Sticking to stories

             I attended a workshop on Early Literacy yesterday. Eventually the conversation came around to Common Core Standards. Basically the speaker said, what children need to succeed is not just reading and writing skills, but information. So curriculums now are emphasizing content, not narrative; non-fiction, not fiction.  Now, I’m a librarian, a dealer of information in an information age – and I really have to take issue with the idea that narrative, fiction, and story are no longer important. That it’s only content that matters. That all we need are the facts.

                Here’s the issue for me. In a previous life, I worked in animal breeding and genetics. You know, the people who select cows for more milk, sheep for more wool, and pigs who grow faster.  So, what does breeding cows to give more milk have to do with reading fiction? Over the years, cows nowadays give a lot more milk than they did even twenty years ago. And our understanding of genetics and the technology to manipulate genetics has exploded. But here’s the problem, sometimes the questions isn’t can we change something, can we make it better? The real question is, do we know what better is?  Because knowing how to do something, is different from knowing what to do.

                In the fifties, short legged Herefords were all the rage. The “better” cow, if you will. Until breeders discovered every time they selected animals with short legs they were increasing the frequency of a lethal dwarf gene in the population. In the sixties and seventies collies with narrow heads were considered the standard, until breeders realized there was a relationship with narrow heads and encephalopathies. In the eighties, long legged Suffolk sheep were consider the “best,” until breeders realized that trait was linked to “spider leg syndrome,” a lethal metabolic bone disorder in lambs.

                Making something better, whether it’s family life, a computer program, or the amount of milk a cow gives, isn’t just a question that requires information. It requires defining “better,” and defining better requires philosophy. It requires the ability to think and reason for one self. It demands wisdom from us.

We don’t gain wisdom through acquiring information. It doesn’t come through knowing how  things work, or how we can change them. Non-narrative non-fiction may give us the information, but wisdom, philosophy, the ability to critically analyze issues, comes from understanding stories.  

True understanding comes from paying attention, from understanding relationships and connections, whether between people, or between people and the world they live in. Real knowledge requires having a philosophy of life, having values to live by. We need to be able to make critical inquiries, discern potential outcomes, and then make hard decisions that we can all live with.

Those are skills that come from stories because if there is one thing fiction or narratives teach, it’s that we live in relationship, and those relationships matter. Stories teach us that actions have consequences, that choices make a difference. Fiction teaches us that people grow and change and that they should, that the choices we make today are different from the choices we may make tomorrow, and that’s okay. As long as we are growing, as long as we are learning, as long as we are striving to figure out what “better” really means, we are on the road to wisdom.

We risk losing a great deal when we believe facts and content are more important than story. There are so many important and necessary things to be learned about living a good life that come through stories. Things like how to make friends, how to be a better friend, how to make hard decisions, how to live up to our values, how to develop values. What will we lose I wonder, when we emphasize content over thought, caring, relationships, values; when we forget that understanding how something works, isn’t the same thing as knowing the right thing to do? That just because we can do something, doesn’t always mean we should.

So, I’m sticking to story, my story, your story, all the stories that line the shelves of every library in the world. Because that, I believe, is where true knowledge and wisdom lie.