The Misdirection of Education Policy by DaFoe Nancy;

Author:DaFoe, Nancy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Darwin, it would appear, understood the profundity of the loss when he turned from the arts. Here, the great and exacting scientist admits to a mistake in his approach: he did not make it a “rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” Darwin would probably not have had much sympathy for the current STEM movement in education.

Reading literature is not easy nor is it hard fact. It is not designed to help us create the next generation of iPhone. Literature does not teach “lessons,” as Vladimir Nabokov aptly put it, but it does connect us in ways that no other field of study is able to do so well. Nabokov wrote in his novel Despair, “To begin with, let us take the following motto . . . Literature is Love. Now we can continue.”[7]

If you don’t know the opening to Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, you should seek it out: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”[8] So begins Tolstoy’s most perfect novel and one of the reasons why literature needs to be taught and read. Of course, reading Anna Karenina is not likely to lead to new technological developments nor will reading it affect the global economy.

Bluntly stated, reading Anna Karenina will not advance STEM education, ESSA, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, nor will it neatly meet the political agendas behind these twenty-first century “stakeholder” and data-driven mantras. Reading and writing about literature are not “how to” exercises; they are not, as some mistakenly assume, about encapsulating a message or moral of the story—that would be a fable. Rather than elaborate further in this listing of non-examples, I will point to the example of Tolstoy’s words near the end of Anna Karenina:

“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; and that I can’t know, and so I can’t live,” Levin said to himself.

“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”

It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result of ages of human thought in that direction.[9]

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.