Not sure how it's being done now, but when I was attending public school, literary appreciation was taught using two basic forms/methods: Fiction, which was almost always a series of novels or short stories that were evaluated at regular intervals via book reports/reviews; and nonfiction, which took the form of general-overview textbooks and which were evaluated similarly via standardized tests/exams. Both of these methods, which were governed by strict and arbitrary deadlines, in retrospect were rather constricted in how much they could improve students' cognitive skills through reading because, to my way of thinking, they emphasized superficiality over substance, quantity over quality, rote memorization over creative interpretation, etc. In the case of high-school English, you'd typically be given two weeks or less to plow through a slew of books like Gatsby or The Catcher in The Rye (both of which I hated) with minimal discussion in class---basically, you were on your own to make sense of the work beyond the first couple of chapters, and the book reports that usually resulted were nothing more profound than hastily drafted plot synopses, to be turned in and promptly forgotten so you could get started on the next book report. In short, it made the process of reading an oppressive chore, and it really turned me off of fiction (certainly the novel form); and it would be many years before I'd even think about diving into Fitzgerald and Salinger again, let alone Dickens and Tolstoy.
With nonfiction, to cite one example, your typical high-school civics text will contain a chapter on how a bill becomes law using a Point A-to-Point B linear narrative. That's fine, but what's missing, however (at least it was when I was a student), are detailed specifics explaining how a bill gets drafted, an explanation of the different kinds of bills that are drafted, and of equal importance, some instruction in how to interpret the language of legislation. So when I see that some high-school administrators are recommending that students be assigned to study executive orders concerning federal land management, or position papers from the Federal Reserve, I think that's terrific and long overdue. I know I learned a lot more about how our government actually works by reading the Congressional Record every day (which I had a subscription to when when I was a teenager) than I ever did in a civics class. If nothing else, one would think that The Federalist Papers and Democracy in America would be required reading at the high-school level. They weren't in my day, and I am guessing they aren't now.
However, it still comes down to methodology. Rush the kids through complex political/legislative issues in civics class, and they'll learn to despise the subject just as I did reading novels in English class. For either literary form, I think it's much wiser to: (a) Give students a menu of reading assignments to choose from within a loose framework of required works, so they can find a book(s) that's right for their reading level and which will most likely pique their interest; (b) give the kids the time to properly absorb and process the material, with plenty of time devoted to classroom discussion; and most importantly, (c) ditch the deadline-driven, one-size-fits-all test methodology in favor of something more flexible and open-ended.
Here's an example that worked for me: In my high-school senior Literature class, students were assigned one book to read for the semester: Homer's Odyssey. That's it---one book for 18 weeks! (At first, the students thought it was a joke.) What's more, we read the book aloud in class every day, line by line, taking turns until we'd finished the entire work. Along the way, the teacher would interrupt on occasion to question us individually about the content/tone/meaning of the opus, and this led to lengthy explorations of symbol and allegory, history and myth, semantics and linguistics---and given the fact that we had 18 weeks, we were able to burrow deeply into the grammar and syntax of the work without having to rush through or skip any chapters. Finally, there were no tests or exams. Our only "assignments" were two papers---a midterm and semester-end essay. These could be any length and on any subject we chose, so long as it related to something we'd discussed in class. And in the end, this class was far-and-away the most richly rewarding scholastic experience of my entire K-12 career. (This appreciation wasn't unique to me---many of my classmates expressed similar thoughts at the time.) To this day, three-plus decades later, I still remember many of the topics we debated, and I can still quote passages from Homer from memory. The class taught me like few others I can recall (at any grade level) exactly How to Read a Book---how to see context and meaning beyond the printed word, how to think abstractly as well as figuratively when examining text, and how to detect pace and flow in compositional discourse. It certainly inculcated an appreciation of epic poetry in me, and the next year, in college, I dove eagerly into Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, the Grail myths, et al, and these are still some of my favorite works in the Western literary canon.
Now, just imagine what kind of impact a work like Democracy in America might have on high-school history students if it were taught the same way that I was taught Homer. With a few brief supplemental reading assignments thrown in for additional context (Gettysburg Address, I Have a Dream), it seems to me that you could really enhance students' understanding and appreciation of American history using only one work that was authored in the 1830s than using the timeline-driven narrative of typical high-school history texts and bimonthly exams that are heavy on dates, events, personalities and other factoids, and light on historical context and present-day relevance.
Digressing for a moment, something else that would prove beneficial to students (and which nobody ever seems to talk about anymore) would be excusing them from school for a few days per year so they could take group field trips to, say, a city council meeting or a trial at the county courthouse, so they could see up-close for themselves how our political and legal systems operate in the real world. A crazy idea, I know, but I can't help but think that high-school-age kids would learn a great deal from such experiences.
Okay, some subjects in the core curriculum, such as math and sciences, necessarily require a lot of rote memorization of empirical data and hence a more rigid system to benchmark student progress, and it seems to me that standardized testing works perfectly well as an evaluative tool for these kinds of subjects: You either know by the end of your geometry class what an isosceles triangle is, or you don't. There's really no room for interpretation. But the liberal arts---history, English, civics, economics, arts, humanities---really shouldn't rely on similar pedagogical methods. Yes, you want to graduate students who are equipped with sufficient computational skills to balance a checkbook each month, but you also want to produce creative thinkers with superior interpretive skills. That's something our public educational system doesn't seem to do particularly well anymore, and it's hard to see how imposing uniform test methodologies across the liberal-arts curriculum is going to improve that. Still, any initiative that can deepen high-schoolers' understanding of how the real worlds of policy and finance affect them is a worthy one, and you'd hope educators would welcome the opportunity to expand their students' horizons in these subjects. If I were the parent of high-schoolers, I know I'd much prefer to see them working for an entire semester on a single well-reasoned essay about the effects of monetary policy on unemployment than watching them crank out a book review every couple of weeks on literary works of the caliber of For Whom The Bell Tolls. (Another crappy novel I was force-fed in high school.) Regardless of literary form, though, you've still got to give the kids sufficient time to process and interpret the material, otherwise they're not really "learning" anything at all.
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Vitelius
