The Specter of High School English
When it comes to the history of American education, Clifton Hillegass has not gotten his due. In his decades-long career, Hillegass's name graced the cover of hundreds of books, works that have sold tens of millions of copies and inspired generations of imitators. Chances are, if you've taken an English class in the last seventy years, whether in high school or at university, you have read his work. If you're an English teacher, at whatever level, you may have even taught it. Hillegass has shaped how millions of readers think about literature, its purpose and its form. By some measures, he is the most influential literary critic of the last century.
Born in Rising City, Nebraska in the last months of World War I, Hillegass was the oldest son of a mail carrier. After graduating college with a degree in physics and math, he dropped out of grad school to pursue a job at the Nebraska Book Co. It was in that capacity that Hillegass found himself at a business dinner with Toronto bookstore owner Jack Cole. Apart from running his two downtown locations, Cole had spent the last decade publishing a series of study guides marketed to Canadian students. He encouraged Hillegass to reprint his "Cole's Notes" in the United States, offering him favorable terms for the rights. So in 1958, with the help of a $4,000 bank loan, Clifton Hillegass began printing his own eponymous study guides, beginning with the plays of William Shakespeare. He called them "Cliff's Notes."
It's tempting to write off Cliff and his ilk—SparkNotes, BookRags, Course Hero, eNotes, MonkeyNotes, LitCharts, and Shmoop, to name a few—as enemies of a good literary education. After all, they encourage glib interpretations, cursory reading, or worse, not reading at all. A 1968 article in English Journal perfectly captures this perspective: "But just how harmless are these study guides which I suspect have hooked more high school and college students than LSD, heroin, marijuana, and all of these drugs put together? ... How many of our students are using these guides? How are they using them...? [And] what effects are they having on our students' reading habits?"
Setting aside the addictive properties of Cliff's little yellow packets, these are questions that scholars of literature and education might want to answer. In Professing Literature, Gerald Graff's landmark history of literary studies, Graff writes that study guides are "a phenomenon that cries out for attention from sociologists of criticism." Yes, "these handbooks are easy enough to deplore as a prostitution of the values of literary study. But no doubt because they are strictly commercial ventures, these guides tend to be based on a more realistic assessment of the actual conditions of literary education as students experience them than what one finds in the official pronouncements of educators." In other words, study guides offer not only a summary of this or that well-taught work, but also a resumé of how it has often been taught. If what we're after is the history of literary study over the past seventy years, we ought to read the CliffsNotes.
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High school English has been in the news a lot over the past several months. One striking aspect of this coverage—beyond the implication that what goes on in English class is of great importance to the nation and its sense of self—is how it has emphasized a central paradox of American education. Namely: high school English takes a thousand forms and also only one. A district in Florida bans a book, so one in California requires it as part of Banned Books Week, but both make the news because the text is a high school "classic," an essential part of what English class is. Battles over reading lists reveal just how widely the American school system can vary, while the National Council of Teachers of English reports just how little that reading list has changed in the last thirty-five years. Reminiscing about the particular class that made us lifelong readers (or else turned us off forever), we might mention an eccentric teacher or an idiosyncratic assignment, but "the American dream" and "the green light" and "the three witches" and "the balcony scene" pass between us as a kind of lingua franca.
Why do we read the things we do in high school, and how did these particular books come to be so central to American education and American life? And, perhaps more to the point, why were we taught to read them like that? Where did the concepts of "the main theme," or "character development," or "the five-paragraph essay" come from, and how have they shaped the way generations of Americans read, live, and think about the world? The answers to these questions can be found in the space between the individual classroom and the Department of Education—that is, between the many small decisions made by the nearly two hundred thousand secondary school English teachers in the United States, and the few large ones made by national organizations like the Common Core State Standards Initiative. That vast institutional middle ground includes teacher training programs, the National Council of Teachers of English, textbook publishers, privately run curricula, and even online study sites. These are the organizations that, as Graff wrote of guides like CliffsNotes, reflect "the actual conditions of literary education" in the United States.
But they also shape those conditions and, by extension, literary culture at large. That's because both the history of American reading and its future run straight through the high school classroom.
Take the textbook, for example, long derided by students and teachers alike. Remember the glee spreading across the kids' faces in Dead Poets Society as Robin Williams's Mr. Keating commands them to rip out the introduction of Understanding Poetry by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.? By contrast, historians of literature and education have much to learn by fishing that preface out of the classroom trash can. Introductory essays, discussion questions, and tables of contents are a kind of fossil record of literary education, remnants of canons and curricula that once were.
Even their titles tell a story of shifting priorities: Twelve Centuries of English Poetry and Prose (1910); Our Literary Heritage: American Literature (1937); American Literature: Themes and Writers (1967); Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes (2000). Their pages trace a declining emphasis on literary history, the rise of New Critical methods, and the persistence of the short story form, even as it floundered elsewhere in the literary field. It's a story of the discipline that relies as much on critics like Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren as it does on the editors at Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Brace, Prentice Hall, and Holt—men who have had more sway over American reading than just about anyone else. Because, if you know what happens at the end of "The Lottery," or can finish the line "But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I ———," it's in part because of them.
Or consider the prep school teachers and college professors who helped design the Advanced Placement program in the early years of the Cold War. The same year that J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was published, the Ford Foundation launched its "Fund for the Advancement of Education," which sponsored a variety of initiatives that would ultimately coalesce in the creation of the AP.1 In 1956, just after Holden Caulfield would have graduated, about 100 schools and 1,200 students participated in the program. In 2024, nearly 24,000 schools and over 3 million students took part. The AP, in other words, is now among the most influential institutions in American secondary education. And their English Literature and English Language programs—among the organization's most popular—have literally dictated the rubric by which those millions read literature, or avoid it altogether.
The AP is quick to point out that it does not "mandate a specific curriculum," but rather "provides a scope and sequence" for teachers to "utilize, modify, and adapt." This downplays the AP's influence on classroom practice significantly. But still, the AP is far less prescriptive than other programs purchased by school districts and foisted upon teachers. In July 2025, a nationwide survey of high school English teachers found that 35% used "pre-packaged materials such as teacher scripts, texts, activities, and/or assessments." Schools in the South and West are more likely to use scripted curricula, as are schools with less funding and a lower proportion of white students.
If you haven't been in a high school English classroom in a few years, you may not recognize names like SpringBoard, StudySync, and CommonLit 360. The thought of private organizations standardizing what the nation's teens read, even scripting minute by minute their discussion of that reading, may sound a bit far-fetched, a bit too much like the plot of a dystopian novel. Not to worry! Most of these programs mandate that students consider the dangers of just such a society. In a unit on "Following the Crowd," ninth graders using CommonLit 360 will study "people who are blind to the dangerous consequences" of conformity. The next year in tenth grade, those same students can use proprietary online materials to guide their discussion of Fahrenheit 451 and its "social commentary on important topics such as human overdependence on technology and the dangers of knowledge suppression." By the time they reach the eleventh grade, and its structured unit on The Crucible and the Red Scare, students will be well-versed in the mechanics of groupthink. Unfortunately, the irony of all this may be lost on them if "irony" doesn't appear on CommonLit's set vocabulary list.
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Little of what is written here will be surprising to working teachers, who know well just how much power institutions like these hold over the contemporary classroom. From the vantage of the university English department, however, that classroom is often frozen in memory or forgotten altogether. I spent five years teaching secondary school English—a job that I cherished and assumed I would return to—before starting my PhD. In the weeks before my first graduate seminars, another former high school teacher who had recently graduated from the program encouraged me to downplay my teaching experience, so that I wouldn't be written off as an insufficiently serious scholar. This advice seemed both ridiculous and unquestionable.
However well-meaning it may be, the message sent by some professors to their students is this: Forget everything you learned in high school English. We do things differently here. The implication is that this is a difference in kind, rather than a difference in degree. I have trouble imagining our colleagues in chemistry making the same declaration. Of course, university laboratories use complex methods and specialized tools that high school science students do not, but the thought of telling first-year undergraduates that microscopes are useless, and that beakers, if they must be used, must never be referred to as beakers—For beakers are gauche!—seems absurd.
Apart from the pedagogical reality that the high school classroom is where nearly all of our students come from, there are a number of reasons why literature professors might take a deeper interest in what goes on there. Those of us interested in literary history, for example, in the books that have confronted readers in particular periods and across time, might be curious to learn that for the better part of the last century millions of young Americans have been meeting multiple times a week to read, discuss, and write about literature. Those of us interested in the history of our discipline, in the evolution of literary studies since the late nineteenth century, stand to discover a parallel universe where ideas about reader response theory, close reading, and the literary canon have developed on an entirely different timeline.
And most important of all, those of us invested in the future of that discipline must understand that the crisis in the humanities and "The End of the English Major" begin well before our students ever set foot on campus. That is, before students have a chance to be put off by our critical methods, or our "Marxist indoctrination," or our departure from the so-called Great Books, or our obsession with the so-called Great Books, their relation to literature is governed by an array of institutions that we have largely ignored—and at our peril.
It's time to read the CliffsNotes, study the AP exam, and work alongside our high school colleagues. Not to pass down wisdom learned on high, but rather to allow for greater exchange in both directions. To put it bluntly, we need each other. The book bans, the AI mandates, the classroom surveillance, the standardization and preprofessionalization, the funding cuts, and the wholesale disinvestment from literary culture: these are K-16 problems and they demand a K-16 response. Anything less puts English departments everywhere at risk. It also fatally underestimates the power of what we do.
In September, a Republican senator railed at the Vice President's "despicable" remarks about extrajudicial killings in Venezuela by asking, "Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?" A few weeks later, the President's glitzy Halloween party made national news, not just because it arrived as millions of Americans were set to lose food assistance, but also because the party's theme was The Great Gatsby, a book that millions of Americans have read in school. One thing we might learn from Cliff Hillegass is that there are a huge number of young readers eager to make sense of the books we hold in common. A huge number of not-so-young readers also draw on those books to make sense of the world. There are not many things that 97% of Americans have in common, but high school English is one of them. We ought to act like it.
Alexander Manshel is an Associate Professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (2023). He is currently at work on a history of high school English in the United States, excerpts from which can be found in American Literary History and The New Yorker.
- For more on this history, see Annie Abrams's indispensible book Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats students. ↩︎