Post 451 : English Without Books

Sara, who until recently taught in a conservative school district in Kentucky, loves teaching Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. She explained in a recent interview that the kids have seen enough dystopian movies, such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, that they can make sense of the genre. When they see how "Bradbury was almost like predicting the future," with wall-sized TVs and "seashells" that are like earbuds, "the kids are usually like in awe." Sara would bring in articles about book banning and share with her students that in their own school, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had been banned. It's eye-opening for them, she explained, paraphrasing their reactions: "Who's making decisions for me? And why am I allowing this?"

Sara's account illustrates a traditional function for English class: as a laboratory for democracy. The discussions with her students that she describes are not just about censorship but about what reading literature should mean to students and who gets to determine the answer to that question. Today, however, English teachers have little latitude to prepare the next generation of citizens. Accordingly, as we've learned from conversations with dozens of teachers and from the responses to a national survey we conducted in 2024, they are intensely dissatisfied with the state of the field. They teach amidst a growing technocracy in education, the ascendancy of a system that prioritizes not just standards and test scores but a corporate industry that has developed around formulating the "analytical," objective readers that the standards and tests seek. They are swimming against the current, in a political climate that has become increasingly suspicious, even hostile, towards humanities education. They are the best witnesses of a change too few outside of K-12 recognize: secondary-level English is no longer a humanistic field so much as a communications-oriented one.

In this essay, we consider the dehumanization of literary studies in K-12 education—a problem that, as Bradbury imagined, is not just the work of censors but of a broken reading culture that predates censorship. In some ways, the focus on censorship has distracted from this less salacious but far more impactful source of harm. While the culture wars have certainly done damage in many school districts, teachers see two decades of shifting state standards to have changed K-12 literary study and the field of English Language Arts even more, a development that too few academics and parents understand.

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Since World War II, secondary English Language Arts literature instruction has been framed by two main ideologies: one, influentially articulated in Louise Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration advances an approach that views literature as a tool for rescuing the reader from the "provincialism" of one's own life; the other, articulated in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's New Critical tome Understanding Poetry, sees formalism as the key to literary understanding. On its face, what today's Common Core State Standards characterize as "literary analysis" appears heavily skewed towards the formalism of the New Critics. But, in fact, there is little resemblance. After all, New Criticism was theorized, in part, as a humanistic antidote to the hegemony of science and technology. In that regard, the mandates to train students to write formulaic, thesis-driven five-paragraph essays and to select the correct answers to reading-comprehension questions about decontextualized excerpts vitiate the spirit of both the text-centered approach of the New Critics as well as the "transactional" one promoted by Rosenblatt.

With few exceptions, state ELA standards confine themselves to quantifiable criteria: "the skills and understandings that all students must demonstrate." They shut out "text-to-self" and "text-to-world" connections to focus exclusively on "text-to-text" ones, to call on language we might remember from our own high school ELA education. They look a lot like this particular CCSS standard: "Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text." This type of objective analysis doesn't invite "exploration," a keyword from Rosenblatt's title and the optimal level of engagement, according to a recent Brookings Institute report, at which students are self-motivated learners. It doesn't require the sort of emotionally engaged, generative "deep reading" that the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes in Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in the Digital World or Patrick Sullivan describes in the edited collection Deep Reading. It doesn't require whole books.

After hearing from so many individual teachers about the trend away from whole books, we created a national survey see the broader patterns, to gauge the experience of teaching high school literature today. In it, we sought to understand what kinds of literary texts teachers were assigning most frequently, why, and the degree of agency they experienced in making those decisions. We created the survey as calls for book bans dominated school news. Indeed, as a recent NCTE report demonstrates, school censorship—including both challenges from outside groups and individuals and preemptive suppression by school and district officials—has perpetuated a stale, Cold-War era list of frequently assigned titles. Yet we discovered that, even in states like Tennessee, Texas, and Nebraska, where bans were common and responses to our survey were highest, state standards and district guidelines to fulfill them are a much greater influence on curriculum than school censorship. As we explore in the next section, censorship generates attention, but many of the greatest threats to a public, humanistic education are taking place behind district boardroom doors. We believe it is our shared responsibility to recognize and educate our post-secondary humanist colleagues about this shift that teachers are describing, in order to reclaim middle and high school English as a humanistic endeavor and to promote a healthier culture of reading in our nation.

A Broken Culture of Reading

Culture change is based in changing attitudes, in this case, about what reading and literature are for. One of the most alarming yet clear cut trends we can see in contemporary secondary literature classrooms is the shift from assigning whole novels and plays in English class to solely excerpts from literary and informational texts. If standardized tests only require students to analyze short passages, the rationale goes, students would be better off reading more excerpts than fewer whole texts. This rationale depends on a definition of reading as pure analytical skill, with little prosocial value. The resulting effect goes far beyond the high school classroom, including a steady decline in rates of adolescents reading for recreation and in the skills students bring to higher education. Students' impatience with reading longer texts, and their seemingly frequent inability to do so, has been the subject of media reports based principally on anecdotes that focus largely on higher education. Foregrounding the perspectives of college professors, these pieces have neglected the voices of classroom teachers, implicating them in the very system that squelches their values and aims.

Our survey data indicates that journalists are underestimating the effect of students' school-based reading experiences on the problem and failing to recognize its systemic roots. It's not that "middle and high schools have stopped" asking students to read whole books; it's that state education departments and districts have pressured—and in some cases ordered—teachers to stop teaching them, in pursuit of test scores. Simultaneously, especially in states with divisive concept legislation, novels have become risky in the face of community censors. There is, indeed, a crisis in the humanities, and it's secondary school English teachers, our most vital public humanists, whose mission has been most directly suppressed.

Some of these teachers do testify to the effects of school censorship. "I used to teach novels all the time," wrote a respondent from Georgia, for example. "Now, politics have killed that: a full-length book is a big red flag." A counterpart from Tennessee writes: "I'm worried about both my state and district. Just this past week 6 books were banned, in addition to the 30+ from earlier this year. I was called into the principal's office for teaching inappropriate texts; however, the pieces were from the county approved textbooks. It's a nightmare to navigate right now."

Yet censorship is only one of the factors driving books from the curriculum, and not the major one. For a question in which respondents were asked to select three factors that most influenced their text selections, our 1250 middle and high school English teachers identified pressure from parents and community groups infrequently (Table 1). The most common choices were state standards and district curricular guidelines. As may be expected, respondents who selected these constraints were less likely also to indicate "preference" as a factor in text selections. This negative correlation reflects wide disparities in teacher autonomy. Some teachers have relative freedom to choose texts they like or think will engage their students (although often, they are restricted to choosing titles from approved lists). Other teachers are more narrowly constrained by their district's mandate to teach curricula made in the image of standardized examinations.¹

State Standards	761
District curricular guidelines	625
Your preference	572
Department/school guidelines	499
Text availability	464
Student preference	447
State Legislation	107
School Board	99
Parents	95
Institutional Partner (largely for college-credit courses)	43
Community groups	38

Further compounding this problem is that many districts are spending heavily on adopting online curriculum packages, which compel teachers to adhere to a script. Most of the literary texts are excerpts or short works. "Our district adopted a disjointed, excerpt-heavy curriculum two years ago, and it is doing real damage to students' interest in reading," a teacher from Washington state reports. This curriculum "would have students reading a minimum of ZERO and a maximum of eight full texts over their four years of high school. I am unwilling to be complicit in this negligence, so I have added two additional full texts to the 10th grade curriculum." A teacher from South Carolina elaborated: "As I continue teaching, I feel more and more as if I'm just meeting standards of mediocrity. Scripted and standardized curriculums are made to push students through as much content as possible. Quantity over quality. There is no room, no time, for a student to digest the reading. There is no time for a novel study." This teacher describes pushing back against their school and district leaders in order to "teach one single novel every year," concluding: "I long for the day.... when I am treated as a trusted professional once again."

Our respondents reported teaching an average of 2.5 "whole book, whole class reads" (in English education parlance) across 1250 middle and high school English classes. We think this number is assuredly high, in light of the self-selecting nature of an on-line survey on the "State of Literature Instruction in American Schools." Teachers who assign little literature are less likely to participate.

Compared to twentieth-century text-selection surveys, the definition of reading a book has changed, too. In many classes, books never leave the classroom. They may be read aloud by the teacher, with the students following along. In an interview, one teacher explained that they didn't let students bring books home because they could not afford to replace lost ones. And about 35% of the reading for the courses reported on by our respondents was done on computers or electronic devices. Here, too, there were wide variations, with some courses entirely digital, others entirely print. (Unsurprisingly, courses that included more whole books tended to have more analog reading.) On the whole, however, reading books in school has become both more monitored and, at the same time, presents increased opportunity for distraction, given all of the other things students simultaneously use their devices for.²

In many parts of the country, district leaders or principals have prohibited whole books altogether, devoting the curriculum entirely to test preparation. This reminds us that school and district cultures get lost in averages; for some students, there is virtually no opportunity to read whole books in school for years on end. In these cases, there is often little teachers feel they can do. "In my 24 years of teaching English, I have seen a great decline in reading the whole text of novels," reports a teacher from Mississippi. "More emphasis is being placed on excerpts as a tool for state test preparation, which I believe is a detriment to students. Most of my 12th grade students have not read an entire novel since elementary." A teacher from Florida expresses profound despair: "As an English teacher, I observe that what was once the proud literary heritage of the discipline imparted unto young minds is now a lifeless shadow of what it was, sacrificed on the altar of std. testing. I've given up, I don't care anymore, and I'm just a passionless robot doing what I'm told until I retire."

For the most part, then, state education departments and district administrators have beaten Moms for Liberty and their allies to the punch, by preempting the teaching of books in the first place. As Faber, the former English professor in Fahrenheit 451, explains, the effect of outright censorship is somewhat superfluous: "'the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.'" In that novel, mass media commandeers the public's flickering attention. Our respondents, too, testified to this generalized state of distraction, and illuminated how censorship and standardization have combined to accelerate a vicious cycle in which students, already struggling, like many of us, to sustain their attention through books - get less and less practice doing so. "We have taken novels from our students," laments another South Carolina teacher. "We have taken reading from our youth during a literacy crisis."³

In this regard, it's not surprising that F451, as teachers often refer to it, is one book that seems to be rising in popularity, as so many others fall away. Its message about the foundational role literature plays in developing a civil society is validating beyond the narrower issue of censorship. That said, there was one book-bane Bradbury did not foresee. "We used to read Fahrenheit 451," writes a respondent from Ohio, "but have decided to cut that one as well because ELA 2 [tenth grade English] is heavily focused on testing preparation."

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Andrew Newman is a Professor of English at Stony Brook University. His writing on high school English appears in Public Books, The Conversation, English Journal and other venues. With Jonna Perrillo, he's the co-Director of "Making the Good Reader and Citizen: The History of Literature Instruction in American Schools," a summer professional development program for teachers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (2021, 2023, 2026).

Jonna Perrillo is an education historian and Professor of English Education at the University of Texas at El Paso. Most recently, she is the author of Uncensored: Educators Speak Out on Teaching in a Time of Book Bans (Harvard Education Press). In addition to co-directing the NEH institutes, her collaborative research with Andrew Newman has appeared in Time, The 74, and other venues and has been cited in The New York Times. 

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References

1. Chae and Ginsberg report that 20% of teachers they surveyed had complete autonomy and 20% have no autonomy in text selections. The State of Literature Use in Secondary English Classrooms: A Public Report, 2. ↩︎
2. The frequent references to diminished reading "stamina" suggest that N. Katherine Hayles' hypothesis about the generational shift from "deep attention" - "the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities" - to "hyper attention" has borne out. "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes," Profession, Modern Language Association, 2007, 187. ↩︎
3. Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451, 60th edition (Riverside: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 83. ↩︎