Common Core is evil for developing children. Their stats will be collected, and only those with natural learning ability will get all the breaks. They get a stellar education, while lesser kids become the drones.

Have you seen this article from the Washington Post? It speaks to a misperception and mis-implementation of the new Common Core standards. At the high school level, 70% of the reading students are to be doing *across the curriculum* is nonfiction. That includes their history, science, foreign language, and math classes. It is *not* that 70% of the *English* curriculum is supposed to be non-fiction.

I'm not a fan of the common core, for many reasons, but before you build an inflammatory week-long series of segments about it, be sure you've got the information right.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/common-core-state-standards-in-english-spark-war-over-words/2012/12/02/4a9701b0-38e1-11e2-8a97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html

What matters is to read, even the newspaper or comic strips. The habit is the key.
Each reading is different for everyone and the fiction underlies beneath that act of internalization, reading a novel or an essay.

When I was 14 my uncle gave me his childhood copy of The Little Price shortly before he died. Although this is a children’s book and I was a teenager, the lessons it teaches had a profound effect on me. I think he knew it would.

I read constantly as a kid. I think that the two books that influenced me the most were Exodus and Siddartha by Hesse.

Exodus helped me to really understand the intensity of the implication of the holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel, and how I as a Jew, felt about the need for Israel to survive as the homeland for Jews to be safe in the world.

Siddartha, because it gave me a new perspective of ways of thinking.

Also, I have a son who had learning disabilities. I tried to get him to read, but he hated it. Now, he is a HS teacher, and reads like crazy. Big thick books, mostly non-fiction.

There's is no more dramatic an adventure story than Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, a thrilling and heartbreaking account of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's 1804-1806 search for the Northwest Passage. Ambrose deftly incorporates original source material from Lewis' extensive diaries--putting you inside his brilliant and troubled head. Imagine preparing for this trip: you don't know where you're going, how long you'll be gone, what kinds of life (human and otherwise) you'll encounter, what the weather or topography will be like. Only one life was lost (to appendicitis)among the 33 men who made the trek. What a story.

The standards say 70% should be non-fiction ACROSS ALL subjects. Considering that students take science, history, math and english, that indicates that they will still be reading literature. So, unless there are people out there who read novels in their math classes, not much will be changing with regards to their english literature classes. It's important to actually read the standards before passing judgment on them.

Reading or Radio?

It seems like the people who do radio do not want people to read. Every time I turn on the radio somebody on the radio keeps telling me what's “Coming Up”. This seems to happen every ten minutes. These “Coming Up” teases happen the whole day on the radio. Should I listen to The Take Away or read a book, newspaper, or magazine? I think Jon Hockenberry wants me to listen to his show with full attention. If I listen to his show, I get teases for what's coming up on other radio programs. Then, I just keep postponing what I was planning on to read.

I'm a high school English teacher. The writing assignments in the classes my colleagues and I teach are rigorous, analytical essays, and develop the skill of constructing an argument and supporting that argument with textual evidence--the very skills that colleges, employers and the CC are pushing for. The students are developing these skills as they write about literature. Writing essays teaches you how to think; reading fiction teaches you how to be human.

Your show's segment was too brief and superficial to address the actual conversations going on among faculty and administrators about this topic.

I think the title of this piece may be a bit misleading. It should be "Is Fiction Necessary?" Non-fiction can be considered to be literature with memoirs, literary journalism, as well as travel essays. I don't want to sound pretentious or anything, but I think this would clear up the meaning a bit.

The gall to even ask that question. Unfathomable.

Neither one is better. As a recent grad of a NYC public HS I always found that a healthy mix of both types of writing helped me become more articulate, critical and engaged in the classroom. Nonfiction paired with fiction helped most. For example we read major writings of existential philosophers before diving into The Stranger or Notes from Underground.

Ultimately, ALL education is metaphor - we synthesize and apply knowledge in new and unexpected ways. This is as true of algebra as it is of Melville. Fiction's purpose is to locate our own condition amid the human condition; it opens our minds, so we can always find new ways to assess new inputs. What problem are we trying to solve here??

This entire question seems like another non-issue to me. I taught high school literature courses for over 33 years in a department that believed all writing is creative writing. We always balanced writing models with fiction and non-fiction. Texts can be paired when considering various themes. It always amazed me that many so-called curriculum experts were asking students to write essays (non-fiction) but having them read only fiction in their courses. In recent years, with such poignant and useful books as the oral histories of Studs Terkel, or beautifully written non-fiction titles like Into the Wild, this balance is easily maintained. (students really enjoy these books too)
What goes through the mind of a person who determines 70% of reading must be non-fiction? I question the motivation there. I question the methodology of any class that does not integrate the two genres. How else would we teach big overarching themes, deeper thinking, or simply an appreciation of writing voice? No wonder I'm beginning to hear Common Core being referred to as Common Bore.

When you say that CC standards "dictate that non-fiction reading should make up 70 percent of a high school senior’s reading curriculum across all disciplines" you are de-emphasizing the important "across all disciplines" aspect.

When most people hear the 70% figure, they ignore the important "across all disciplines" aspect.

What CC standards are trying to do is increase the amount of reading in general. With regards to literature classes, the CC standards indicate that literature should be what is read, going so far as to suggest that literary non-fiction be read instead of what you might call "expository" non-fiction (i.e. your math book or The God Delusion).

My biggest worry is that over time non-fiction be taken as factual or literal rather than open for interpretation. Another thing lost to a greater focus on non-fiction is a part of the imagination that helps us to put complex concepts (philosophical ones as well) into better context.

Someone once said that nonfiction has all the facts but fiction has the truth. I can't help but wonder why humans keep insisting that we as a species have a legitimate apparatus to "truly" perceive the thing we call "reality." It's disappointing that we as readers continue to be willing to trick ourselves into believing that something as amorphous and chaotic as human life, perceived through a set of fallible senses and filtered through a biased, fallible brain, translated into imperfect language, shoved into a box of orderly form called "non-fiction", edited for boredom, and made "sexy" with style can ever be considered “true" in any sense of the word. The truth is an absolute. There's nothing absolute about human perception of reality. In human matters, everything is fiction. Students should read EVERYTHING.

While career preparation is an important element in education, we must not lose sight that we are educating young adults as human beings, and not simply as future members of the workforce. Reading great works, be it literature, non-fiction, or poetry, are all integral in understanding the human story. This in turn informs our understanding of history, politics and the sciences as more than a sum of dates/events/facts--literature teaches contextual analysis and opens new paths of thought.

The fiction classics that were assigned reading in high school English classes were stories that I could not at all relate to as a teenager. The first book that I could identify with and that made sense was Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto." I lived in a slum that was 2 blocks from mansions and a beautiful waterfront. The class system was thrown in my face every day and it wasn't until I read Marx that it all came together and explained my reality. That was when I was 14 years old. Later, at 16, I discovered Albert Camus,Franz Kafka as well as many philosophers. These meant much more to me than "Pride and Prejudice" or "Moby Dick."

As a sophomore in high school, The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn offered me my first serious insights into the American identity. Couched in their respective florid and colloquial language, these novels married thoughtful analysis with articulate prose. I use this invaluable skill of considerate self-expression in my continuing efforts to understand my identity as an American and a person.

Non-fiction books, by and large, do not offer the same union of beauty and truth that renders the observations of our condition made by novelists so poignant.

I agree students can only express themselves; however, I don't believe that's because of an over-reliance on fiction. It does not follow that fiction only produces a self-expressive response. My students, sadly, cannot even interpret their own experiences; they can only recount a memory. They have a dire inability to see outside of themselves; fiction could help feed imagination and, so, empathy. I like both fiction and non-fiction. Readers who can parse fiction can easily analyze nonfiction; the reverse is not always true.

Non-Fiction gives us answers even if they turn out to be falsehoods later. Literature gives us a different kind of answer:
Literature allows an Author the ability to develop a character who is not "real" and find out something about life that did not "exist" before his imagination allowed him to conjure up the situation.

I think that non-fiction is the "easy" way out to avoid "controversial" books. It seems that this is just another way to bring Fahrenheit 451 to real life.

I foresee the next battle being which non-fiction books are allowed. Are schools in certain areas only going to use books published by Glen Beck or Bill O'Reilly? Are other areas only going to allow books by Walter Isaacson or Jon Stewart?

As for a life-changing book I had to read for school: The Magus, by John Fowles

I am from the Detroit area, and maybe your guests are teaching in a more affluent area? I am increasingly shocked by how difficult it is for high school students, and recent high school graduates, put their feelings and passions into coherent understandable arguments; analyzing their thoughts or the thoughts of others in order to better communicate with the world around them.

The ability to argue one's beliefs and values is absolutely necessary in adult life. Should abortion be outlawed? Should taxes be raised or lowered? How to negotiate for a raise or promotion in your workplace? So many of our interactions as citizens of the world require us to be able to coherently understand and state our thoughts AND feelings.

So many of our physical interactions with the world require us to be able to analyze what is happening around us. It my overwhelming experience that high school students are not fully capable of doing this.

I would not want to disparage the value of fiction or overstate the value of non-fiction, each has it's place. As an engineer I find that the overabundance of non-fiction I have had to devour over the course of my career has all but destroyed my sense of narrative. Lately I have focused on the value of imagination over the value of knowledge. The latter is often finite in scope, while the former is without bound.

I'm not sure how they made the assumption that none of the books mentioned were non-fiction. I specifically mentioned Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and I was even asked to call in to leave a message about it. I find it hard to believe I'm the only person that thinks books like this are the most influential in their lives.

How silly. There is a profound misunderstanding about literature being presented.

Think less about feelings and more about s novel being an analysis of a scenario. The scenario being based on a collection of beliefs (something that a mathematician would call axiom) which represent the constrints on a social situation.

In short the novel is an analysis of an imaginary world based on deducing the consequense of the axioms.

I must wonder are the novels of Ayn Rand (a favorite of many conservative economists) little more than an exploration of a collection of constraints established by her beliefs about Czarist Russia

Our society has a hardert time agreeing on the non-fiction world, it's not a surprise it's read less.