Avoidance of Nonfiction

1. “Language mastery is not some abstract skill,’ he said in his latest book, ‘The Making of Americans.’ ‘It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community.”2.”There, Willingham maintains, ‘Many people think of intelligence as comprised of mental skills that are independent of knowledge.’”3. It should be “intelligence as composed of mental skills,” or “intelligence as consisting of mental skills,” or “intelligence comprising mental skills,” shouldn’t it?Yes, I’m being picky, but there’s something about the language-lecture around-the-horn of Willingham to Hirsch to Bauerlein that brings out the grammar ump in me.Will willynilly bat cleanup here?

Professor Baurlein tells us that “”Educators say nonfiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend….”Well, it’s probably harder for the “educators” to comprehend. Remember that the Colleges of Education get the students with the lowest College Board and/or ACT scores. And the Education colleges get some (but not all) of the denser and less generally acute faculty. And dense and uninformed people tend to think everybody else is about as dense as they are.

When I hear my students complain about the vocabulary portion of SAT/GRE exams, I explain to them that such vocabulary is there specifically because educated people in the English-speaking world do indeed use it. Admittedly, some use it to a greater degree with fluency, but all should be comfortable seeing/hearing it. The fact that they aren’t comfortable with it, I tell them, is an indication of an educational shortcoming on their part. After all, virtually none of us were specifically taught this body of vocabulary via some specific course (Vocabulary 101). We picked it up from other sources, often through contextual clues the first few times we heard it.As others have said, students often don’t read non-required books, but that isn’t different from past generations. What is different is the sheer number of people who are being told that they can and should get a college degree. The universities are loading up on people who have never been readers, but previously were neither recruited nor were they generally successful at self-respecting universities.

There are other ways to gather general knowledge besides reading non-fiction books. One can pick up some general knowledge by reading fiction, of course. And then there are TV documentaries, things parents explain while reading good books aloud to children, and my favorite: conversation around the dinner table. The curiosity and habits of the parents and family friends do sometimes rub off on the offspring, for better and worse. And there are also Wikipedia and Youtube, which, however stuffed with fluff, nonetheless are boundless sources of generally useful knowledge and will increasingly be so.The main achievement of assigned books in English class seems to be to populate the top-ten list with something beyond vampire stories, though more issues books than great ones.

Thank you for raising the distinction about fiction vs nonfiction. As a librarian, people assume I read a lot. But they always seem very surprised when I say that I pretty much only read non-fiction. They (adults) seem to equate “reading” with novels. Also, it has long been a pet peeve of mine that US copyright law treats fiction and non-fiction identically. Given that the US Constitution specifically indicates “To promote the progress of science and useful arts”, I’ve always thought there was a compelling case that copyright terms should be much shorter on non-fiction than on fiction.Aside from textbooks and newspapers, I think the first place I encountered nonfiction writing in high school was on practice SAT questions, where there would be these strange reading paragraphs that we had to answer questions about. They weren’t in newspaper style, or textbook style, and weren’t fiction, and I wondered then why they were testing us about a kind of writing that didn’t seem to exist in the world! Since then, there has been an explosion of nonfiction popular writing, books like Freakonomics and such. Maybe high school curricula, particularly the “college prep” programs, ought to find a way to introduce popular and even some scholarly nonfiction into their reading lists.

Yes I will bat cleanup from the 11th spot in the order. This latest attempt at ???? by Bauerlein is actually laughable. All of this intellectual and learning theory analysis of high school students reading habits occurs without any thought of what inspired these preferences in the first instance. I know that it would never have occurred to Bauerlein that the kids preferences were directly influenced by their high school teachers. Therefore, this latest “braincramp” of Bauerlein’s is targeted at the wrong audience. He needs to be writing this message to high school teachers.

I don’t get willynilly’s “cleanup” comment. My kids are in high school, and I can vouch for the fact that their teachers are not pushing vampire books. My unscientific view is that kids’ reading preferences are shaped in part by school, in part by peers, and in large part by the reading practices of their parents. If kids happen to have a teacher who assigns an interesting book, that’s influential. If their peers read a book, they might read it (that’s the source of the Twilight effect). If their parents read, they might understand that reading is an activity that isn’t limited to school.As a college professor, what I find most fascinating about the fact that my (mostly upper middle income) students don’t read is their completely random use of prepositions. Not only have they not learned about prepositions in an English class, but they haven’t picked up the patterns through reading.

comprise . . . 3 compose, constitute usage Although it has been in use since the late 18th century, sense 3 is still attacked as wrong. Why it has been singled out is not clear, but until comparatively recent times it was found chiefly in scientific or technical writing rather than belles lettres. Our current evidence shows a slight shift in usage: sense 3 is somewhat more frequent in recent literary use than the earlier senses. You should be aware, however, that if you use sense 3 you may be subject to criticism for doing so, and you may want to choose a safer synonym such as compose or make up. [MWCD10]Whatever the causes of our current situation, I really don’t think focusing on minutiae, particularly from a spuriously “conservative” POV, helps much. Like it or not, words change meaning, and we can control it about as well as we control the weather. It might be a better use of one’s time, not to mention mind, to do something about the problem rather than carping about the irrelevant. How could anyone possibly misunderstand the meaning of what was written?

This is an interesting point, actually: it’s never occurred to me to question the fact that high schools assign mostly fiction in English classes. I suppose I’ve always bought in to the theory that fiction is a “gateway drug” to reading in general, which is more or less how it worked in my case. I will say that unless things have changed drastically from my day, students do get a great deal of nonfiction in school in the form of textbooks — History, Social Studies, Civics and the like. But I take the point that there’s a great deal of non-fiction prose out there that’s not explicitly pedagogical in the same way that students might definitely benefit from. Biographies, just for an example, as well as trade non-fiction books like Freakonomics or the works of Malcolm Gladwell, which are surely simple enough for high schoolers to get. Good idea.

jffoster:You wrote: “And dense and uninformed people tend to think everybody else is about as dense as they are.”Well, with your “contribution” you certainly have proved those dense and uninformed educators right. You are dense and uninformed just as they imagine. Dense: You make a comment that is utterly irrelevant to the point of the blog (did you have trouble reading it?). And,”Educators” in the construction “Educators say nonfiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend….” would include professors of history, physics, architecture, classics, etc. because last I heard they taught students in courses. Here’s a book you may want to read, “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts” by Wineburg.Plenty of research supports this empircal claim. That you do not know about it makes you ignorant. That you flaunt your ignorance under the guise of supposed superiority makes you, to put it kindly, dense.Uniformed: Provide evidence that the verbal GRE scores of Ed School PhD students are lower than those of biology or chem students, because we are talking about reading after all. Bet you can’t do that. If you can, prove to me that literature or sociology grad students at Northeastern State U. have higher reading scores than Ed students at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, etc.

Yes, really (19), Actually, this will disappoint you but I did know of Weinburg’s “Historical Thinking…”. It was reviewed, on the whole somewhat favorably, in American Anthropologist something on the order of ten or so years ago. I read the review, got hold of the book, and read some of it. It is of limited pertinence here. The original claim in Bauerlein’s post reads: “Educators say nonfiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read nonfiction and they can’t read nonfiction because they don’t know enough about the real worlWeinburg is about reading history. Period. (Or maybe since it’s history, periods.) If I recall correctly (and I may not–it’s been a while and I didn’t read all of it), it’s primarily about infering motives of actions and meanings of writings of particular historical personages. I.e., individuals. This is understandable given Weinburg’s background in history and educational psychology but it limits it. I don’t recall much in there about social organization, cultural ecology, or the like. I fault not the author for not having done what he never set out to do. Nor do I infer that by “nonfiction” Bauerlein meant particularistic history. Bauerlein in the same paragraph says “educators”. Now if by “educators” one means anybody who regularly works in direct teaching of students, then most “educators” such as your list have never written about whether fiction or nonfiction was easier for students. When I used the term, I put it in set off quotes, intending an indication it was Bauerlein’s term. I suspected he had in mind what I would call “educationists”, though I did not know that and considered the evidence too sparse to warrant turning my suspicion into an inference. As to GRE scores, I have no information on those, did not adduce them, and don’t have time to rise to that bait, even were I disposed to do so. There is quite a bit of information out on College Board (SAT) and ACT scores and undergraduate colleges, and also Quality Point Ratings of students in these colleges. Colleges of Education students tend to have relatively low SAT / ACT scores but relatively high, at least at some universities, Quality Point Ratings. It is hard not to draw the inference that Educationists are handing out relatively good grades to relatively poor students.

I think they was talking in graduate school. Harvard has the mostest famousest graduate school of education in the hole country.(And don’t give me no guff about grammar.)

It’s easy to criticize the shift from teaching facts to teaching skills, but when I read this thread, it’s plain to see that plenty of people with plenty of facts — hey just Google them! — have trouble performing the skills of critical reading and thinking.What does this discussion of GRE scores have to do with the topic? Bauerlein’s thesis above is that we do students a disservice by emphasizing skills and not knowledge or facts in reading classes, and that the unpopularity of non-fiction among kids is somehow both cause and effect.The GRE scores of education majors have nothing to do with this topic. First of all, not all educators are or were education majors. You can get a teaching certificate for 6-12 grades by getting an MAT degree in one’s discipline. Second, one would have to show that there’s some correlation between GRE verbal scores and success as a teacher. Third, I don’t think anyone is disputing that, for the most part, education programs are not always the most competitive. The reason for that is simple: often, the more talented math, science, etc. majors want the money they deserve for their talents, and teaching does not offer that kind of money. (Also, academically successful people often don’t have the interpersonal skills required to deal with young people. Or any people for that matter.)So yeah, I see a lot of evidence here that many people could benefit from an education in reading skills. Identify the main idea. Identify the supporting ideas. Identify and evaluate the evidence. Respond by addressing the main ideas, the argument, and the evidence. Rinse and repeat.

1. As with any good caricature, the likeness may not be “photographic,” but it captures the essence.2. Prof. Bauerlein is right about Columbia. I’m an ed school layperson and Harvard was the first one that popped into my little head, ergo “famous.” But Columbia did have this guy named Dewey.

Just a clarification. The statement about educators is made by Mathews, not by me.And a point about Hirsch. He calls himself an “educational conservative,” but I believe he’s a liberal in politics.