Much attention has been given to the fact that American students’ reading skills have deteriorated, with the number of students who can read proficiently having hit a thirty-year low. Part of this can be attributed to the decline of phonics education—which, thankfully, is picking back up—and part of this can be attributed to COVID-era school closures, ideology in the classroom, technology, and a general deterioration of standards.
But there’s another worrying trend: of the students who can read, most are not reading full novels. The Atlantic published in October of 2024 about how even elite college students aren’t reading books, or at least can’t seem to get through a book. This starts well before college: Tim Donahue, a high school English teacher, wrote for the New York Times last month, noting that many schools across the country no longer assign full novels, instead having students pick apart sentences and words and read only segments from actual books:
The notion that students can master a range of literary competencies is further diluting the already deluded approach to English class. To put the National Council of Teachers of English guidelines in action, teachers are substituting intertextuality and experiential learning for engaging with the actual text. What might have been a full read of “The Great Gatsby” is replaced by students reading the first three chapters, then listening to a TED Talk on the American dream, reading a Claude McKay poem, dressing up like flappers and then writing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the Prohibition. They’ll experience Chapters 4 through 8 only through plot summaries and return to their texts for the final chapter.
Not only does this pedagogical trend dumb down education, even for the most capable students; it deprives all students of the opportunity to explore stories and ideas that may shape their thinking and expand their worlds. Moreover, students who’ve never read, say, any Shakespeare or Milton can’t begin to understand their Western heritage, which has, over the centuries, been formed by great literature. Likewise, students who’ve never encountered Fitzgerald, or Hemingway, or Hawthorne, or Poe in their English classes are missing a fundamental part of American history.
Often, when discussing literacy education, we speak in terms of the bare minimum—that children should be able to sound out words and understand them—a tendency which, while natural given the abysmal literacy statistics, sets the bar far too low. Real literacy education goes far beyond that bare minimum: it means interacting with culture, with art, with history, with the ideas and stories that have shaped the world in which we live—and, ideally, cultivating in students a lifelong love of reading and creating an educated citizenry that is capable not only of reading words off a page but of engaging with them on a deeper level.