No room for literature in

education?
Posted: Thursday, November 28, 2013 8:00 am | Updated: 12:23 pm, Mon Dec 23, 2013.
By Terese Karmel | 0 comments
In the novel “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, a character, Fred Vincy, is dismissed as someone who just reads fiction.
Of course Eliot, a great novelist, is playing with her readers.
But today the attitude seems to be too prevalent with the architects of the “Common Core” curriculum for kindergarten
through grade 12 students. The “Common Core” recommends that language arts teachers de-emphasize fiction and
increase nonfiction curriculum. The main argument is that “informational texts” prepare students better for college
and career.
It’s a pity that one must defend fiction now that figures, formulas, charts, and graphs are the knighted tools of
expression and words reflecting thoughts and feelings are the second-class citizens of communication.
The attitude is shortsighted. Is there nothing to be gained through contact with Alice, Huck Finn, David Copperfield,
Jay Gatsby, Leopold Bloom, Atticus Finch, and the many other fictional characters with whom so many of us have
grown up?
It’s hard enough to get kids to read, but how can it be suggested that the “Harry Potter” books or “To Kill a
Mockingbird” are less valuable than, say, a study of the history of wizards in children’s literature or an examination of
judicial racism? Nonfiction analyses may refer to the original works of fiction but they won’t replace the experience of
reading the novels.
Critics of the shift in emphasis to nonfiction have said that with so much multimedia competition for the attention of
students, shouldn’t we rejoice rather than discourage them when they pick up a novel?
The new order risks replacing imaginative students with generations of automatons taught that self-indulgent
memoirs, lab reports, or 140-character tweets are creative.
I teach literature and journalism in college. With the former, figuring that I have one shot to introduce my freshmen
to great works of fiction, I load them up on short stories by the best of the craft. (Rarely have students heard of the
authors.)
Of course fiction has no role in journalism, but the elements of a solid story are the same as those of great literature:
description, narrative structure, tone, and unity. To instruct my students in writing in-depth profiles, I use descriptions
by Charles Dickens to show them how to capture the essence of an individual. Mr. Micawber: “A stoutish, middle-
aged person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head … than there is upon an
egg.” And Scrooge: “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as
flint from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”
A popular course in journalism at the University of Connecticut is called literary journalism, in which the professor,
Wayne Worcester, a distinguished fiction and nonfiction writer, has students read Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Tom
Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, who wrote both fiction and literary nonfiction.
Worcester tells journalism students they are in the business of storytelling and the only difference between them
great storytellers of fiction, like John Steinbeck, is that Steinbeck is dead. “You have at your disposal,” Worcester
says, “all the devices that all writers have with the single most important restriction that your story must be accurate
and true.”
So there you have it: To describe an anxious person on a witness stand is to note the beads of sweat on his ruddy
complexion. To render Roger Federer is to write that he pirouettes across the court like a member of the Ballets
Russes. To put the reader at a performance of “Hamlet” is to describe the irony of the speech and the agony on the
face of the beleaguered son.
Such observations are the backbone of writing — whether fiction, journalistic articles, or Internet postings.
Ironically, it’s technology, in the form of Bluetooth audio downloads, that has kept Fred Vincy, Mr. Micawber, and
Scrooge my constant companions during 10-minute hops and hourslong journeys in my car.
But now I’m thinking that I should download a batch of novels in case they start receding from the audio book market.
And what’s next to go? Drama? No Shakespeare and O’Neill? Poetry? No Frost or Keats?
Are these also to be considered frivolous accouterment to serious learning? I shudder at the thought.
Terese Karmel is a former newspaper reporter who teaches at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.