It is tempting to ask what the planners of the revised Standard Core Curriculum were thinking when they devised its content. That might, however, exceed the planners’ capacities. As it is, even normally progressive members of the nation’s professoriate have voiced stern alarums about the repercussions that the proposed Curriculum may entail for the future of America’s youth—who are already, as we know, such bright young things when taken in the aggregate.

After all, the new Core Curriculum proposal—an effort of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in conjunction with the Achieve Foundation—is a rather curious affair. More than anything, it is designed to be functional, practical, productive of students who can contribute to the building of a brighter future by acquiring those skills needed to boost the GDP. The reign of the toaster-makers has come into its own.

Thus it is that we discover a plan of education that is stripped of all anachronistic superfluities. Literature is out. History, much effaced by the comfortably nebulous heading of Social Studies, is also out. Incoming high schoolers no longer need fear Shakespeare’s fearsome verbiage: what will matter henceforth are the skills of calculation, computing, and quantifying. The watchword of this proposed Core Curriculum is Fact: Fact concrete, Fact immediate, Fact unquestioning, Fact compliant. Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, if he could weep, would be weeping with joy. All nonsense has been vanquished.

But let us not be hasty to applaud the new Curriculum: it has a hollow bottom. Quash the capacity for moral imagination in a child, and strange aberrations make their appearance. The Jabberwocky is banished; Aslan is shorn and made a tabby; Tom, Huck, and Sid take a nasty turn, and what is the result? That tendency towards habitual action that a child gradually develops will remain, but his actions will not be directed towards any fixed object, nor will have any lodestar by which to regulate his life. 

Nature will revolt and the desire for nonsense will return, but neither will be anywhere near the optimal conditions of human flourishing. The cloying sensuality of what passes for childhood reading is an early symptom of this failure in contemporary education, a failure which will be aggravated tenfold by the implementation of such a curriculum as has been proposed and, indeed, implemented by nearly all of our nation’s fifty states— with the valiant exception of Indiana. 

What, then, is to be proposed as a solution to such circumstances? How can the formation of a child’s moral sensibilities be developed such that they grow up to be responsible adults? Stories were once the central medium by which the inclination towards the good was nourished. And a good story is like a good sword: both have a point. But today our children are given safety scissors: watery, morally uncertain and ideologically-laced fictions. 

What I would like to tentatively propose, therefore, as one means to counter-balance this dramatic truncation of personal formation encountered in our public schools—miniature versions of Eliot’s Waste Land—is to encourage, in whatever way possible, the reading or, better yet, the hearing, of narratives with definitive moral content. John Senior’s Good Books list would be one way to start. The recommendations of classically-inclined private schools or homeschooling groups is another. Bring on Tom Sawyer; bring on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; and by all means, let the little children encounter some version of Homer at some point. Above all, however, don’t neglect the Jabberwocky. A little nonsense in always needed, even in our preeminently factual age.