A nonfiction parable

Sometime in the past year of so I read (I think in the SLJ) that high school students aren't being required to read even ONE nonfiction book each year. I know that's true at ACS.

That's a failure on many fronts. Perhaps it fails most by denying students the experience of recognizing and engaging a nuanced and complex argument; complete with overstatement, areas of indecision, restatements, weak arguments, historical & cultural references, often dozens of book and author leads for broadening understanding (or highlighting just how much more there is to learn), and page by page invitations to question assumptions, facts, revelations, and currently held beliefs.

I just finished reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. All the way through it I was writing down the names of books and people that he mentioned, trying to unravel his motives, question his environment, reflect on the gap of forty years that has passed, and, in general, open the doors and explore the paths that a well-written nonfiction books provides to understanding the world and myself.

The experience prompts me to create a bibliography of first-rate nonfiction books in my library and, more importantly, it urges me to urge my teachers to have their students make this experience part of their ACS portfolio of accomplishments.