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I grew up hundreds of miles from the ocean in Pittsburgh, wanting to be like Ransome's characters

This letter in The New York Times, June 17, 2012, is a great refutation to the Common Core's assertion that we must saturate young children in nonfiction because it's what teaches them about the world.



Remembering Ransome

To the Editor:

It was not just British children who were saturated with the Swallows and Amazons novels of Arthur Ransome, as the review of The Last Englishman, by Roland Chambers, suggests (May 27). I grew up hundreds of miles from the ocean in Pittsburgh, wanting to be like Ransome's characters. I wrote to him asking which of the English lakes was the right one. He sent me a postcard saying that it was "Windermere, with a few touches of Coniston, for the sake of disguise." He ended with "You'll be sailing some day!" and I lived on that.

I never got over it; thousands of American children did not. In Maine as an adult I saw a bus full of schoolchildren with the boast "We can tie bowline knots!" written all over it, a sign I think of loyal Ransome followers. As a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in literature, I took the night boat from Harwich to Hook of Holland, essentially the same boat that almost ran the children down in We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea.

Reality for me never caught up with Pigeon Post and Coot Club."Even now, as an old man, often the last thing I do before shutting down the computer at night is ask Google Earth to fly me to Horsey Mere or Potter Heigham in the Norfolk Broads. Looking for windmills, I ­suppose.

Perhaps the biggest surprise I ever had was finding out that the man who created Swallows and Amazons was also a close personal friend of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of the Russian secret police, who oversaw torture in Moscow's Lubyanka prison.

FRANK PHELAN




I grew up hundreds of miles from the ocean in Pittsburgh, wanting to be like Ransome's characters.

The self-proclaimed Common Core architect David Coleman is tone deaf--not only tone deaf about literature but about children and what they need. But this doesn't stop consultants and curriculum coordinators across the country from jumping on the bandwagon and decreeing a "close reading" of the text--while turning a blind eye to the needs of children.

If you believe in heaven and hell, you know where the Standardistos who rob children of imagination and dreams will end up.


— Susan Ohanian

June 17, 2012


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Index of Common Core [sic] Standards

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