentary on the diminished regard for literature in education, with no—that’s right, zero–reading selections of fiction.
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When I start my classes each year I go over why I read and make the following available, which explains why I read. I give seven reasons and then use seven questions based on those seven reasons (the questions follow my seven reasons) as an alternative assessment on quizzes. Students can either take my quiz or answer the seven questions. I try to make it clear (perhaps I make it too wordily clear) why reading is important to me and more than just some leisure activity.
For me these are the reasons I see literature as important to a well lived life:
1. It helps us answer or at least engage the question “what is the good life” by confronting us with many different answers. The reason for a balanced curriculum in regards to literature is because the fewer works that are studied and the fewer points of view and the fewer historical periods that are studied the more limited are the choices of answers we are given to this question. I could give my students books that arrive at conclusions similar to my own and stack the deck or I can let students choose from a diversity of texts from different times, places, and points of view and let students reason their way through by their own lights.
2. It helps students see what good writing looks like. Again, not all good writing falls into a single “Style.” I recently made a comparison for my students between Dashell Hammatt and Raymond Chandler. In the genre of the detective story Hammatt plays Hemingway to Chandler’s F. Scott Fitzgerald. I enjoy not just the poetry of John Donne but some of his sermons as well and his Devotions on Emergent Occasions. T. S. Eliot is a different writer as an essayist than he is as a poet and a different writer still as a playwright (notice the “wright” in playwright refers not to writing, but to shaping as a “wheel wright” shapes a wheel). Emerson as an essayist is different from Thoreau, but even more different from Edmund Burke, or Samuel Johnson, or Addison and Steele, all fine essayists with a diversity of styles.
3. I think stories define concepts for us, like bravery, loyalty, honor, commitment. I like what Clarissa Pinkola Estee says: “There was a serious piece of advice given by the very old people in our family. It was that every child ought to know twelve complete stories before that child was twelve years old. Those twelve tales were to be a group of heroic stories that covered a spectrum – of both the beautiful and the hellacious – from lifelong loves and loyalties, to descents, threats, and deaths, with rebirth ever affirmed. No matter how much “much” a person might otherwise possess, they were seen as poor – and worse, as imperiled – if they did not know stories they could turn to for advice, throughout and till the very end of life.” We see different ways of living modeled in stories, some positive, some negative. Even if we do not agree with the outcomes of the stories or the punishments and rewards dispersed in the stories or the way those punishments and rewards are allocated, the stories encourage readers to consider the values they depict. Readers are always free to make different choices and reach different conclusion, but even where there is disagreement there is value in considering these issues of character and behavior, to think about how we should act in certain situations before being called upon to act in those situations when the occasion presents itself.
4. They are beautiful and open us up to the beautiful and the sublime and help us to appreciate the beautiful and sublime. I think the stories that shape a culture are not always well written or difficult stories. I think comics like Batman and Superman are as much a part of American culture as Mark Twain, but I am not sure they need to be studied in school. But there is a kind of beauty (as well as a certain naiveté and over simplification of things) to them (I am also a huge fan of Chaban’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which may explain some of my appreciation of comics). I enjoy the poetry of the prose of writers like Fitzgerald, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and many others. It is by wresting with the difficult and the beautiful that we come to appreciate the difficult and the beautiful. The sad thing is, is that these are things we do not miss if we are not exposed to them because we do not know what we are missing. I like the painting at this link as a metaphor for this: Along the River (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Along_the_River_7-119-3.jpg). Scroll to the picture at the bottom of the page. It is beautiful to look at and you may stop there. But if you scroll to the left, the picture keeps going and going. There are 3 or 4 times “more picture” than is seen in the opening view. If you never scroll across you will never see and never know what you are missing.
5. Reading stories takes us out of our own limited view of the world and help us see the world through the eyes of many others. This is important to the development of empathy a real and living concern for others. Once we have seen problems from views that are different from our own, it is more difficult to dismiss the problems and concerns of others because they are not our problems and concerns. Reading well also makes it more difficult to dismiss others with whom we disagree and their views. We are better able to understand views we disagree with and why those we disagree with hold those views, as John Stuart Mill once said, “he who understands only his side of the case, knows little of that.”
6. Reading develops the imagination. The texts we bind in books are black spots on white paper, it is the imagination that makes the words on the page more than black spots. When we are told of a “blue house in a green wood” we as readers have to build and paint the house (does it have one story or two, is it a Cape Cod style house or a Southern California stucco tract house, is it a deep dark blue or is it the color of the sea or the sky), we have to imagine the “wood,” is it a few trees or a deep and dark forest. When I was younger I worked on a copper mine in Elat, Israel. When I first got to Elat, I did not as yet have the job and I camped in a place others in my situation called “The Forest.” It consisted of a group of trees that was two or three blocks in length and about six trees in width. Growing up in Southern California and going on camping trips to Big Pines in the Los Padres forest and to the Mammoth Lakes in the High Sierras, my idea of a forest was very different from this, but for the middle of the desert where vegetation is sparse this was a forest (of course I am also aware that there was some irony employed on the part of those that had named this tract of land “the forest.”) Life is more interesting, pleasurable, and meaningful if we have vivid imaginations. I like the story of Boethius who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. He was, when he wrote the book, sitting in a prison far removed from his library. But though he did not have his books he had his memories of them. Solzhenitsyn makes a similar observation about the memories of stories while in prison and the consolation they can bring in his book The Oak and the Calf. I like to tell students that “every reader interprets a story by her or his own lights. Though there are interpretations that are the result of misreadings and are not correct, there are many different ways to interpret a story correctly. I suggest to students that Literature is not like mathematics where 2+2 always equals 4, unless of course you are in base three in which case it is eleven.” And this is important to me, that even in mathematics the answers we get are determined by the number system in which we are working. “There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that do not.” But the ability to think and work in different number systems have enabled us to make some amazing advancements, computers began with base 16, hexadecimal. Steve Jobs got the idea to craft fonts for computers that were more elegant from studying calligraphy, not from his engineering class. Some think that Copernicus began to think of a heliocentric universe after seeing a map of the world that included the “New Word,” the Americas, in a place that was, according to the geocentric models of the day, supposed to be under water. Reading helps teach us to imagine and see things differently from the conventional ways of looking.
7. Reading is reflective or at least it encourages reflection. It is difficult to read well if in the course of that reading we are not reflecting on our own lives, our place in the world, our behavior and what it ought to be (the “we have done those things we ought not to have done and left undone those things we ought to have done” type questions). Just as reading puts us into a larger world and brings us out of ourselves and our own limited views of things, it also drives us deeper into ourselves and helps us understand who we really are and to become more comfortable with who we are and more accepting of ourselves, while helping us to change what is “unfinished” in our characters.
These are the questions for the alternative quiz:
1. How is the “Good Life” depicted in the book? (For those unfamiliar with Aristotle, the “good life” refers to the way we should live if we are to enjoy a happy and productive life.)
2. What is the style, that is, what does “good writing” look like in this book?
3. What values, concepts, or ideals does this book define?
4. How is beauty captured in this book, that is, what about the book is beautiful?
5. How does the book expand the world of your experience?
6. How does the book feed and develop your imagination?
7. What does this book encourage you to think about and reflect upon? What did you learn about yourself from this book?
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
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I think the emphasis on nonfiction stems from the fact that it is mainly men who are making the decisions regarding education policy (ones who have no background in education) and males tend to prefer nonfiction over fiction. The exception might be those who enjoy science fiction, fantasy, and super heroes, which I might argue have a strong correlation with real science concepts.
These same individuals probably hated reading The Scarlet Letter or Pride and Prejudice in high school or college and even as adults can’t seem to grasp the need for a common literary background (especially important in our multicultural country).
And the selections which were adopted were not well thought out and, as usual, often not appropriate to the age or grade of the student.
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Reading
In my article, THE POWER OF ENGAGED READING, in the CEA March 2014 issue of Education Canada, (available onlne)I do explain why , based on MRI studies, reading fiction is in fact better than reading non fiction
The Power of Engaged Reading
How to boost our children’s life success? Instill a love of reading
The art of reading, particularly engaged reading as opposed to the mechanics of reading, is a powerful predictor of life success by any measure. It is not only the best predictor of who goes to university – regardless of socioeconomic background and parental education – it is the best predictor of life income, career options, even life partner choices. And neuroscience is proving that reading fiction is one of the most powerful means of developing sympathetic individuals, with better social skills and higher levels of self-esteem. The converse, especially for unengaged young male readers engaged in long hours of playing video games, is higher unemployment and dependence on social welfare, antisocial behaviours and increased crime rates. Never has there ever been such compelling evidence of the power of engaged reading for our youth and their future prospects.
Reading with pleasure, and especially reading fiction, is far important than we have ever imagined.
If I were a father living in poverty, I would dedicate myself to encouraging my children to be engaged readers of relevant, age-appropriate fiction. If I were a school teacher, I would dedicate my professional development time to learn strategies to promote and develop engaged readers of meaningful and relevant novels, short stories and drama, no matter if I was a Grade 1 teacher or Grade 12 Physics teacher. It is the most important thing I could do for a child, especially a boy.
A perplexing issue within this broad realization is the disturbing disconnect between boys and reading. It verges on a problem of epidemic proportions. Finding ways to develop engaged readers is important for every child, but particularly for boys.
The state of Arizona forecasts the number of future prison cells needed based on Grade 4 state reading scores.[1] Perhaps we should examine what they know that we may not. Increasingly, new research across many countries is showing that the best predictor of future education achievement and life success is reading ability – or, more significantly, being an engaged reader. (The engaged reader, according to Guthrie, is “purposeful, intrinsically motivated, and socially interactive.”[2]) While most research has shown, for example, that family income is the best predictor of who goes to college, Ross Finnie and Richard Mueller at the University of Ottawa have shown that “the largest determinant of university participation, however, is the score on the reading portion of the PISA.”[3] Those reading scores proved to be by far the best predictor of post-secondary attendance, even pre-empting family income and parental education.
The connection between engaged reading and life success is, in a way, intuitive. But Timothy Bates and Stuart Ritchie, at Edinburgh University, have proven the connection between reading well and future job success empirically. They analyzed the relationship between early reading skills at seven and later socio-economic life, following more than 17,000 people in England, Scotland and Wales over 50 years from 1958. They showed that reading well at age seven was a key factor in determining whether people went on to get a high-income job. Reading level at age seven was linked to social class even 35 years on. “Children with higher reading and maths skills ended up having higher incomes, better housing and more professional roles in adulthood,”[4] the authors concluded.
By contrast, 79 of 100 people entering Canadian correctional facilities don’t have their high school diploma; 85 percent of them are functionally illiterate, and the vast majority are male.[5]
In his study of 4th Graders, John Guthrie at the University of Maryland found that engaged readers from homes with few material advantages routinely outperformed less engaged readers from the most advantageous home environments. “Based on a massive sample, this finding suggests the stunning conclusion that engaged reading can overcome traditional barriers to reading achievement, including gender, parental education, and income.”[6] This is a remarkable finding as we continuously search for ways to narrow the gap between the achievement of the advantaged and the disadvantaged children in society. Literacy is the key to economic and social power, regardless of socio-economic class. As we consider the growing gender gap between boys and girls, it is even more important.
What about the boys?
The aggregate data masks a major problem that exists for boys. The gender gap is a central element in understanding the power of engaged reading. A recent Ontario Ministry of Education report on boys’ literacy[7] cites declining achievement and concludes that boys score lower than girls on all measures of literacy. There is a literacy gap between boys and girls from Grade 3 right through to Grade 12. Boys dominate behavioural and other special education classes and are twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with an attention deficit or learning disability. They are more likely to be held back and to drop out. If they do graduate, they are less likely to attend college or university. If they do go to college, they get lower grades than female students and are less likely to graduate. Concomitant social factors are equally troubling. For example, suicidal behaviours are increasing in boys; boys are twice as likely to abuse alcohol[8] and have higher unemployment, crime, and incarceration rates.
I believe a major factor in this growing problem with boys is the exponential use of video games, especially violent ones. While playing video games may also have positive effects, Leonard Sax posits they are the major reason for boys’ declining reading scores, school achievement and increasing social problems. He argues in Boys Adrift, for example, that the evidence is unequivocal. The more time a child spends playing video games, the less likely he is to do well in school, at every level from elementary to college. But it is not just declining achievement, it is declining social behaviour as well. According to Sax, playing violent video games such as Doom or Grand Theft Auto “clearly and unambiguously causes young men to have a more violent self-image and to behave more violently”; playing violent video games leads directly “to aggressive behaviour, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, and cardiovascular arousal, and to decreases in helping behaviour.” Boys who play these games, he argues, are more likely to engage in “serious, real-world types of aggression.”[9]
But engaged reading of fiction offers a powerful antidote to all these negative effects, particularly for boys.
The fiction factor
If all reading is helpful, reading fiction offers added benefits – in fact, astounding benefits! It has long been argued that reading great literature improves us as human beings. Neuroscience is proving this claim to be truer than we ever imagined. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show us that the same regions of the brain that are activated during a real event are activated while reading about it in a story. Reading a story produces a vivid replica of reality. Novels are not only a simulation of reality, but permit readers to enter viscerally into the thoughts, feelings, and problems of others.
Raymond Mar, at York University performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies.[10] He found narratives in novels offer a unique opportunity to engage what is called “theory of mind.” He, along with Keith Oatley and others, reveal how we identify with the hopes, dreams and frustrations of the novel’s characters, speculate about their motives, and follow their relations, conflicts and activities with friends, lovers and family, the same areas of the brain are activated as when experiencing real-life issues. Literature allows not just learning about emotions, but experiencing them, It is a form of practice for real life. It is, both psychologically and practically, immensely beneficial.
It appears from this growing body of research that individuals who read fiction are better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their point of view. These researchers found a similar result in preschool-aged children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their “theory of mind.” For example, five-year-olds exposed to egalitarian material showed more egalitarian responses on tests of stereotypes for women’s occupations that persisted over time. These results indicate an improved capacity to empathize with a marginalized group. Exposure to narrative fiction was positively associated with empathic ability, whereas exposure to expository non-fiction was negatively associated with empathy. Reading fiction not only leads readers to be more empathetic, but also leads to personal growth and improves us as individuals. Reading fiction, these researchers conclude, leads to self-understanding, a relevant key to improving ourselves. They call this effect the Self-Improvement Hypothesis, wherein “changes in selfhood can occur as a function of reading certain kinds of fiction.”[11]
The act of reading, particularly engaged reading as opposed to the mechanics of reading, is a powerful predictor of life success by anymeasure. It is the best predictor of who goes to university regardless of socio-economic background and parental education. It is the best predictor of life income, career options, even life partner choices. And neuroscience is proving that reading fiction is one of the most powerful means of developing sympathetic individuals, with better social skills and higher levels of self esteem, resulting in increasing self improvement and prosocial behaviours.
The converse, especially for unengaged young male readers, especially many of those engaged in long hours playing video games, is higher unemployment and dependence on social welfare, antisocial behaviours and increased crime rates.
So, what’s not to like? Let’s get our kids reading!
Photo: Jerry Diakiw
First published in Education Canada, March 2014
EN BREF – L’art de la lecture, particulièrement la lecture qui engage l’esprit par opposition à la mécanique de lecture, est un puissant indicateur du succès futur, quels que soient les critères utilisés. Non seulement prédit-il mieux qui fréquentera l’université – sans égard au statut socioéconomique et à la scolarisation des parents – c’est aussi le meilleur prédicteur des revenus futurs, des possibilités professionnelles et même des choix de partenaire de vie. La neuroscience confirme actuellement que lire de la fiction constitue l’une des meilleures façons de développer des personnes sympathiques possédant de meilleures habiletés sociales et une bonne estime de soi. L’inverse, particulièrement pour les jeunes garçons que la lecture n’engage pas et qui passent des heures à jouer à des jeux vidéo, prend la forme de taux accrus de chômage, de dépendance aux programmes sociaux, de comportements antisociaux et de criminalité. Jamais n’a-t-on eu des preuves aussi éloquentes du pouvoir que recèle une lecture qui engage l’esprit pour nos jeunes et leurs perspectives d’avenir.
[1] Arizona Republic , September 15, 2004, cited in Educational CyberPlayGround® Internet Database. http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/stats.asp
[2] J. T. Guthrie, “Teaching for Literacy Engagement,” Journal of Literacy Research 36 (2004): 1-30.
[3] R. Finnie and R. E. Mueller, “The Backgrounds of Canadian Youth and Access to Post-Secondary Education: New evidence from the youth in transition survey,” in Who Goes? Who Stays? What Matters? Accessing and persisting in post-secondary education in Canada, eds. R. Finnie, R. E. Mueller, A. Sweetman and A. Usher (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
[4] S. J. Ritchie and T. C. Bates, “Enduring Links from Childhood Mathematics and Reading Achievement to Adult Socioeconomic Status,” Psychological Science 247 (July 2013): 1301-1308.
[5] Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, “Target Crime with Literacy: The link between low literacy and crime.” http://policeabc.ca/literacy-fact-sheets/Page-5.html
[6] Guthrie, “Teaching for Literacy Engagement,” 5.
[7] D. Booth, S. Elliot-Johns and Fiona Bruce, Centre for Literacy at Nipissing University, Boy’s Literacy Attainment: Research and related practice (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2012. http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/research/boys_literacy.pdf
[8] K. Morris, “Increase in Teen Boys’ Suicidal Behaviour Linked with Alcohol Misuse,” The Lancet 352, No. 9126 (Aug. 8, 1998): 459
[9] L. Sax, Boys Adrift: The five factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2007).
[10] R. A. Mar, M. Djikic, and K. Oatley, “Effects of Reading on Knowledge, Social Abilities, and Selfhood,” in Directions in Empirical Studies in Literature: In honor of Willie van Peer, eds. S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova, & J. Auracher (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008), 127-137.
[11] Mar et al., “Effects of Reading on Knowledge, Social Abilitie
E
About the author(s)
Jerry Diakiw
Jerry Diakiw is a former superintendent with the York Region School Board and currently teaches social justice issues in schools and communities at York University in Toronto. He can be reached at jdiakiw@edu.yorku.ca.
Article tags
academic achievement
equity
Photo: Jerry Diakiw
Jdiakw@edu.yorku.ca
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jD – what you say makes sense. While I’m not against video games, I believe everything in moderation. Anything which becomes compulsive whether drinking, watching TV, playing video games, even exercise, can become dangerous.
I also agree with your take on fiction reading. Many boys prefer nonfiction, but there are many, especially gifted children, that are avid readers, often preferring science fiction or fantasy. There’s a reason graphic novels and comic books are so popular ( and don’t forget Star Wars).
Introducing boys to good fiction which they will enjoy is one of the reasons it is so important to have well stocked libraries with trained (certified) librarians to guide them towards the right books.
As far as below level or non readers, it is important that they still hear those compelling tales, whether it is read aloud or listened to on a CD. Just because they aren’t capable of reading a text, doesn’t mean they should be shut out of the “fun”. My dyslexic son listened to all seven of the Harry Potter books (perfect for “road trips” to Chicago or Jersey to visit relatives). Now an adult, he still gets a tape to listen to when traveling. (Money shouldn’t be a factor as they are free to borrow at the public library).
As a librarian in an urban school, I would often lend out the tape and tape player to those children, usually boys, who wanted to “read” the same books as their friends.
The positive aspect of read alouds is that they develop listening skills (something that needs to be developed in today’s children),
That’s the problem with common core, the emphasis is on the wrong skills at the wrong levels, replacing more common sense, relevant approaches which would truly prepare children for life after school.
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Not sure this relates but these are two articles I gave my students to read this year. I had no choice, we are under obligation to read informational texts in my all of our English classes, so these are two I gave my students so I might stay in compliance. The others I gave them to read are like unto these, but I think these two are apropos in light of what you have written.
Neil Gaimon on preserving libraries:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
Edith Hall on libraries of the Classics in British coal mines:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/20/classics-for-the-people-ancient-greeks
Gaiman points out the role reading fiction played in U. S. technological advancement and why China lifted its ban on Science Fiction. It even gives us Einstein’s thoughts on fairy tales. The article by Edith Hall points out how certain Victorian philanthropists set up libraries of classical literature, history, and the like in coal mines and other work places so that miners and factory workers could read the classics. The libraries were used extensively and the books were well read. In any event I found them enlightening.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
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I think literature is important to teach for many reasons. One being people always say that the reason we teach history is to know where we come from or to learn from the past, well the same things can be said for teaching literature. A piece of literature can show the mistakes and good decisions that we have made over the years. It can show the reader what not to do and what to do. Its also important because it can open up a whole new world for the reader. It show children a life outside of their own. I will always remember looking and reading French literature in school and reading about cultures and places I may never visit. Literature stands on its own as a representative part of a society. It is the same a piece of art work or a musical piece when it represents a certain time in history. Literature can teach students to increase vocabulary and increase their reading knowledge. The saying that reading is fundamental is very true and works of literature should be in included in that as well.
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read
Why Literature Matters | Diane Ravitch's blog
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