Some of you may have seen
this article about Common Core-based tests in New York. The overall message is that scores dropped a lot over last year, when the CC wasn't being used. Hmm. Okay. Predictably,
people are complaining. One father complained that the 3rd grade language arts portion on the sample test was "dense (and dull!)."
I decided to have a look.I found the sample questions easily (
you can see them here). I looked at the first passage in the language arts section.
Turns out the passage was a very short story written by Leo Tolstoy (
The Gray Hare). Hmm. I read it, and agreed with the dense and dull label. It was positively blah and immediately forgettable. Hmm. Hmm. Tolstoy?
Blah? So I did some searching and found a non-multiple-choice-test version of the story (
read it here).
The version I found was a peaceful little tale about a bunny on an ordinary winter's night. Human society bustles around him while the snow glitters under a starry sky. He plays with his friends as the night passes, eats grains left over by the humans, and eventually tucks himself in to sleep at dawn.
The high stakes version is rearranged and harder to understand. The gentle portrait painted by Tolstoy is smudged, blurry, and has the additional pointlessness of horses being whipped for no apparent reason. It also substitutes the word
sugar for
silver to describe how the snow glitters. Question 3 asks why the author used the word
sugar. Well, he didn't. The test writers did, presumably so that they could add a misleading answer choice about food (?).
But this stuff is merely the ordinary corruption of literature that we have come to expect from industrialized education. It isn't the achingly painful and soul-destroying side of this story/test passage and how it illustrates the bankruptcy of the US public education system.
I read about Tolstoy and learned that he got a bit of religion in his middle years. He was heavily Christian but investigated other belief systems, preached non-violence, and even became an ascetic. There were goods and bads to this: he wasn't afraid to speak out against brutality and influenced Gandhi. But he also made things difficult on his wife.
You may ask what all this has to do with a story about a hare looking for food on a cold night and a high stakes test.Well.
From what I've read (
this, for example), the story is an allegory about living simply and the ways that humans invent to live, well, complexly. The hare seems to represent an ideal Christian life --- one that Tolstoy aspired to.
There's so much you could do with a tale like this one and Tolstoy himself and his other works --- but it would have to wait until 8th or 9th grade at the earliest. Philosophy, morality, religion, allegory, how writing can be used to paint a picture...the list is very long.
All of this subtlety is, of course, completely lost in the high stakes mediocritized version of the story, where Tolstoy's fable and its context are reduced to the importance of such factoids as "In which scene does the hare reach his goal for the day?"
