Obama's Kicking Mark Twain Out of the Classroom in Exchange for Himself

I love classic literature. My favorite college classes were literature classes, going back to a time where literature taught morality and values, unlike this 50 Shades stuff that passes for literature these days.  From Beowulf to Twain, I loved reading in college and discovering the deeper messages in the books. Those days may soon be gone in our country's schools if Obama has his way.

The Washington Post writes about how Obama's Department of Education is pushing classic literature out of the classroom in exchange for "informative text". One can only guess what that means in this day and age where big government tries to influence all aspects of your life.

The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly “informational text” instead of fictional literature....

....The new standards, which are slowly rolling out now and will be in place by 2014, require that nonfiction texts represent 50 percent of reading assignments in elementary schools, and the requirement grows to 70 percent by grade 12.

Among the suggested non­fiction pieces for high school juniors and seniors are Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” “FedViews,” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2009) and “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” published by the General Services Administration.

Executive Order 13423 is the Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management order.

Now, one of the things that I learned in the earliest literature classes I had, which was classic English literature going back to the earliest story telling, is how Christians often told these tales to reflect Christian virtue for their audience. Beowulf is a prime example of this as we learn how one's ego can be his downfall. There are clearly Christian elements in the classic poem that were added as the story was told through the generations. One can only guess these tales of virtue might be an inconvenience for the statists wanting them removed from our schools.