The Core Standards for Writing: Another Failure of Imagination?

By Edgar H. Schuster

When the 9/11 Commission reviewed factors that made our country vulnerable to the 2001 terrorist attacks, it found that “the most important failure was one of imagination.”

Imagination, defined by one dictionary as “the ability to confront and deal with reality by using the creative power of the mind,” is a critical faculty in our world. And where better for it to be nurtured and to flower forth than in the writing classroom?

Yet, if we examine the draft standards for English language arts from the Common Core State Standards Initiative , a project led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, we find imagination mentioned nowhere. In fact, most of the 18 proposed writing standards are singularly unimaginative. They are also woefully out of balance, in the direction of relatively...