How children are educated is a divisive topic, and when scientific standards are applied to what books children of various age levels should read in school, it’s easy for book lovers, like me, to snipe from the sidelines.

However, when it comes to the new Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, something weird is going on. The system rates books by “lexiles”, a measure of “lexical complexity” ranging from 200 to more than 1600—and based on the results, this system is seriously flawed.

Here’s an infographic showing the complexity of different books:

The Atlantic has some information about what lexile ranges are appropriate for which age level. With a score of only 610, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises isn’t even complex enough for a fourth grader; The Hunger Games and, absurdly, Mr. Popper’s Penguins rank much higher.

Now, I love me some Hunger Games, and I grant that Hemingway’s prose isn’t exactly known for the broadness of its vocabulary—but still, any system that can come up with these kind of results is seriously flawed.

At New Republic, Blaine Greteman looks around his town of Iowa City, home to the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop, for more absurdities—like the fact that Flannery O’Connor’s Collected Stories doesn’t rise above a sixth-grade reading level, and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” scores at the same level as Curious George Gets a Medal.

Yikes. Perhaps I’m stating the obvious here, but this is a bad system. Reading shouldn’t be about learning big words—it should be about imagination, and wonderment, and creative, empathetic engagement with the world.

The issue of educational standards is not simple, and I’m sure that any system will have its flaws. But when it comes to children’s engagement with creative writing and other arts, my feeling is that we should begin by trusting teachers and kids to find their way to the texts that will engage their imaginations and drive passionate classroom discussion. At The Stake, we don’t like it when meddling parents come between kids and good books. Bureaucrats, no matter how well-meaning, shouldn’t do it either.