Jamie Gass of the Pioneer Institute (a think-tank in Boston with which I disagree about charters) wrote a terrific piece about the history of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, why it is a classic, and why young people today should read it.
Gass writes:
Until recently, Massachusetts’ nation-leading K-12 English standards were animated by such classic British literature and poetry. Great fiction contributed to the commonwealth’s success on virtually every K-12 reading test known to the English-speaking world.
But in 2010, Massachusetts took $250 million in one-time federal grant money to replace its proven English standards with inferior nationalized ones known as Common Core. These national standards – an educational Frankenstein’s monster – largely decapitated timeless fiction and stitched on brainless so-called “informational texts…”
Frankenstein awakens us to a key lesson of modern learning – science is a powerful tool, but when uncoupled from moral and ethical grounding, it can easily become monstrous.
After pseudo-scientific 20th-century totalitarian regimes – which manufactured mass murder, the Holocaust, and gulags – Mary Shelley’s central message about the limits of human power and modern science is even more relevant today.
How sad for students and teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The one thing I appreciated about Common Core–just one–was that it promoted reading and writing across the curriculum. However, it appears the one thing that administrators absorbed was the 70% expository/30% fiction formula (no one can tell me how that proportion was derived) even though it was intended to refer to all disciplines in all four years of high school. They just applied it to English classes, and now we have the near elimination of classic fiction from the syllabi. Tragic. Oh, and at my high school at least, there was no reading and writing across the curriculum. That was ignored for something called “Project Based Learning.” I will take this article to my school board, even though I suspect they won’t pay any attention.
Cindy,
I have explained here where that formula for literature/informational text came from.
The National Assessment for Educational Progress is administered by a bipartisan governing board, composed of state legislators, business people, educators, etc. It is appointed by the Secretary of Education. I served on the National Assessment Governing Board from 2000-2007 (appointed by Bill Clinton and Secretary Richard Riley). NAGB instructs assessment developers about the proportion of questions that should be based on literature/informational text. The proportions are exactly what is now in the Common Core. NAGB did not devise those proportions as instructions for teachers, but for test-makers. Why the drafting committee for the CCSS put them into the Common Core is a mystery. In fact, it makes no sense at all. English teachers should teach whatever they think best for their students.
Diane, thanks for picking up Jamie’s excellent piece.
Yes, you are both right: bring back Frankenstein. It’s real literature, so much richer than “informational texts,” as the Common Core now feeds our children.
And scores are already going down? Can anyone be surprised?
I reblogged your piece at http://schoollawpro.com/bring-back-frankenstein-great-jamie-gass-op-ed-picked-up-by-diane-ravitch/
Thank you both!
I second Cindy’s comments. Back once upon a time when women’s history was part of the curriculum at the local community college, we studied Mary Shelley’s mother, about whom most of our population knows nothing: the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft (read Frances Sherwood’s Vindication for a searing modern day reading of her life).
“After pseudo-scientific 20th-century totalitarian regimes – which manufactured mass murder, the Holocaust, and gulags” – he tries to attribute inhuman technocratic and “educratic” ideas along with the mass murder solely to totalitarian regimes while completely avoiding “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”.
The article at the link goes beyond that — but even if it didn’t, the point is that eliminating time for metaphorical classics means eliminating the philosophical discussions they spark, which inevitably lead to points such as yours.
Jamie Gass is on the Board for the MA Center for Civic Education where I volunteered in the past and I have mentioned here before. We certainly have a bipartisan agreement on this viewpoint because it is a waste of precious R&D funds.
Pioneer has a long tradition of the “right ” of center and I was a Bernie supporter before I voted for HRC. I sent the article to all 3 of our reps, our senator and the school committee members in my city. (I don’t think it is necessary to send to our reps in Washington). I think the locals are getting tired of hearing from me … but they need to get the message. We have met with the reps in Lawrence and teachers from the Merrimack Valley have asked them to “rein in the DESE/BESE” and the policies of Baker/Peyser/Sagan…
I spent 25 years teaching High School. I taught physics, math, and “earth science”.
However, I also have degrees (science degrees) in Astronomy and Physics. I’m male. I find Shelly’s book to be a treasure trove. Nothing ticks me off more than a bunch of business majors and ‘liberal arts’ people expecting ‘science’ to save their butts as they make political decisions that put everything on edge. Perhaps they really need to read Shelly (second edition, at least). Frankenstein created the ‘monster’, however it was society that drove him to violence. How prescient Shelly was of the ‘Manhattan Project’ saga.
The reason I chose Astronomy was because I thought it was non-involved in either war or politics. The reason I didn’t decide to work in physics was because I didn’t want to either work for the Defense (poorly named) Department or make money for the already rich. I have never regretted my choice (at the age of 30) to teach High School, and I know that I had just a bit of influence not only on my students, but some of their parents (and a few rich ones) as well.
I’ve been retired for almost 20 years, now, and I’m not sure I could recommend the profession today. The art of education (drawing out from the student) is no longer considered important. Instead, it’s all about ‘stuffing in’ (the exact opposite).
Mary’s work is an artistic masterpiece, and a springboard for very basic philosophical and linguistic dialogues. It’s like Moby Dick, only more easily accessible because it’s shorter and not as obscure. Both provide one interpretation when you are young, and another when you are mature and begin to understand the nature of allegory and art. Mellville’s work should only be taught in College, by people who know the historical context. Shelly, however, is much more accessible to High School students, and, as I said, it an excellent opportunity to ‘draw out’, not simply ‘stuff in’.
I would only add this caveat…. The typical English teacher hated math and science. As a result, they will emphasize the ‘monster’ part and ignore the ambiguous love of Frankenstein for his creation, and the sorrow he felt as he sought (eventually) to destroy it. I would ask that typical English teacher another question….
In our age, we Frankensteins were asked by you to create a monster. We didn’t do it on our own (slight deviation from Shelly). We did your bidding, but, heroically sought to control it. Once conceived, you (through Graves) took control (just as society turned Shelly’s artificial creation into a ‘monster’).
I would love to teach this book, with High School Students. But, in physics classes, there was the expectation of preparing my students for the ‘next step’, and I only had a bit of time (after the AP) to spend a week or two on ‘analytic philosophy’, a system I found somewhat unsatisfying in graduate school, however one that I hoped would suddenly jolt an almost confident senior (already accepted into college) into a bit of self-reflection.
Shelly’s work is now banned because it is such a huge springboard for open-ended discussion (an opportunity for education). Today’s owners fear that.
Love your comment, Daedalus.
What a great idea to have Frankenstein taught by a science teacher
reference to the works with description and context were in the psychology book I used with under-grads at U. MA….
We fetishize reading, and forget what reading is for: to learn about the world. We spend 12 years having kids acquire “reading skills” so they can read, but never have them read to actually learn anything about the world. Ostensibly they’ll do that once they’re 18 and have acquired the requisite reading skills. This is crazy.
What we should be doing instead is teaching about the world (its geography, cultures, literature, art, science, math, etc) and thereby making competent, knowledgable rulers of this democracy (we the people are the true rulers, not Trump). Enhanced reading ability is a byproduct of this endeavor, not an end in itself.
Couldn’t agree more. Common Core ELA is like trying to grasp dimension by focusing on the study of the ruler rather than on using it, repeatedly, to measure things.
I don’t think that Gass and his friends at the right-wing Pioneer Institute would be so enthralled to have the full story of Frankenstein’s author discussed in class. After all, the failings of schoolchildren are often blamed by the right on a lack of proper morality and family structure. Here’s an excerpt from terrific article in the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley began writing “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” when she was eighteen years old, two years after she’d become pregnant with her first child, a baby she did not name. “Nurse the baby, read,” she had written in her diary, day after day, until the eleventh day: “I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it,” and then, in the morning, “Find my baby dead.” With grief at that loss came a fear of “a fever from the milk.” Her breasts were swollen, inflamed, unsucked; her sleep, too, grew fevered. “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived,” she wrote in her diary. “Awake and find no baby.”
Pregnant again only weeks later, she was likely still nursing her second baby when she started writing “Frankenstein,” and pregnant with her third by the time she finished. She didn’t put her name on her book—she published “Frankenstein” anonymously, in 1818, not least out of a concern that she might lose custody of her children—and she didn’t give her monster a name, either. “This anonymous androdaemon,” one reviewer called it. For the first theatrical production of “Frankenstein,” staged in London in 1823 (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as “––––––.”
“This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,” Shelley remarked about the creature’s theatrical billing. She herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of her mother’s milk, since her mother had died eleven days after giving birth to her, mainly too sick to give suck—Awoke and found no mother.
Beautifully expressed. Thank you, Christine.
I have a horrible feeling I never actually read “Frankenstein” [it’s going on my do-list now]. And I’ll admit to having tried Moby Dick 3 times (belatedly, having added it to my books as a library-sale volunteer: that wasn’t on the reading list for ‘fast-track’ [one below ‘accelerated’ in ’60’s jrhi/ srhi tracking] ). But somehow this brings me right back into my intense jrhi jealousy that we (fast-track) didn’t ‘get to’ read Romeo & Juliet (another tome added as a lib-sale volunteer) – sorry, Hamlet-only for the regular kids & you’ll never be assigned more Shakespeare.
Thank god we were assigned The Good Earth, Grapes of Wrath, 1984, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Catcher in the Rye, For Whom the Bell Tolls– O’Neill, Eliot, Joyce — Pushkin, Chekhov, DeMaupassant. And in French we read excerpts of Les Misérables like Jean Valjean, & excerpts of Caesar in Latin class. Sr yr hisch we read something by a Bronte & I was off & running on my own time w/Austen, March, Thackeray– causing me to race to catch up after college [for-lang Romance Lit] to Hardy & back around to US lit (Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers) & from there Welty et al moderns, still catching up…
It hurts me to even contemplate these kids today, w/o the literary pinnings they need to think/ discuss issues cogently. Just a few yrs ago a Mom complained to me of her 6th-grader’s September ELA struggle thro a 10-day close-reading/ essay assnt on MLK’s ‘A Letter from the Birmingham Jail’– w/paltry historical context– she wondered about the value of such a lesson so obviously above the intellectual grasp of 11-y.o.’s. There must be any number of novels which could prepare 11-15 y.o.’s for such an assnt… Illustrative of the warping of ELA studies brought about by CCSS. i wonder if today’s kids will survive the truncated fictional curriculum & learn to love & learn from lit as I did in ’60’s 7th-12th.
” a Mom complained to me of her 6th-grader’s September ELA struggle thro a 10-day close-reading/ essay assnt on MLK’s ‘A Letter from the Birmingham Jail’– w/paltry historical context– she wondered about the value of such a lesson so obviously above the intellectual grasp of 11-y.o.’s. ” I saw this in Albany with the granddaughter. Given an assignment to critique Elie Wiesel’s speech in Washington and I said “it would have helped if they had ever read Night” in the school; and they were told they must do this “close” reading thingy…. I think Bob Shepherd called it “close readinglite” or something that fit the bill. They were also told the teacher could not help them (so it was not teaching but just another form of a test — with not context or background).
“Frankenstein” is wonderful, and an organic way to teach difficult vocabulary. When I taught it, I also included the life of Mary Shelley’s wonderful mother. It can be taught on so many levels, from so many different angles. One book I appreciated is “The Age of Wonders,” by Richard Holmes. All the Romantics were social rebels, but so were the scientists, and in those days there was not a great division between the disciplines, as there is now. My students were able to relate “Frankenstein” to the unintended consequences (or are they?) of our day. Diane, thanks for telling me about the genesis of 70%/30%–talk about a Frankenstein creation. I’m still not clear what magical process led them to those proportions, but David Coleman is the man who thinks “melancholy” is an outdated word and not as useful as “synthesize.”
this is where I part ways with Jamie Gass. We can agree that the MA Curriculum Frameworks are better than the Common Core. But Pioneer Institute tells me I am anti-catholic because I will not support charter schools (or voucher plans). If you can take the time, the video will give you the presentation from Pioneer by Jamie Gass during the school choice week (Introduced here by Heartland Institute so turn the sound down on the ads.). New England was formed by the non-conformists; there were Puritans and Pilgrims and then some who just wanted to fish because the fishing was excellent and some who were just land speculators. Ideas of the separation of church and state grew along with the New England issues of “local control”. Mr. Gass turns the history around into this anti-Catholic theme being the basis for my beliefs? Can’t go there so it is not possible for me to be bipartisan with their voucher schemes And it was also the same group that told me Robert Reich is too strident (so , nevertheless,Jean will persist in being strident as they accuse Rob. R.). Remember, only if you have time to pursue this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEnfniOrc2Q&feature=youtu.be
I part ways with the Pioneer Institute on their support for privatization.
But when Jamie Gass supports literature and history, I will join with him.
yes, definitely agreed. And I know he serves on the Board for the MA Center for Civic Education and I certainly support that program (as I have written many times before in this blog space)…. MA Center for Civic Education has grown out of the efforts of teachers to keep it going after federal funding ended. We had federal funding up until. Kennedy died and then it was decided to be an “earmark” …. Local /state funding and volunteers and the director takes no salary (an outstanding, retired history teacher )