Diminished Lives: an Assault on the Humanities

Anyone who spends a lot of time visiting children in public primary schools will probably notice that the time traditionally devoted to the study of arts and letters has undergone a notable reduction. “Severe budget cuts [the] humanities and other non-STEM fields,” according to Robin DG Kelley, professor of American history at UCLA, have accompanied the growing assault on critical inquiry.

This trend, which I began to notice in the years after the passage of the No Child Left Behind test law, is part of a larger pattern of retreat from the humanities in general, to which there is tending to be less and less attention, it seems, because the benefits or “results” of engaging a child in a work of literature they enjoy do not lend themselves easily to rigorous, scientific measurement. “I want to change the face of teaching reading from an art to a science,” a senior U.S. Department of Education official said in 2002. If she had simply meant that reading instruction should be based on research known to have a scientific basis, her statement would have seemed like common sense to me. Unfortunately, in too many schools the science theme quickly turned into a storm of arctic air that swept away any serious concern about the artistry of language in the books and stories that children increasingly had no time to read.

“So maybe we don’t teach an entire novel,” noted a curriculum administrator in a New York district in an interview with The New York Times in 2015, “but we make sure to teach the concepts that the novel would have transmitted”.

That’s a funny statement. I don’t think many people read a novel to discover “a concept” or set of concepts hidden within its pages. I think most people read a novel to enjoy the story and get caught up in the lives of the people it describes and how their personalities and characters develop as the story progresses. This is obviously impossible if students only read a few paragraphs or pages.

A case in point: One of the bright young teachers I knew when she was a graduate student here at Cambridge became a fifth-grade classroom teacher a few years later in a poorly funded district in Virginia. There was no school library, and in the classrooms literary books had been largely abandoned and replaced by tiny pieces of writing called practical texts.

The teacher, who had studied education after earning her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, had worked as a teacher in a fairly affluent neighborhood in a suburb near Cambridge, where the pressure of testing had been less severe and where she had had the opportunity to introduce her students to books she had known and loved since she was a child. So the idea of ​​using what she calls “ridiculous little pieces” of test-aligned material as a pillar of teaching struck her as, as she puts it, “pretty incredible.”

Later, she sent me a package that included several passages that her students were required to read during a six-week period leading up to the final round of standardized exams—during which, she told me, they did not read any books.

One of the longest pieces she sent was a nonfiction passage about a sea creature I’d never heard of called the blobfish. He began by saying that the blobfish has “a human-looking face” and, in the next sentence, is “a human-looking fish” and, in the paragraph that follows, has “an almost human appearance.” Although it is “perhaps not one of the most attractive of sea creatures,” the passage continues, “it is certainly one of the most interesting.” Its shapelessness “allows the blobfish to float easily” in “the ocean depths where it dwells.” The blobfish “spends all its time floating” and, two sentences later, the blobfish (plural) “spends most of its time floating…They are made to float.”

The blobfish “may not be the most attractive fish,” children are told a second time in the final paragraph, after which a multiple-choice question asks students to identify the structure that was used to organize the passage. The teacher said one of her students stuck her fingers down her throat to show how interesting she found it.

It is not surprising that so many teachers, with his good education and cheerful personality – and his fierce resistance to the loss of his autonomy – are unwilling to stay long in schools where the “ridiculous little bits” of mediocre writing and the pressure to conform to standardized banalities stifle any enjoyment to be had in the arts and letters.