The Virginia Department of Education has approved a draft 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.
The document is an expression of a utilitarian, 21st-century mindset. We have highfalutin talk of “multimodal literacies” and “media messages,” but nothing on Hawthorne or Robert Frost. Students are asked to acquire “the ability to problem solve and collaborate in and across teams,” not to memorize and recite classic poems and speeches.
It is true that in 12th grade, students are asked to examine “universal themes” in “British literature … of different eras,” 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 “better align with the demands of the present and future world” than they do about conserving literary tradition. One standard has students “Interpret and complete an application for employment or college admission.” There is no standard that says, “Describe the main themes and styles of English Romantic poetry.”
As I said, the new standards do mention literary
