Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy by Anne Boyd Rioux

Author:Anne Boyd Rioux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

PART III

A CLASSIC FOR TODAY

7

“A PRIVATE BOOK FOR GIRLS”

Can Boys Read Little Women?

WHEN I BEGAN teaching Little Women in my American literature survey courses, I wondered how many of my students had read the book before. In that first class, only one said she had read it in high school. A few of the women had been given the book to read as girls. None of the men had read it. This was a small sample, admittedly, but I wondered if it was being taught in middle and high schools. Surely if books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were being taught, their near-contemporary and, shall we say, feminine counterpart, Little Women, was as well. It didn’t take much digging to find out how wrong I was and why Alcott’s classic had not endured as a book for schools while Twain’s tales of boyhood had.

Little Women, it turns out, is barely on teachers’ and students’ radars. Its educational heyday in the first half of the twentieth century is a distant memory. Surveys of teachers’ favorite or recommended texts conducted by the National Education Association ranked Little Women at 47 in 1999 and 73 in 2007. A 2010 survey of four hundred English teachers indicated that none were teaching anything by Alcott. The same year, the annual What Kids Are Reading survey, based on 6.2 million students’ reading records, listed the forty most frequently read books by grade. Little Women was not mentioned in the report.1

Also in 2010, however, Little Women received a potential boost from the new Common Core Standards Initiative. Along with benchmarks students should reach in each grade came lists of “exemplar texts” having sufficient quality and appropriate complexity for each level. Little Women made the list for grades 6–8 (as did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). It hasn’t much benefited from the recommendation, however. According to the 2012 What Kids Are Reading report, which includes a focus on the Common Core exemplar texts, only 0.08 percent of the 7.6 million American students surveyed had read Little Women the previous school year. By 2014, while some texts on the Common Core exemplar list had received a nice boost since the initiative began—Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, for instance, was read by ten times as many students as before, and Tom Sawyer by four times as many—Little Women’s increase was only two hundredths of a percentage point, meaning it was read by 0.1 percent of students. In the 2016 surveys, conducted in the U.K. as well as the United States, Alcott was not mentioned in either report, which represented the reading habits of 9.8 million students in the United States and 750,000 in the U.K.2

Most educators and parents have been less than thrilled with the Common Core, which many states have challenged. The list of “exemplar texts” has been particularly controversial among education specialists, raising concerns about creating a new literary canon. Classics in general were deemed to be overrepresented on the list, but Little Women was the target of a specific kind of criticism.

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