Over at the NYT, Alexander Nazaryan has a rather strident article about "The fallacy of balanced literacy." Therein, he writes, "balanced literacy is an especially irresponsible
approach, given that New York State has adopted the federal Common Core
standards, which skew toward a narrowly proscribed list of texts,
many of them nonfiction." [Now changed to narrowly prescribed.]
These texts are prescribed. That is, they're
imposed, not declared unacceptable or invalid. Nevertheless, the Google Books corpus suggests narrowly proscribed is a new and growing phrase.
So, I'm curious: was this simply a typo, or did he have in mind some
metaphor of narrowing down by proscription. Or was it something else?
