{"id":2215360,"date":"2024-04-08T07:17:02","date_gmt":"2024-04-08T11:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/virginia-multiculturalists-expel-literary-tradition-from-state-english-standards\/"},"modified":"2024-04-08T07:21:04","modified_gmt":"2024-04-08T11:21:04","slug":"virginia-multiculturalists-expel-literary-tradition-from-state-english-standards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/virginia-multiculturalists-expel-literary-tradition-from-state-english-standards\/","title":{"rendered":"Virginia Multiculturalists Remove Literary Tradition from State English Standards"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fvirginia-multiculturalists-expel-literary-tradition-from-state-english-standards%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2215360&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The Virginia\u200c Department of \u200dEducation has endorsed new English Language Arts standards that prioritize contemporary skills over <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/north-korean-defector-after-attending-ivy-league-school-even-north-korea-was-not-this-nuts\/\" title=\"North Korean Defector After Attending Ivy League School: Even North Korea Was \u2018Not This Nuts\u2019\">classic literature<\/a>. Traditional literary works\u2064 by authors like Shakespeare and Hawthorne take a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/shocking-bodycam-footage-of-police-responding-to-altercation-between-georgia-democrat-senate-candidate-raphael-warnock-and-his-wife-released-video\/\" title=\"Shocking Bodycam Footage of Police Responding to Altercation Between Georgia Democrat Senate Candidate Raphael Warnock and His Wife Released (VIDEO)\">back seat<\/a> to modern concepts like &#8220;multimodal literacies.&#8221; The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-definitive-timeline-of-disneys-path-to-wokeness\/\" title=\"The Definitive Timeline Of Disney\u2019s Path To Wokeness\">standards aim<\/a> to align education with future demands but risk diluting the rich\u2062 literary heritage passed \u2063down to students.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<p><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><\/p>\n<div class=\"article-content\">\n<p>The Virginia Department of Education has approved a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.doe.virginia.gov\/home\/showpublisheddocument\/53301\/638466137385830000\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">draft<\/a> of new English Language Arts standards. They make for a dreary read. If you care about novels and poems, if you think Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are essential voices that every young American should hear, if you feel, as W. E. B. Du Bois did, that an hour with Shakespeare is a mighty inspiration that can relieve the dismal circumstances of life, this fresh version of ELA in the Old Dominion will only depress you.<\/p>\n<p>The document is an expression of a utilitarian, 21st-century mindset. We have highfalutin talk of \u201cmultimodal literacies\u201d and \u201cmedia messages,\u201d but nothing on Hawthorne or Robert Frost. Students are asked to acquire \u201cthe ability to problem solve and collaborate in and across teams,\u201d not to memorize and recite classic poems and speeches. <\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2-long d-flex justify-content-center\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; \" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-1853409386\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1379703300879-0\" class=\"mb-30\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-f6222c985de0561123e1645932034bcb fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-f6222c985de0561123e1645932034bcb\"><\/div>\n<p>It is true that in 12th\u00a0grade, students are asked to examine \u201cuniversal themes\u201d in \u201cBritish literature \u2026 of different eras,\u201d but we need much more than such a lax demand that can be satisfied with but a few poems and novels from different times. The authors of the standards care more about making Virginia classrooms \u201cbetter align with the demands of the present and future world\u201d than they do about conserving literary tradition. One standard has students \u201cInterpret and complete an application for employment or college admission.\u201d There is no standard that says, \u201cDescribe the main themes and styles of English Romantic poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As I said, the new standards do mention literary history a couple of times, with one \u201cGuiding Principle\u201d stating that \u201cour students should be exposed to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-grift-that-keeps-on-grifting\/\" title=\"The Grift That Keeps on Grifting\">literary work<\/a> across cultures, eras, and viewpoints.\u201d It even uses the words \u201cfoundational\u201d and \u201cmasterpieces\u201d:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>Virginia learners should be exposed to foundational authors such as Homer and Shakespeare as well as masterpieces from different genres, cultures, geographies and time periods.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This is not a standard, however, only an exhortation. It won\u2019t be assessed. The principle is so vague that a teacher may satisfy it with but three or four classics assigned in all of 11th\u00a0grade. Call it a little window dressing, a feeble gesture toward the old-fashioned way.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not enough, not nearly, and we also know what the plural term \u201ccultures\u201d means: less Jane Austen and more BIPOC writing. The literary education Virginia kids receive will vary from district to district. There will be no common reading, no shared experience statewide. Students will not get what they really need: a big picture of the past, a grand inheritance waiting to be claimed, the novels of Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain, the poems of Pope, Blake, and Keats, the plays of the Bard. This is what we created in Florida, Georgia, and Arkansas, whose governors understand the importance of literary tradition to the formation of young Americans.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-0072ebfa4d5a96eb47828099ebf51787 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-6\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-0072ebfa4d5a96eb47828099ebf51787\"><\/div>\n<p>The result goes along with what has happened to English in the last 40 years. The field has been drained of content, with no domain knowledge. Physics has Newton\u2019s laws, civics has the Constitution, and English has reading and writing skills, which amount to no content at all. It used to be that English meant grammar, punctuation, and the Great American Novel, Charles Dickens and <em>Jane Eyre<\/em>, some Shakespeare and modern poetry. Multiculturalists didn\u2019t like the tradition because it was overly male and Eurocentric, while business-type conservatives preferred PowerPoint over <em>Hamlet<\/em>. From the \u201980s onward, they won. Literature dropped out, and it will remain that way as these Virginia standards move forward. <\/p>\n<p>American youth are not doing well. Health indicators are down, and so is educational achievement. The causes are many, and one of them is under-recognized: the loss of a meaningful, stabilizing past. The average teen is flooded with social media and crass entertainment by the hour, all of it present-oriented, immediate, and pressing. They have no sense of legacy or lineage, leaving them to enter the adult world without roots or foundations. They are existentially insecure. Life doesn\u2019t have much meaning beyond the daily rush. <\/p>\n<p>The critic Matthew Arnold once noted that people who read the old writers find that those voices produce a certain \u201csteadying and composing effect upon their judgment.\u201d Without them, the individual flounders to manage the flood of information, consumer messages, and social media. For the 15-year-old, the 21st\u00a0century is chaotic. <\/p>\n<p>The new English standards won\u2019t help. They provide none of the stability that young Virginians need. The past means little to the authors of them. This is especially frustrating because of the role education played in Gov. Youngkin\u2019s rise. Parents want a coherent, meaningful curriculum that prizes tradition, not trendy nonsense about multimodal literacies. <\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-1a8d05581ab815505c17ae4da8cdbba9 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-10\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-1a8d05581ab815505c17ae4da8cdbba9\"><\/div>\n<p>Youngkin claims to be a conservative, but this model conserves nothing. Could he not find any conservatives to participate in the process? Does he not understand that a conservative society thrives only as long as it hands down a cultural inheritance? Once again, a Republican champion on the campaign trail is turning out to be a disappointment. Now in office, Youngkin is failing English.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-8372e5af1fc42bbaee75dd15ef4e44e2 fdrlst__b89e9-after-post-content\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-8372e5af1fc42bbaee75dd15ef4e44e2\"><\/div>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\">    \t\t\t\t\t   \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Virginia Department of Education has endorsed revised English Language Arts standards that may disappoint literary enthusiasts. Advocates of classics like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson&#8217;s works may find these changes concerning. The proposed standards risk excluding pivotal voices like those of revered figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1221,"featured_media":2215361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/31981589415_8e71353b5c_k.jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2215360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/31981589415_8e71353b5c_k.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2215360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2215360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2215360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2215361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2215360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2215360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2215360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}