I am only about half way through this week’s book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice at the time of this post. I’m not going to write about this book directly, but I wanted to post about an essay concerning nonfiction that I read in one of Marc Aronson’s books. (You might remember that we read one or two pieces authored by Aronson near the beginning of the semester.) Aronson’s essay, which is from the book Beyond the Pale: New Essays for a New Era, is titled “The Pursuit of Happiness: Does American History Matter?” I found this essay to be quite relevant to this week’s reading, and it raised some questions that I am eager to explore as I continue my reading of Claudette Colvin, as well as some questions that I think are worth discussing in class.
Aronson discusses the lack of proper teaching of American history to children and teens in schools. He cites statistics that show that 18 percent of fourth graders, 17 percent of eighth graders and 10 percent of seniors are “B” students in the topic of American history (76). This means that 90 percent of high school seniors have a below-satisfactory grasp on the history of their own country.
He also brings up the issue of the history books that children and teens are given in school. He says that one pitfall of these books is that they offer young people “neatly packaged history…There is no imagination in these books; the predictable facts, dates, photos, and maps tell the same old stories in essentially the same old ways” (79). He also says that authors often feel forced to fictionalize historical information in order to make it more palatable to the younger generation who have been so heavily exposed to popular culture. Aronson says this implies that “history in itself is boring,” (80) and that writers must first recognize what they feel is important in America’s history in order to introduce new creativity into nonfiction. If this does not happen, nonfiction for young people will continue to be drab and dull.
I am not far enough into Claudette Colvin to know if it achieves this new creativity that makes American history both exciting and informative for young adults to read. I would love to hear what others think about Claudette Colvin in regards to Aronson’s essay in your comments.
I’d like to end with a quote from the essay to spark some discussion. Aronson says, “If we were today to write a book for young people, if all of us in this room sat down together to create a book on the history of freedom, of the struggle for freedom, of the idea of freedom, in American history, I think we’d have a great deal of trouble deciding how to do it. We’d either think we were sanitizing, or we’d lose our way in the exceptions. It would be easier just to write a novel about a young boy at Valley Forge, a girl on the home front during the Civil War” (81).
So, I ask you all: Is Claudette Colvin able to cover the broad spectrum of the Civil Rights movement in the format in which it was written? Why do you think Aronson said that we would find it easier to write a novel rather than a history?
Susan Elliott
