A subject that always gets me to sit up and take notice whenever it’s mentioned in the news is the ongoing decline in reading. So of course I had to click on a story headlined “Not-so-great expectations: Students are reading fewer books in English class.” Here are some highlights.
In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world.
I hear this a lot. I can understand cutting reading requirements because we no longer live in a text-based culture. Reading novels, even for English class, may be seen as having few practical applications in the real world. But I don’t buy that studying short-form content will prepare students for much of anything.
The National Council of Teachers of English acknowledged the shift in a 2022 statement on media education, saying: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”
The idea is not to remove books but to teach media literacy and add other texts that feel relevant to students, said Seth French, one of the statement’s co-authors. In the English class he taught before becoming a dean last year at Bentonville High School in Arkansas, students engaged with plays, poetry and articles but read just one book together as a class.
This is another idea I’ve always taken exception to. I remember arguing against this kind of thinking thirty years ago. It’s typical of people advocating for change to say that they’re just adding new kinds of learning but keeping all the old. It’s not an “either . . . or” proposition, but “both . . . and.” Which is nonsense. It’s a zero sum game when it comes to students’ time and attention. The “idea” may be “not to remove books” from the curriculum, but that’s what’s going to happen.
Also, it’s not so much that book reading and essay-writing are the “pinnacle of English language arts education” as it is that the Humanities are essentially fields of study that are grounded in the reading of books. That’s what a degree in Literature, History, Philosophy, etc. is. The arts without reading is a contradiction in terms. If students aren’t prepared for that in grade school than the game is already over.
There’s little data on how many books are assigned by schools. But in general, students are reading less. Federal data from last year shows only 14% of young teens say they read for fun daily, compared with 27% in 2012.
Whoa! The number of kids reading for fun (meaning: the number of kids reading at all) has been cut in half in only ten years?
Teachers say the slide has its roots in the COVID-19 crisis.
“There was a trend, it happened when COVID hit, to stop reading full-length novels because students were in trauma; we were in a pandemic. The problem is we haven’t quite come back from that,” said Kristy Acevedo, who teaches English at a vocational high school in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Wouldn’t spending lots of time indoors, in lockdown, mean that you’d be likely to read more? I guess not. Because . . . trauma.
For some students, it’s a struggle to read at all. Only around a third of fourth and eighth graders reached reading proficiency in the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, down significantly from 2019.
Another “significant” and recent decline. And I wonder what “reading proficiency” means. Are we talking basic literacy? So only a third of these students are literate? And we’re talking about reading proficiency here. I assume that anyone who isn’t able to read proficiently also can’t write. That’s the way these things usually work.
Terri White, a teacher at South Windsor High School in Connecticut, no longer makes her honors ninth-grade English class read all of To Kill a Mockingbird. She assigns about a third of the book and a synopsis of the rest. They have to move on quickly because of pressure for teachers to cram more into the curriculum, she said.
A ninth-grade English class can’t read all of To Kill a Mockingbird! So the teacher assigns a third of it and hands out a synopsis of the rest. What percentage of the class even reads the third of the book that’s assigned? And the idea of just giving kids a synopsis of the book is wrongheaded. You don’t read literature to find out what the story was about, who died in the end and whodunit. That’s treating books as just being sources of information. But unless we’re talking about some (not all) reference works, books also contain ideas and experiences that the act and (I would say) art of reading draws out. A bare synopsis misses all of this.
But of course, if you’re just looking to acquire information from a book in order to pass some standardized test, then I can see thinking that reading is no longer the pinnacle of an arts education. Or, for that matter, even relevant.
Alex Good 