The State Board of Education is getting flak from both sides about their plans to add an approved reading list into proposed new English/language arts and reading curriculum standards.
The Texas Freedom Network is furious because they fear that this will open up another front in the culture wars (“Professional teachers don’t need dentists and insurance salesmen on the state board telling them which books and authors meet their personal approval,” said TFN president Kathy Miller.) But former Temple educator and self-appointed Miss Manners of the lexicon Donna Garner has sent the board a letter complaining that they were considering putting that most corrupting of books, Catcher in the Rye, on their draft list (there is no word yet on her stance on that new rockety-rolling music the kids seem to like so much these days.)
Garner, who has also occasionally railed about how public schools promote that hewmewsexuamiality, helped put together the rebel Texas Alternative Document (TAD), an alternative reading list, in which she advocates for “alternatives to Harry Potter” (hint: not Lemony Snickett.) Strangely, the list almost completely excludes anything written in the twentieth century: There is, to be fair, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (love to see her explain away the original title.)
Instead, it depends on a list of ‘classics’, which are to be taught for their vocabulary-boosting worth or purely for their narrative nature, rather than any real analytical approach. Which, considering it contains a healthy blast of Dickens and Jonathan Swift (two profoundly political authors who must be read and understood within their greater social context), seems to miss the point.
Possibly it’s actually a clever plan by Garner to train a generation of literary subversives: Is anything more likely to turn a tenth-grader into a future DeLillo or Palahniuk or Rice or Ellison or Bradbury than making them read Emily Dickinson?
This article appears in March 21 • 2008.
