There’s a lot of debate in educational circles these days about what our children should be reading. Sparked by the Common Core State Standards — new national guidelines for what public school students should learn from kindergarten through twelfth grade — the debate centers on the question of whether students should study literature or “informational texts.”

Supporters of the Common Core have argued strenuously that the purpose of education is to prepare students for their future careers. Reading, therefore, should be taught in a way that will best serve students’ future employers. According to these folks, in the twenty-first-century economy, an understanding of Shakespeare or any other sophisticated literature will be of little use to most students in their careers. As Common Core designer and advocate David Coleman put it: “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ ”

Coleman and the other architects of the Common Core should be commended for their commitment to promoting curriculum “designed to be robust and relevant to the real world.” Unfortunately, however, their understanding of the global economy seems to be trapped in a late-twentieth-century “knowledge economy” framework.