Amid consistently bad news for US education, one development in public schools is so horrifying, few would believe it’s even true — if the evidence weren’t so solid.
It turns out that book reading in schools has fallen off severely and, in many classrooms, nearly disappeared from the syllabus, even in English classes.
More and more, students read short works and excerpts, not entire books.
Some of the most popular curricula used in classrooms include no actual books at all; for example, Wonders, a McGraw-Hill product found in 20% percent of elementary schools nationwide, offers texts for sixth graders that average just seven pages.
Meanwhile, reading scores continue to fall, college teachers find they can’t assign novels and expect them to be read in their entirety, and leisure reading by Gen Z tallies barely eight minutes a day.
Some blame cellphones and social media, which erode the attention span needed to carry out long-form reading.
Others blame Common Core, which emphasized close reading of short passages, as do the SAT and ACT exams.
Curriculum providers, too, make more money on their own assembled anthologies than on complete works such as “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
However much these and other factors are at play, the result is disastrous.
Observers highlight the loss of mental skills and habits when full book reading disappears, a deficiency that shows up later in the workplace and in low adult literacy rates.
Add to that the cultural blow, the loss of a heritage — “The Odyssey,” Sophocles, Dickens, “Animal Farm,” the Great American Novel, “Walden,” Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative” . . .
Unfortunately, reform is not going to come from inside the schoolhouse; it’ll take an external power to impose book reading on the curriculum.
The good news: There is such a power: state legislatures.
Lawmakers approve K-12 standards for math and English language arts that have the force of law.
They set graduation requirements, including the number of courses for each core subject; they can ensure a certain level of work be completed for each, including a minimum of full-book reading.
The action needed to address the problem isn’t complicated. The two of us have drafted model legislation, called the BOOKS Act (Books Optimize Our Kids’ Schools), published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, that requires completion of at least two full books a semester in English classes.
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This is a floor, not a ceiling.
By one estimate, English teachers now assign an average of only 2.7 books a year, which means many teach only one, or none.
Requiring a minimum of four a year in English, while allowing teachers to assign more, if desired, would essentially restore the previous norm: That was the typical load prior to the 1990s; since then, the number has dropped, hitting around one to three books a year in the 2020s.
Under the BOOKS Act, half of the mandated books must have been published prior to 1900.
This leaves plenty of room for modern texts, while still exposing students to the rich vocabulary, varied customs and splendid masterpieces of earlier eras.
Books like Homer’s “Odyssey,” Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography,” Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” will enliven and deepen English classes, as they have for decades until recently.
More contemporary texts are welcome under the BOOKS Act, so long as they stand in high critical regard and centrally bear on the subject of the class.
Undoubtedly, books selected in blue states and school districts will differ from those assigned in red zones.
Our model allows for this, while sketching some minimum guidelines that should be agreeable to all.
Great fiction and autobiography do more than expand vocabulary, lengthen attention spans and train for composition.
They are makers of character, agents of moral knowledge and treasure-houses of culture.
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” advised Henry Davod Thoreau.
The BOOKS Act sees to it that our children, once again, will go by this wise counsel.
Mark Bauerlein is emeritus professor of English at Emory University. Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
