On Wednesday NAS's director of the Center for the Study of the Curriculum, Ashley Thorne, appeared on HuffPost Live, the online live-streaming network of The Huffington Post, to discuss the trend in college common reading of assigning recent books to the near exclusion of older books and classics. The discussion used as a springboard Ashley's recent article in The Guardian, "Why Are American Universities Shying Away from the Classics?" which looks at some of the findings in NAS's new report, Beach Books: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?
The other participants were Paul Constant, books editor of Seattle's The Stranger, David Kirkland, assistant professor of English education at New York University, and Caroline Bicks, associate professor of English at Boston College. Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani, HuffPost Live producer, hosted the conversation.
Click on the video below to watch the 30-minute discussion.
