A Texas Experiment

 Our educational establishment, it seems, has catastrophically failed the nation's public schools over the last few decades.  Despite the bipartisan No Child Left Behind bill from the George W. Bush Administration and the national testing frenzy that it mandated, basic skills of reading and math appear to have been declining, not advancing, a trend accelerated by the pandemic.  One big reason was the abandonment of phonics as the main means of teaching kids how to read, in favor of encouraging students to guess word's meanings based upon their context.  That, I have to believe, can only reflect the obsession with new generations with proving that they think they can do things better than their parents did. One remarkable bright spot is the state of Mississippi, which abandoned the new methods in 2013, and has now seen its ranking in 4th grade reading rise from 49 in that year to 9 most recently.  Now, in a very different way, the state of Texas--where public schools are under a sustained attack--is doing something equally revolutionary. 

Today's New York Times published a list of about 200 books and short selections that Texas students will be required to read in the course of the 13 years of primary and secondary education.   They begin reading in kindergarten (which I and my contemporaries did not), with popular children's works including some old fairy tells, a Berenstain Bears selection, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, picture books about Thomas Edison and George Washington,  and much more.  The similar first grade curriculum includes some verses from the Old Testament Book of Jonah, the first of a number of biblical passages.  The youngest grades also include selections from a book by William Bennett, once President Reagan's Secretary of Education, called The Children's Book of Virtues.  Fourth grade includes children's versions of old stories like Robin Hood, Stevenson's treasure Island, and King Arthur and his knights. By fifth grade the kids will read an abridged Don Quixote, the poem Casey at the Bat, an exegesis of the Declaration of Independence, the Mayflower Compact, and a book on the Constitution--as well as the story of the burning bush from Exodus. Sixth grad includes four sections on the Civil War, including a General Order written by U. S. Grant and the Gettysburg Address. Every year now includes something from the Bible.  In seventh grade they will read the full diary of Anne Frank--that may be when I read it myself--George Washington's Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport," and selected poems by Dylan Thomas, Langston Hughes, and Robert Frost. Eighth graders will read The Giver by Lois Lowry, which I don't know, and Night by Elie Wiesel.  

Things really get serious in ninth grade, where the biggest selections are Animal Farm and Great Expectations by Dickens--which I read in eleventh grade and don't feel I got much out of.  They also read Lincoln's Springfield Lyceum address, which anticipated Strauss and Howe's generational theory, as well as the Civil War.   The tenth grade list includes Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Dante's Inferno (which I have never read, and what appears to be Martin Luther King's last speech before he died. They also read substantial excerpts from the Book of Job. The long books from 11th grade are Fahrenheit 451 and The Scarlet Letter, and it includes a short nonfiction work of Ayn Rand's about capitalism and a short section that I am not familiar with by the black conservative Thomas Sowell. And in their senior year they will read Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, a Trollope excerpt, and poems by Kipling (If, a favorite of mine), Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), and Emily Dickinson.  

All right,. here goes.

There are a lot of wonderful books on this list, along with a lot of basic history.  Of course all of us, including me, can think of others they would like to see included, and if I had to pick one, it would probably be To Kill a Mockingbird, but in general the quality is very high.  The list is traditional insofar as it reflects the development of modern western civilization (there is nothing, I believe, from ancient Greece or Rome, which is curious), and there is more about the Holocaust than about civil rights in the US.  It does include some black writers and women, obviously, but the authors rejected the now-popular view--reflected in the Times's own comments--that the traditional canon is an instrument of white male oppression that has to be redressed by reducing the number of white male authors to 50 percent or less. Nor do the compilers believe that Texas's Hispanic and black children need to read a critical mass of people who "look like them."  Longtime readers will not be surprised to hear that I see nothing wrong with that, believing along with many black intellectuals that our cultural heritage belongs to us all.

The Biblical passages are drawing a lot of criticism, naturally, and the Times feels compelled to point out that there is nothing form the Koran or the Bhagavad  Gita. That doesn't bother me either for the same reason that I, a completely irreligious person in the traditional sense, wasn't bothered in the slightest when one of my young sons played  a soldier in a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar or the other one got the chance to sing the lead in Amahl and the Night Visitors.   A lot, of course, will depend on how teachers present the material, but the Bible and its stories are an indelible part of our culture about which any educated person should be glad to know something about.  I would like to see them taught as the very important historical documents that they are and I'm sure that's what some teachers will do.

If in fact Texas makes its students do all these readings, it will graduate an unusually educated population from its high schools. On the whole I have to applaud what they have done, and I hope that other states, whether red or blue, might do something similar.  They are trying to keep reading serious books alive, which is no small thing.  In our divided times, I welcome any attempt to bridge the great divide among us, and to recognize, as in Mississippi, that you never know who is going to really do something about the great problems the nation now faces.