![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Emerson, Longfellow, Melville, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Conrad all adored his books. In contrast to Andrew Jackson’s Indian-murdering rampages, Cooper was the first novelist to portray the disappearing Native Americans with enlightenment and complexity.Ĭora, who is herself bi-racial, asks, “Should we distrust man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?”īiographer Wayne Franklin tells us Cooper authored 10 percent of America’s novels in the 1820s. Modeled after frontiersman Daniel Boone, Hawk-eye’s trailblazing character inspired the individualistic persona prominent in western folklore. While the treacherous Magua pursues, Hawk-eye, Chingachgook, and Uncas guide the Munro sisters to their father at Fort William Henry, which is under siege by the French. Students who read classics like The Mohicans learn American history through gripping narratives. In Massachusetts, for the first time in a decade, our eighth graders were no longer number one in the country. Worse still, it prescribes a “cold reading” method where even non-fiction texts are scalped from their historical context.Īs Cooper warned posterity: “The tendency of democracies is … to mediocrity.”įive years into Common Core, national eighth grade reading scores on the 2015 NAEP were disastrous. This move cuts the classic novels Bay State students read by 60 percent. Deval Patrick's administration sacrificed Massachusetts' proven, literature-rich English standards for a one-time federal grant of $250 million to adopt Common Core. ![]()
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