Classroom curricula see literature as a means rather than as an end in itself.
L ast week, an English teacher sent me her school’s language arts curriculum, which is designed by the Savvas Learning Company. It includes a number of great essays, poems, and authors — The Most Dangerous Game, Robert Frost, speeches from American history — as well as a few questionable pieces of content for a high school English class — an opinion column by comedian and actor John Leguizamo and a brochure on zombie preparedness, for example.
The presence of one medium is notably sparse: complete books. Short works abound, as do excerpts from novels, but, by my count, across the ninth- through twelfth-grade curricula, there are in total four complete plays and one novella. The rest of the readings consist of passages, poems, essays, speeches, and other short works — a stew without meat and potatoes.
Last year, one professor’s essay sent the chattering class a-chattering when he made the simple, if dismaying, observation that his students could not read, and had not read, entire books. The idea of picking through 300 pages of Pride and Prejudice, the professor revealed, is a Gordian knot of complexity even for “elite” college students.
Such an observation raises a simple question: Why aren’t students reading books? The aforementioned curriculum provides a straightforward answer: Schools aren’t assigning them. Even when they do, these books aren’t particularly rigorous.
In just one example, a small town in Iowa recently faced a local controversy when its district replaced To Kill a Mockingbird with graphic novels aimed at middle schoolers. I spoke to Shellie Flockhart, a parent who brought her concern to the board, who says she saw “no difference” between the new graphic novel assigned and Captain Underpants. Notably, the replacement unit on the American dream was, according to Flockhart, no patriotic paean to the country but an assemblage of readings intended to undercut the idea of American meritocracy. It focused exclusively on how difficult it is for immigrants to assimilate.
Unfortunately, these aren’t isolated instances of educational mediocrity. A report by the Curriculum Insight Project notes that many of the most popular English curricula used across the country, in states red and blue, include few if any extended readings. In prior generations, students might have read few books because they relied on SparkNotes. Now, they’re not reading books because teachers aren’t even bothering to assign them.
To understand this development necessitates a return to the canon wars of yesteryear. As the late John Searle points out in his excellent 1990 essay “The Storm over the University,” the anti-canon radicals didn’t just want to replace a Western canon with a more diverse one. Rather, Searle observes, “the whole idea of ‘the canon’ has to be abolished,” according to these radicals. Relativity must conquer objective standards of quality, merit, and beauty.
As a result, English class becomes a study of literature not as an end in itself but as a means to advance “approved” ideas. Instead of reading Shakespeare because his works are great, for example, students read Romeo and Juliet because it provides insight into the sexism endemic to Elizabethan England. Curriculum becomes an assemblage of texts and excerpts that advance a central “theme.” No book is greater than another. There’s no inherent wisdom or beauty in any of them, but they can be used for some external end. Of course, these ends are always politically tinged.
If the 1960s and 1970s saw arguments for this approach, the emphasis today is on implementation. In 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the largest and most influential professional organization of English teachers, ironically declared that it was time to “decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education” and to instead teach using videos, GIFs, memes, and other media.
In another report by the NCTE, the authors argue that teachers need to “model and instruct students on how to read through a critical lens across a range of literary theories (e.g., postcolonial criticism, Black feminist criticism, Chicana feminist criticism).” In other words, when reading Hamlet, for instance, teachers shouldn’t let the text speak about ambition and power, which it does. Instead, they should encourage students to read it through various “lenses,” thereby forcing it to squeak and squeal about toxic masculinity, class oppression, and other such themes that, if the text is read outright, it doesn’t actually broach.
One popular teacher-prep textbook advocates this very approach. The unit theme comes first. A teacher’s job is to gather a collection of texts that advance that theme. Notable, of course, are chapters on planning units about power, race, and LGBTQ issues. Similarly, the NCTE recommends that students write comics for final projects, watch documentaries about current events, or use Taylor Swift songs and Beauty and the Beast to “analyze toxic masculinity in The Great Gatsby.” The Savvas Learning Company curriculum has units on looking beyond borders and taking a stand that have a dozen or so readings each but no central text.
All of this is, of course, incorrect. Students need the experience of facing the challenge of long, classic works of literature — the linguistic and cognitive growth that comes through parsing through difficult texts, and the sense of accomplishment derived from doing so. We read The Great Gatsby or Animal Farm to challenge common beliefs about wealth, political power, and human nature, and to expose students to beauty. In short, we teach literature not to teach students the current approved set of views but to expose them to the best that has been thought and said.
The solution is simple: Get books, complete books, back on curricula.