The “Me” Curriculum at the DOE: Why we need to stop telling students “Narrative writing is all about me.” | Get Schooled

The “Me” Curriculum at the DOE: Why we need to stop telling students “Narrative writing is all about me.” | Get Schooled:

The “Me” Curriculum at the DOE: Why we need to stop telling students “Narrative writing is all about me.”

by Maureen Downey

Dr. Mark Bauerlein

Here is a terrific guest column by Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein, author of the 2008 book “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.”
This is a good piece for teachers to discuss.
By Mark Bauerlein

You couldn’t get much farther from the life of a Georgia teenager than the world of Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 short story “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” There, an old man in a café drinks late into the night while two waiters discuss him. The older waiter goes home with fatalistic thoughts, at one point slipping into the Lord’s Prayer but substituting nada for “Father”— an expression of his atheism whose terrible loneliness he keeps at bay with bright, familiar spaces at home and work.
The irrelevance of that scene to Georgia teens, however, doesn’t prevent the Georgia Department of Education from recommending that 11th Grade teachers issue this writing assignment to English students:
The characters in …