The Georgia Department of Education has released a new version of proposed English language arts standards for public comment, and they contain a big surprise. If you dig into the “Texts” section and go to grade eleven, you’ll find this requirement:
Identify and discuss major authors and works of three periods of English and American literary history, including key themes and stylistic features.
We have the same content in grade twelve, with the activity rising from “Identify and discuss” to “Compare and contrast.” In earlier grades, the breadth shrinks to two periods (ninth and tenth) and to one period (sixth to eighth). I was an advisor on the project and pushed hard for precisely this literary-historical thread. By “period,” we mean Romantic poetry, the Harlem Renaissance, Shakespeare and his time, Victorian women novelists—any identifiable era or movement or collection of writers with historical affiliation.
Browse further and you’ll see standards on old “myths and stories” that have influenced modern writers (say, Lincoln drawing on the Gospels), plus an entry in every grade that has students perform this task:
Build background knowledge by reciting all or part of significant poems and speeches as appropriate by grade level. (This standard is listed under “Practices,” not “Texts.”)
In putting literary-historical-oratorical expectations into the standards, not in supplementary materials or as recommendations, in citing “background knowledge” in every grade, Georgia educators have given English a broad and distinct disciplinary content, a domain of its own. The customary notes on grammar, composition, reading comprehension, and research remain, and they greatly outnumber the knowledge elements. Here we have a subject matter, too, one that grows from year to year, leaving teachers latitude to choose periods and genres (Georgia wants to preserve local control), but still requiring an impressive degree of coverage, not to mention a dozen texts memorized and performed by graduation time.
It is true that many states that adopted Common Core specified some literary content and today have students read a Shakespeare play and an American play, foundational documents such as the Declaration of Independence, plus “foundational works of American literature” from the eighteenth to the early-twentieth centuries. (See, for instance, Maryland’s ELA standards for grades eleven and twelve.) Common Core itself included this demand: “Students in K–5 apply the Reading standards to the following range of text types, with texts selected from a broad range of cultures and periods.” This is a worthy practice, but in pulling discrete texts from other times and cultures, it doesn’t ensure a holistic understanding of periods and contexts. Georgia’s model builds better background knowledge, the “Big Picture” wholeness that the umbrella term “period” solicits, and the construction of tradition in the heads of the kids. Maryland has students show how “a modern work of fiction draws on...myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible”—again, a good exercise, but in beginning with the single text, it gets the process backward. The knowledge gained from such a piecemeal method doesn’t stick as well. Georgia asks sixth to eighth graders to study “myths and stories (fictional or historical)” first, to develop background knowledge of ancient gods, the Bible, legends, tall tales, and archetypes, to compare different creation myths, track various Cain figures over time, or other such “collectivizing” exercises that students may call upon when they encounter Song of Solomon three years later.
Assessment won’t be difficult. Give students a variety of passages that have been identified by author and date, and ask test-takers to pick one and draft a constructed response detailing the themes and styles that make the passage illustrative of its period. Options will be spread out enough for all students to find at least one from periods they have studied. And as for the recitations, they could be handled through a contest on the model of the National Spelling Bee, which is exactly what the National Endowment for the Arts created fifteen years ago with its Poetry Out Loud project, which students have loved as intensely as they do sports (in 2009 alone, more than 300,000 students participated).
In sum, Georgia has crafted a literary formation to go along with the skills acquisition. There, the tradition will thrive, as befits a state with cities named Athens, Sparta, Smyrna, Rome, Augusta, and Atlanta. Five years from now, after Georgia students spend a few semesters undergoing his formation, reading scores will rise. I’m sure of it. More importantly, they will have absorbed the words of the best writers of the language that they speak.
