Why Are the Common Core Standards Interested in 18th Century American Literature?

Get ready for the Philip Freneau revival.

From the 11-12th grade Reading standards:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.9 Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.

By design there are few standards that address the scope of literary reading in any specificity, so the ones that do deserve close attention. Setting aside other concerns about this standard (which we will return to in future stories), why is eighteenth century works in there? If you take out political texts considered “informational” in the Common Core structure, what are the important 18th century American dramas, poems, novels? Anyone?

Britannica suggests Philip Freneau was the most “memorable” American poet of the era, but ultimately concludes:

Freneau strove for a fresh idiom that would be unmistakably American, but, except in a few poems, he failed to achieve it.

18th century American literature barely exists.

Meanwhile, the Common Core pointedly excludes texts beyond the “early-twentieth-century,” again, for what reason? To discourage their study? Is 1920 the end of the “foundational” period in American literature?

There is a corresponding informational text standard:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.9 Analyze seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features.

Why push that back to the 1600's? That brings in the Mayflower Compact, which presumably all high school students in Common Core states will now read in English class, but what else? The rhetoric of Cotton Mather and Roger Williams’ theological disputes? There are certainly worse uses of time in English class than analyzing The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, but is that what the Common Core is telling us to do? It certainly seems to be.

In both cases the date ranges were revised and pushed back in the three month period between the first and final drafts of the grade level standards. Why? Who knows.