As published in The Concord Review

I suppose that most people who write for the e-journal [AERA–SIG] know what they are talking about. My problem is that I cannot find out what I would like to talk about—namely the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools.

It seems to me that if we are sending our gifted students, and other students, from high school off to college, where they will be expected to read nonfiction books and write research papers, it would be a good idea to have them read one or more complete nonfiction books and write one or more serious research papers while they are in our public high schools (emphasis mine).

While one study has been done on the assignment of research papers (1), no one seems interested enough to fund even a small study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books. As long as the English Departments control reading and writing, the reading is likely to be fiction and the writing to be personal, creative, and the five-paragraph essay (2) (emphasis mine).

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education survey, 90% of the professors interviewed said that the students they receive are not well-prepared in reading, doing research, or in academic writing. (3) This should not be a surprise, since so many of them have not done any of that in high school, but for years the College Board had a list of 101 books for the college-bound student on its website, and all were fiction except Night, Walden, Emerson’s Essays, and the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. (4) Not a history book in sight...

This is not to suggest that things are worse than ever. When I was in high school [Class of 1954] I was not assigned a nonfiction book, nor was I asked to do a serious history research paper, for example.

A Harvard student from the same state where I went to high school, but from the class of 2005 in college, wrote to me that after she arrived:

"It took me two years to gain a working knowledge of paper-writing, to get to a point where I was constructing arguments and using evidence to support them. I read pamphlets and books on the mechanics of writing college papers, but the reality is simple: you only learn how to write papers by WRITING them. So here I am, about to graduate, with a GPA much lower than it should be and no real way to explain to graduate schools and recruiting companies that I spent my first semesters just scraping by. And the amount of determination, energy and devotion it took to scrape by isn’t easily quantified and demonstrable.

"This lack of forethought on the part of high school educators and administrators is creating a large divide among college graduates—and it’s one that helps neither the students nor their alumni institutions. Modern public high schools have an obligation not to simply pump out graduates at the end of the year, but also to prepare their students for the intellectual rigors of college.”

I have been writing about these issues for many years (5,6,7,8,9,10,11) but I can’t seem to get through to those Edupundits who are concerned with raising academic standards. A study done for the Gates Foundation (12) which tried to explain how to get students into college and through college, completely overlooked having students prepare by reading nonfiction books and writing research term papers.

Even the National Endowment for the Arts (13), which has been studying the decline in reading, confines its attention almost exclusively to what Americans, including high school and college students, are reading for pleasure outside of school, as if the reading they do for school is not important enough to ask about.

To me it is like some cloud-cuckoo land where no one wonders whether our students will find their college assignments in history, political science, philosophy, economics, and so on, a shock or not. This may be why almost 50% of some college freshmen do not return for a second year. (14)

Reading is the path to knowledge and writing is the way to make knowledge one’s own. (15) Not reading nonfiction and not writing term papers is the way to make college work unmanageable, in my view (emphasis mine).

It is all very well to focus on unequal school funding, reading for pleasure, school violence, the selection and training of teachers and principals, merit pay, and so on, but if we continue to neglect the academic literacy requirements for our students, we will continue to shortchange them and to fail to prepare them for academic work in college and for literate work afterwards (emphasis mine).

There is a good deal of attention to math and science for our students, but essentially no attention that I can find to whether our high school students, gifted and otherwise, can read a history book or write a history research paper.

The old saying goes that "He Who Knows Not and Knows He Knows Not is a Child, Teach Him.” I need someone to teach me the state of nonfiction reading in U.S. public high schools, because I believe that many of our high school students are being left sadly unprepared for college-level academic reading and writing (emphasis mine).

I am seeking support for a small study (10% of the cost of the NEA study of reading for entertainment) of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools, to find out if any are assigned and to find out, if so, which one(s). It would be nice to know whether nonfiction means only Barbara Erenreich’s Nickel and Dimed or whether it might include Battle Cry of Freedom, The Path Between the Seas, or Truman, as it does in some of our independent schools.


Notes:
1) The Concord Review Study, conducted for The Concord Review in 2002, by the Center for Survey Analysis at the University of Connecticut. www.tcr.org

2) Will Fitzhugh, "Bibliophobia,” Education Week, Commentary, 4 October 2006

3) Education Week, April 26, 2006, "Students’ Preparation for College-Level Demands”

4) College Board website: www.collegeboard.com "101 Books for the College-Bound Student”

5) Will Fitzhugh, "The State of the Term Paper,” January 16, 2002, pp. 35, 37 Education Week, Commentary

6) Will Fitzhugh, Roundup: Talking About History "Why writing history term papers is vital” New York Sun (9-13-06)

7) Will Fitzhugh, "Where’s The Content?” Educational Leadership, Fall 2006

8) Will Fitzhugh, "Over the Seawall,” National Association of College Admissions Counselors, Conference in Tampa, Wednesday, September 28, 2005

9) Will Fitzhugh, "Page Per Year” EducationNews.org 16 May 2007

10) Will Fitzhugh, "Writing A History Research Paper,” Knowledge Quest (American School Library Association) Volume 34, Number 2, December 2005

11) Will Fitzhugh, "What if History Professors Recruited?” History Matters! National Council for History Education, Inc. October 2002; Will Fitzhugh, "History Research Papers” History Matters! National Council for History Education, Inc. Volume 20, Number 3 November 2007

12) Will Fitzhugh, "Windows on College Readiness” Clarion Call, The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Raleigh, North Carolina, October 26, 2006

13) Will Fitzhugh, "Memory’s Forgotten Daughter,” EducationNews.org 20 November 2007

14) ACT: "Crisis at the Core 2004,” page 3, Of the 70 percent of our students who do graduate from high school in four years, as many as 65 percent who go to two-year colleges and 35 percent who go to four-year colleges are so unready they must take remedial courses first, and ACT recently reported that one in four freshmen at four-year colleges, and one in two at two-year colleges do not return for a sophomore year.

Will Fitzhugh, "About The NAEP Writing Assessment,” Interview by Michael Shaughnessey, Ph.D., EducationNews.org 24 January 2007