I’m inclined to agree with Sara Mosle, who writes in favor of upcoming curriculum changes for high school students. The Common Core State Standards, adopted widely but not yet by Virginia, specify reading requirements that are lighter on the fiction, heavier on the non.
It occurs to me that almost all of my expository writing assignments in high school consisted of analysis of prose fiction; why was I never tasked with writing an explanation of how a fuel injector works, or describing the mechanic down the block who serviced them? And correspondingly, we were given few reading assignments in narrative nonfiction.
What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call “narrative nonfiction”: writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways.
In my day, students got a good whack of mediocre historical fiction in an attempt to make the work more palatable: Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, Julius Caesar instead of the good Shakespeare.
What, instead, to read? Robert Atwan offers his list of the best ten essays since 1950: James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace.
