When will high school English teachers stop assigning the wrong books? When will they stop assigning novels that are neither accessible nor interesting to most high schoolers?
Take The Scarlet Letter, for instance. It starts like this:
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
What teenager wouldn’t want to read long and convoluted sentences about old men and prison? Wuthering Heights is just as ugly. Frankly, it’s a mistake to assign anything from that era—or anything older. Forget about Charles Dickens and Jane Austen; forget about Chaucer and Shakespeare.
You may have heard of the reading wars. That’s the long-standing debate between advocates of a whole language approach and proponents of phonics. By now, I hope, most teachers and principals see the value of both. By now, most teachers and principals understand that phonics should be the focus of the early years while some whole language methods have a place in the intermediate years.
The good guys are winning those reading wars. But there is another war being waged in high school, and we are losing. You can tell we are losing the Battle for the Book because teens and young adults are not reading books.
Are they reading on the bus? No. Are they reading on the plane? No. Reading in the waiting room? No. Reading in their bedrooms? No. Do they want to read? No. And what are we doing about it? Assigning Crime and Punishment!
A recent analysis of the American Time Use Survey revealed a steady decline in pleasure reading, reading that is not for work or school. According to the researchers at University College London and the University of Florida, the time Americans spend reading dropped by more than 40% between 2004 and 2023.
A lot has changed in those 20 years. It used to be that the average person could watch one NFL game a week; now, you can stream a dozen. The iPhone was released in 2007; the Android in 2008. Young people migrated from MySpace to Facebook to Instagram. Cave Game became Minecraft. Since its initial release in 2003, the Call of Duty video games have sold more than 500 million units. There is more competition than ever for our students’ time and attention.
For high school English teachers, the job used to be teaching students to read things that are rigorous and complex. But it is no longer a given that they will read at all. Now more than ever, the priority for high school English teachers should be instilling in students a love of reading—or even just a willingness to read.
I don’t mean to reject the canon. Shakespeare is special, of course, and so are Milton and Spencer, Browning and Blake, and countless other playwrights, poets, and novelists from the 1500s through the 1800s. But we are teaching teens for whom the 20th century is long ago, for whom screens have replaced paper as the dominant medium, and for whom even this sentence is a long one. Leave the canon to the English majors.
The general goals of high school English are more important than ever. Comprehension is crucial to our students’ success and the maintenance of our democracy. Literary analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are skills that carry over from sonnets and short stories to movies and stump speeches. In short, kids can’t succeed in other classes if they can’t read. Our society can’t succeed if its citizens can’t think for themselves.
Those goals are more important than reading any particular piece of literature. After all, what’s at stake is more than shallow aesthetic preferences; it’s the capacity for deep thought that literacy unlocks.
When teachers assign the wrong texts, they undermine their ability to teach these essential skills. Inaccessible reads drive kids to the internet in search of summaries. Worse yet, bad classroom assignments turn kids against reading in the future.
There’s no excuse for assigning inaccessible or boring novels and plays when there are so many books out there that teens would be more likely to enjoy.
Dystopian fiction speaks to teens. When I was still teaching 12th grade English, I got good results teaching 1984 and Brave New World, and friends had luck with Fahrenheit 451. A new option would be Klara and the Sun. In this 2021 novel, Kazuo Ishiguro explores artificial intelligence.
In Our Time is good for our time. Ernest Hemingway’s collection of short stories and vignettes, published in 1925, can be digested in pieces or as a whole and has everything from war to fishing.
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, is also well suited to our time, as it anticipates the narrow beauty ideals consumed by today’s teens on social media.
But English teachers need not limit themselves to Nobel Prize winners like Ishiguro, Hemingway, and Morrison. Try Station Eleven or other novels by Emily St. John Mandel. Consider Carrie or other novels by Stephen King.
Again, it’s not what they’re reading that matters; it’s that they’re reading. All kinds of novels, short stories, and poems can be used to teach literary elements and literary criticism—so can song lyrics and screenplays. What matters most is that teens learn to enjoy reading. To that end, high school English teachers need to assign books that are accessible and interesting.
