To give a choice, or not?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/30reading.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I am slowly being persuaded to believe in the importance of learner choice for reading and writing classes. In a mailing list of college English teachers in Japan that I am a part of, we read Atwell's In the Middle together and debated the pros and cons for introducing workshop style classes for foreign language classes in secondary and tertiary education.

Accepting student choice requires a very different philosophy of education than the traditional teacher-centered, teacher-evaluating style that values ranking students against others and sorting them into Excellents and Failures with "reliable" standardized assessment schemes. Student choice can only be accepted if teachers accept that the goal of education is to develop each learner in their own individual way, valuing the fact that each learner has different goals and preferences and can learn meaningfully when they are guided to make wise choices about their own learning.

This article gives both sides of the debate, which apparently is heating up in high school and middle schools across the US as the movement spreads.

One of the quotes in the article is by Dr. Snow of Harvard:

“If what we’re trying to get to is, everybody has read ‘Ethan Frome’ and Henry James and Shakespeare, then the challenge for the teacher is how do you make that stuff accessible and interesting enough that kids will stick with it....But if the goal is, how do you make kids lifelong readers, then it seems to me that there’s a lot to be said for the choice approach. As adults, as good readers, we don’t all read the same thing, and we revel in our idiosyncrasies as adult readers, so kids should have some of the same freedom.”

My feeling is that both approaches can work for some kids, but only choice can work for all.

As for the "building a literary canon" approach, where ostensibly "all" English speakers (or Americans?) should know the same "classics" defined by some limited "western" intellectual tradition (ruled by the church? by Oxbridge and the Ivy League elitists?) in order to be called "literate" in some stifling, snobby environment in the future that acts like intellect is defined by knowledge of some limited body of literature...well you can already tell what I think about that from all my quotation marks above.

In particular, the concept of a "canon" makes no sense from the perspective of using English as a global language. Different people from different cultures are going to read different books based on their interests and backgrounds, and there is nothing lost from that as long as they are able to communicate their values and feelings and listen to others' with open minds.