Interesting article. Click the link to read it in its entirety. The importance of poetry… Could you defend it if you had to?
In the state that was home to Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, where Edgar Allan Poe was born and where Robert Frost died, critics of new national education goals fear that poetry will become an endangered pursuit.
The alarm is being sounded by the conservative Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank better known for its white papers lamenting public pension abuses than for its love of the sonnet. But Pioneer has also focused its ire on the Common Core teaching standards promoted by the Obama administration, saying they threaten state and local autonomy and the teaching of verse to schoolchildren.
“We do not read poetry so that we can write better office memoranda later on,” declared a recent institute report. “We want instead fully realized human beings who will read poetry because it is beautiful and because it brings us knowledge of what is true, even if it is knowledge that can no more be used than a sunset or a kiss can be used.”
Fighting words, indeed. The report — titled “The Dying of the Light,” after a phrase from a Dylan Thomas poem — arrived in the waning days of April, which was National Poetry Month. This spring, many Massachusetts public schools are testing out a replacement for the MCAS exam that is more in line with the Common Core, stressing critical thinking and skills to help students in college and careers.
While proponents say the federal standards are no less sensitive to rhyme and meter, the suggestion that poetry’s role in class could be diminished struck fear in the heart of some teachers and poets.
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