In her memoir, Dorothy Allison writes, “Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.”
Throughout my teaching career at independent schools, which began during the Clinton administration, I’ve also been telling students that reading a story all the way through is an act of love. It takes stillness and receptivity to realize this, it takes a willingness to enter the life of someone you’ll never meet, and it requires great practice.
It’s easy to join the hand-wringing chorus, blaming TikTok’s corn drill challenge, Jake Paul and their ilk for the diminuendo of Dickens. But we cannot let reading become another bygone practice. In their more than eight hours of screen time a day, on average, students navigate a galaxy of mediated experiences; schools need to be a bastion of the analog experience of the physical book.
The study of English involves more than reading. It includes written expression and the cultivation of an authentic voice. But the comprehension of literature, on which the study of English is based, is rooted in the pleasure of reading. Sometimes there will be a beam of light that falls on a room of students collectively leaning into a story, with only the scuffing sounds of pages, and it’s as though all our heartbeats have slowed. But we have introduced so many antagonists to scrape against this stillness that reading seems to be impractical.
The test scores released at the end of last month by the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal disturbing trend lines for the future of literacy in our country. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” on reading skills, meaning they were unable to determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument. This was the worst result in the exam’s 32-year history. To make matters worse, or perhaps to explain how we got here, the assessment reported that in 2023 only 14 percent of students said they read for fun almost every day, a drop of 13 percentage points since 2012.
In its attempt to make English more relevant, the National Council of Teachers of English — devoted to the improvement of language arts instruction — announced in 2022 that it would widen its doors to the digital and mediated world. The aim was to retreat from the primacy of the written word and invite more ideas to be represented by images and multimedia. “It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master,” the council said.
Around the time this decision was made, only 37 percent of American 12th graders were rated as proficient or better at reading. So the council’s determination that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education” seems highly questionable.
But literacy involves more than the scraps and fragments of mediated experiences. And reading, in particular, is an important exercise in inferiority, an insistence on listening to something without imposing your own design on it. It’s a grounding and an ascension. While we still have the institutions of school and class time as well as the books that line our walls, we need to challenge students with language and characters that may not come to them immediately but might with healthy discipline.
The notion that students can master a range of literary competencies is further diluting the already deluded approach to English class. To put the National Council of Teachers of English guidelines in action, teachers are substituting intertextuality and experiential learning for engaging with the actual text. What might have been a full read of “The Great Gatsby” is replaced by students reading the first three chapters, then listening to a TED Talk on the American dream, reading a Claude McKay poem, dressing up like flappers and then writing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the Prohibition. They’ll experience Chapters 4 through 8 only through plot summaries and return to their texts for the final chapter.
Going mostly by summary and assumption, students get thumbnail versions of things. They see the Cartesian grid, the lines on a map that chart the ocean, but they “don’t see the waves,” as the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff recently said about the reality in which many seem to be living in now. They see “the metrics that can be measured rather than the reality that those metrics are simply trying to approximate.” He is not an alarmist, but he is alarmed about losing the “in-between, this connective reality.”
Of all the things I could do in this world, I’m fortunate to peddle stories from faraway lands to young minds and see whether I can rouse their synapses. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I’d rather be watching sports or “Saturday Night Live” clips or sleeping, even. And it’s not easy for students to crack open a book, to decipher language written in a way they don’t speak and to codify multisyllabic names. (It’s also not easy for them to wake up at 5:30 for hockey practice, but they’re really good at this.)
The juniors and seniors I taught last fall had little knowledge of environmental activism or animal welfare when I handed them Richard Powers’s “Bewilderment,” about a precocious 9-year-old who is consumed with saving endangered species as his grieving father struggles to protect him. But the vicarious safety of fiction gave students an invitation to discuss planetary ethics and the power and limits of parental love. This pathos they raised will be a part of their forming identities. Had they merely read the summary, they would have seen many of the same words, but they’d have lacked the feeling part.
When a semester begins, I often give my students a wicked little essay by Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” She advises, “Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges, but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.” Like this, a classroom allows students to travel along with dockworkers and tycoons, tyrants and liberators. And when they have turned the last page, Woolf invites the reader to “leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge.”
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