Alt-Education

Ann Althouse argues that fiction shouldn't be taught in public schools. A stalking horse—but for what? I'll consider it while I'm reading on the beach.

UPDATE: I promise you, I gave Althouse no thought whatsoever while I was closing waves, root beers, and short stories by Will Self. But now I'm giving her program a little more thought.

Althouse:

And why does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school.

So that's pretty straightforward: get rid of English classes, literature classes. (But I don't think your reading skillz are teh suxx0rz, Henry; I was looking for an angle and that probably slanted your reading of my reading, lolz.)

Maybe it's Culture Wars shell-shock that leads me to suspect that Althouse—a conservative who is not above specious argumentation—objects to, and with this suggestion deprecates, exposure to art. She's down on fiction (the tell-tale "storybooks" slam on novels), so there's reason to suspect that she is suggesting this program at the very least because she does not like fiction. "I worry that authority figures will choose fiction that they approve of because it teaches the values they like" sounds like a nod toward contrarianism, but may just as well be a swipe at the liberal academy, and, in any case, expresses a concern that applies to subjects like history and science. Intelligent design, anyone?

Subtext and context notwithstanding, she's arguing that English classes are unnecessary because the goal of reading education is to promote reading comprehension, and comprehension alone—that fiction has no utility. She assumes that this is self evident. I don't think it is self evident, I don't think she's right on the comprehension point, and furthermore I don't think that she's even arguing what she says she's arguing.

Althouse claims but never proves that fiction is an inefficient way to teach kids how to read. In fact, the only counterargument she anticipates and falsifies is that people might not learn to love fiction if they're not exposed to it during school—which is neither here nor there. Althouse's question should be whether history and science texts are better vehicles for developing reading skills.

Reading isn't merely processing the logic of a text; acuity is also required. Teaching kids how to read, and read well as they age, means exposing them to all the diverse textual strategies that writers use to convey information. Learning to understand and anticipate and imitate strategies like metaphor, symbolism, and the first-person perspective makes for strong, literate readers. None of these strategies appears in junior-high American history textbooks. Which—so long as we're debating positions built entirely on personal preferences—were really fucking boring.