About a week ago, Grant Wiggins of Understanding by Design fame wrote an article for ASCD Edge entitled Ban Fiction From the Curriculum. (I’d link to it, but it’s been removed from the ASCD site without any explanation I could find.) Fortunately, arvind grover summed up the article nicely here:

he thinks that the abundance of fiction serves female students better than male students

he thinks that reading so much fiction ill prepares you for an adult life where non-fiction reading is much more essential

I admit that when I first read the article, I dismissed it as deliberately provocative to raise a point about including other kinds of writing in the curriculum and decided not to write about it. But I’ve been seeing it get some traction, and so I feel compelled write about it.

First, let’s admit that the article has some points – yes, English class can be about much more than fiction – and should be. I look at how 9th graders at SLA take so much by reading The Freedom Writers Diary or how many former students still tell me at the 11th grade Poetry Project at Beacon was some of the most powerful reading and writing they’ve ever done, so yes, thinking that fiction is the only reading that should be done in an English classroom is a mistake.

But the first fallacy of the article is that all reading should be done in an English classroom. Yes, Wiggins is 100% right – we should read much more non-fiction in schools. Sadly, much of the time they could be reading powerful non-fiction is spent reading out of textbooks. Why do we continue to pretend that history can fit into a textbook? Why do we think that students will get a better grasp of science by reading a science textbook instead of reading science journals? So yes, Mr. Wiggins, let’s make sure that we give kids many, many more chances to read non-fiction. Let’s give kids access to first-person accounts of historical events… or have students read the actual Federalist Papers, rather than textbook summaries of them. Let’s read more biographies, more scholarly articles, more opinion pieces, more candidate websites and position papers. All of those pieces of reading material have more relevance, more passion, and more accuracy than the average history textbook and certainly more dynamism than the average science textbook. Let’s free science and history from the hegemony of the textbook and let kids really read.

But let’s also remember the power of story in our lives. Every story we read should give us a new lens on the world. How many students have seen themselves in Hamlet – struggling to figure out how to make decisions within the competing interests of family and duty and identity? How many students have deepened their understanding of African-American identity through the works of Toni Morrison or Gloria Naylor or Richard Wright? One only need look at the incredible popularity of the Harry Potter and Twilight novels to remind us of how powerfully kids can connect with fiction. And the list goes on and on…

Stories – fiction or non-fiction – help us create the narrative of our own lives, and they help us make sense of the world around us. The ability to deconstruct stories and create our own is a fundamental part of being human. And that cuts across any gendered lines we could create. For me, the world of fiction got me through high school in ways that non-fiction never could. I devoured book after book, both in and out of class.

And there is one last objection – perhaps the most important one for me – that I want to state. By assuming that we should ban fiction because it is not as "useful" makes the case that all education must be utilitarian in purpose. We still teach art, music and even poetry and fiction because the life of the mind matters. Fiction can remind us that there is more to life than work, more to life than what we can see with our eyes. Stories teach us that we can envision a world different — even better — than the one we have.

Stories remind us to dream… to imagine… to create.

And so, with all due respect, Mr. Wiggins, fiction must stay in the curriculum. Some of us — even us boys — learned more from fiction than anything else we did in school.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad