A Serious Flaw in Common Core
There is a serious flaw in the national Common Core English/Language Arts reading standards and it is the result of the ideological point of view about literacy and learning of those who developed it. I am not sure if it was done intentionally or if they are actually unaware of it. The flaw is uncertainty about how we know what a document really means.
Is deep meaning inherent in a text, as the national Common Core standards claim, or is meaning created through the interaction of the reader with the text because we can never really know exactly what an author from a different time period or who lived under different circumstances intended? Does the discovery of deeper meaning simply require close reading of the text or a broader understanding of the context from which the document emerged? Text or context?
What is amazing is that this debate goes back at least as far as Socrates and Plato in the ancient Greek world and is a major point of contention when the United States Supreme Court tries to interpret the Constitution. Yet the authors of the Common Core Standards
