Why read fiction in English class?
The problem with the slow drift from fiction to technical nonfiction in secondary level English Language Arts
The past decade-and-a-half has seen a slow drift from literary fiction to nonfiction, at least in public schools at the secondary level in NY state, and I suspect throughout the country.
This is not a research paper, however, to briefly demonstrate that this is not a figment of my imagination, we could consider the evolution of the NY State English Regents examination, which is a requirement for graduation from public schools in NY, and typically taken junior year. Assessment drives instruction, and there isn’t any assessment more high-stakes in NY State than the Regents exams.
English Regents Exams in 1998: questions on spelling & vocabulary, multiple choice questions on narrative nonfiction & literature, two essays that gave multiple options for each. All-in-all, the exam was approximately 20% narrative nonfiction, 20% spelling & vocabulary, and conceivably 60% fiction, considering the essay prompts each gave multiple options.
English Regents Exams from 1999-2010: a two day exam comprising a total of 26 multiple choice and four essays. Essentially 50% technical or narrative nonfiction and 50% fiction. There are no more spelling or vocabulary questions per se, and no more options for essays.
English Regents Exams from 2010-Present: back to a one day exam comprising a total of 24 multiple choice questions and two essays (one longer than the other). Five of those multiple choice questions are on a poem, which represents about 9% of the scoring; 19 multiple choice questions are on narrative or technical nonfiction, representing about 34% of the scoring; a single persuasive essay based on a series of technical nonfiction excerpts or articles representing about 43% of total scoring, and one essay/short response on a narrative nonfiction (which asks the student to complete a technical task, i.e., identify how the author uses some rhetorical technique), represents about 14% of the total scoring.
We went from 20% nonfiction, all of which was narrative nonfiction, to 9% fiction, with well over half of the test related to technical nonfiction, over the course of 23 years.
I admit that personally, I read more nonfiction than I do fiction; I also write more nonfiction than fiction. I have nothing against nonfiction. However, literary fiction serves an important function, especially for children and young adults. K-12 English classes ought to recognize this, but at least in NY state, it would seem the belief is that fiction isn’t worth the trouble.
Why are we moving away from fiction in favor of technical and narrative nonfiction, and why is that a problem?
Ambiguity in literature makes assessments subjective
Ambiguity, which plays a central role in human existence, is reflected beautifully in literature, but is also difficult to measure in a multiple choice question. The best way to do it with fidelity is to deconstruct the piece for it’s literary features, e.g. “which is the best explanation for how the dialogue in lines 14-18 develops the theme of the excerpt? (a) increases tension, (b)...etc.” Yes, you can do that, and have validity and reliability, and learn all about how dialogue functions on a technical level, but it’s essentially a demand to murder the excerpt and then perform an autopsy. Or maybe, excerpting to begin with was what killed the work. Who’s to say.
The mantra if you didn’t measure it, it didn’t happen is at play.Jerry Muller called this “metric fixation” in his book The Tyranny of Metrics. Yes, we can have perfectly valid and reliable assessments that measure student “growth” by focusing on nonfiction and deconstructing the various technical elements of a text - “growth” defined as “getting better, for a period of time, at those specific tasks” - but what do students lose as a result of hyperfocusing on strictly quantifiable questions and answers? Are the spreadsheets that quantifiable questions produce really that important (looking at you, school board)? Again - what are students losing, and why are we OK with that loss?
The pragmatism meme
The pragmatism meme states something like I’m so glad I learned about parallelograms instead of how to do taxes. It’s really come in handy this parallelogram season.
You could replace “reading stories” with “parallelograms” and get the idea that it’s a better use of a student’s time reading about the internet’s impact on our thinking process, or whether plastic shopping bags should be banned, or the cost-benefit of pets in the work place, than it is reading stories about characters who never even existed, in places that aren’t real, who have problems that we’ll never (at least literally) have.
When I was in high school, I asked my English teacher a question, which was a version of the pragmatism meme. I don’t remember my exact wording, but I remember her answer: We read stories in school so we can improve our vocabulary and spelling.
It was the most unsatisfying answer I possibly could have gotten, but I wasn’t able to come up with my own answer for another few decades. Which has also led me to conclude that there is a lack of understanding as to why it is so important for people to read stories (stories, not “close reads” where people read short passages or excerpts over and over again). Reading stories is not something that should be considered a leisurely, non-academic activity. Voluminous reading of a wide range of stories is far more important for students than so-called “deep dives” into one or two books. In addition, a near total shift to nonfiction is a mistake.
Why is a shift from fiction to nonfiction a mistake?
Nonfiction is admittedly more pragmatic, and it is what students are going to likely be reading as a productive adult member of polite society. So what’s so wrong with the meme? Shouldn’t we be preparing students for “college and career”?
In order to understand why a dramatic shift from fiction to nonfiction is a mistake, we should understand why stories are so important. The author Tom Green, while discussing why the characters in The Great Gatsby are important despite being unlikeable, says this:
That’s the pleasure and challenge of reading great novels. You get to see yourself as others see you, and you get to see others how they see themselves.
I thought that was the neatest and most concise way to say empathy can be nurtured through vicariously sharing the experiences of fictional characters - even shitty ones. Think about The Great Gatsby (if you can remember 10th grade English). Every single character is unlikeable, yet somehow, it’s still an important book. Maybe because there are parts of us that are unlikeable. And maybe we’re human. And maybe other people are human, too. So maybe we can recognize some of the unlikeable traits that we have in ourselves in others, and understand them, and have patience with them, and not immediately go to war with them, and maybe they can do the same with us. Also, maybe if we can recognize the shittiness of other characters in ourselves, then it might just give us the opportunity to curb our impulse to be rotten.
Reading stories is largely about learning empathy through vicarious experiences. “Empathy” is a word that sometimes carries with it a soft connotation, as though it were the equivalent of “caring” or “loving” or “accepting.” That’s not how I view empathy whatsoever. Empathy literally means “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”
I have seen “empathy” used to mean something like “to understand the suffering of another” or “a necessary prerequisite in seeing another’s oppression.” It means no such thing. The word “another” in the definition of “empathy” is not specified. Being empathetic is dark. It takes strength and courage. It reveals parts of us that we’d rather not have revealed. It means understanding not just the raped, but the rapist. It means understanding not just the enslaved, but the slave master. It means understanding not just the Jew, but the Nazi. Fiction holds a mirror up to the best and the worst of us all; and while the best is pretty darn good, the worst is absolutely fucking horrific.
If the vicarious experiences from stories develop empathy, and if empathy is so dark, then why don’t we accept nonfiction as the new ELA normal? Who wants to hold a mirror up to the shadowy nightmare that is our own soul, anyway? It’s not like we’re going to buy slaves or become Nazis or vote for that other political party if we don’t read novels - we don’t have to imagine ourselves as those “others”, those animals, those viruses, in order to not become monsters ourselves. Right?
In his book The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker claims that violence worldwide has steadily declined, and that we are living during the most peaceful era of human history, in no small part due to “expanding the empathy circle” (summarized here).
The printing press was invented in 1492. Daniel Defoe wrote the first English language novel, Robinson Crusoe, in 1719. The “humanitarian revolution” came soon after in the late-18th and 19th centuries, and “was accelerated by publishing, literacy, travel, science, and other cosmopolitan forces that broaden people’s intellectual and moral horizons.” (Pinker, 2011)
What was it “that passed from unexceptionable to controversial to immoral to unthinkable to not thought-about during the Humanitarian Revolution”? That period of time following the emergence of the English-language novel and relative wide-spread literacy? “Customs such as slavery, serfdom, breaking on the wheel, disemboweling, bearbaiting, cat-burning, heretic-burning, witch-drowning, thief-hanging, public executions, the display of rotting corpses on gibbets, dueling, debtors’ prisons, flogging, keelhauling” and more, all activities that were more-or-less normal, almost completely disappeared during this time. (Pinker, 2011)
Pinker doesn’t claim that a dramatic increase in literacy as well as literature is solely responsible for the incredible expansion of our empathy circle, but he does claim that it is partially (and maybe in large part) responsible, and I would add that it’s a gain that could conceivably be, at least somewhat, lost. I’m not saying that the shift in English Regents exams is going to cause us to go back to keelhauling and witch-drowning, but is it really so unreasonable to believe that reading fewer stories will result in a weaker empathy muscle, and that, on some level, that won’t bode well for our society?
Conclusion
I sometimes feel as though I am having two conversations. I am very much a supporter of Self-Directed Education (unschooling) and I am not comfortable in forcing students to read any story, for a number of reasons. I understand the trepidation in choosing “the best” texts for everyone because, frankly, so long as you have a class of more than one student, you will not be able to select a single “best” set of texts for everybody.
On the other hand, in the context of compulsory education, true “SDE” is not a practical reality in the near future, and so the conversation of which texts, how many texts, and what kind of texts, has to be had.
I’ve always thought it was particularly arrogant for an English teacher to claim that they are “teaching” literature - as corny as it sounds, great literature is an experience that incrementally transforms us into more empathetic people. Overloading on nonfiction texts, or limiting fiction to a single book or, worse yet, a series of excerpts to be read over and over again, is going to result in less empathetic people, and a more dysfunctional society.