Remember the last time you read a nonfiction book for school? I can’t, either. Last year, as a freshman, I read a collection of short stories, “Of Mice and Men,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Great Expectations” and “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Zero nonfiction. Why?
Think about why we assign reading to children — to learn to empathize with a variety of personalities, to broaden their horizons by immersing themselves in the lives of people from different backgrounds and time periods and to practice critical thinking and analysis. Nonfiction is just as good, if not better, at accomplishing those goals, and schools make a huge mistake when they fail to emphasize it as much as they do fiction.
Here’s one example: According to Slate magazine, one Maryland private school asked students to use “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett to discuss the civil rights struggle. Yet not only is “The Help” written by a white woman, told primarily through a white woman’s perspective and centered on how she helped overcome racism in her town, it is not even historically accurate.
Why choose “The Help” over real histories of the civil rights movement? For example, excerpts of “Parting the Waters” by Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, have the far more potential to inspire students.
Unlike Stockett, who never mentions any real person involved in the struggle, Branch’s book details key figures such as Martin Luther King. Schools could kill two birds with one stone: teach students literature and interest in actual, in-depth history.
According to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 9.8 percent of books in first-grade classrooms were nonfiction. Even those who claim fiction is a more valuable resource than nonfiction cannot justify a 9:1 ratio.
What many fail to realize is that nonfiction has powerful themes, too. “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls, for instance, is a story of how a young girl rose from a neglected childhood to achieve self-sufficiency and nonconformity.
Nonfiction isn’t limited to just historical accounts and reflective essays — it can also include literary criticism, one of the major emphases in the high school curriculum. In addition, by exposing kids to well-written articles, teachers can impart lessons like how to write strong persuasive essays, creative and literary nonfiction and more.
With the introduction of Common Core, which requires that 70 percent of 12th grade literature be nonfiction, I hope this imbalance will begin to disappear.
After all, some part of our curriculum needs to go to teaching students to, say, to read a New York Times editorial, analyze present-day news, or write their own argumentative essay on real-life issues.
Novels like “The Scarlett Letter” and plays like “Oedipus Rex” aren’t wrong, or unhelpful, nor they should they be removed from the curriculum. But the same time, students need balance.
Thousands of nonfiction books and articles are out there, covering a huge variety of material. Want to teach kids about the effects of war on young people? Choose “Night” by Elie Wiesel. A story of discrimination? Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
There is no excuse to ignore this treasure trove. With any luck, someday in the near future, if you ask a student what the last nonfiction book they read was, they’ll be able to say “Parting the Waters” or “The Glass Castle.”
