Why Schools Should Assign Books

In the Schoolhouse, Vol. 9

In the Schoolhouse is a biweekly newsletter about schoolteaching in the 21st century. This semester, I am on sabbatical as a Marcus Bach Fellow at the University of Iowa. To stay connected with fellow educators and celebrate their work, I am launching The Book Talks, an interview series in which teachers will discuss their favorite books to teach.

Are you a teacher at the K-12 or college level? Is there a book you look forward to teaching year after year, or a new book on your syllabus you’re excited about sharing with students? I hope you’ll consider being an interviewee to share your experiences and insights! There is a link to an interest form at the bottom of this post.

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In recent months education reporters have sounded alarms about declining numbers of books on syllabi at elite colleges, as well as declining numbers of tweens and teens who read for fun. It’s possible the panic about books in schools is a little over-inflated. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to accurately measure how many K-12 teachers nationwide are teaching books and how many books are on those teachers’ syllabi. Not to mention the impossibility of accurately assessing how many students are reading the books assigned to them. More research needs to be done on this phenomenon/crisis-if-it-really-is-a-crisis.

But sit in any faculty lounge for half an hour and you’ll witness at least one teacher wringing his hands about the kids not reading. At the same time, the vast majority of teachers I know and have worked with do continue to teach books. There are a lot of us. This is part of why I’m launching The Book Talks, to put attention on how many of us are doing this work. (See below!)

I’ve been thinking about the State of Reading in the larger context of record-high rates of absenteeism in schools nationwide and across socioeconomic levels. Journalists, teachers, and school administrators seem fixated on identifying incentives to keep kids in school, some as desperate and asinine as routine Pajama Days. But offering incentives for attending school is fundamentally different from establishing reasons for engaging in schooling. Books can offer them.

Building a literate society should not be—and does not have to be—based on a carrot-and-stick paradigm, which will further exhaust an already stretched-to-breaking generation of teachers and will do nothing to seriously engage the minds of children. Regardless of the number of teachers teaching books, the number of books on syllabi, or the number of students reading them, now seems a ripe moment to consider the role and value of full-length books in schools.

It stands to reason that at least some schools have done away with books in the Era of Standardized Testing. As students have seen fewer books and more informational excerpts and news articles in their classrooms, the message they’ve received about the purpose of reading has shifted: Your job is to succeed on a test. I believe standardized tests have a place in our educational ecosphere, but the fact is that fixation on test scores, particularly since the passage of No Child Left Behind, has fed the idea that reading is ultimately for analyzing and processing data.

So it’s possible that fewer students are leaving high school having experienced books (or even a book) at intellectual and emotional levels. They may be skeptical of the idea, if they have even considered it, that reading books in a community can help its members observe and grapple with their shared reality. Curiosity to understand that reality is of utmost importance now, given the fact that children in K-12 schools have no conscious memory of a country where deep political polarization was not the norm.

Most of the critical reading skills students are asked to demonstrate on standardized tests do not require engagement with lengthy narratives. To win the metrics game, you don’t have to know any stories; but all of the emotional reward that comes from reading comes from narrative. It comes from a story’s ability to lock a reader into a trajectory with stakes. Even young children can experience and appreciate this phenomenon. Will Amelia Bedelia keep her job through all her domestic mishaps? A first grader can feel this question with as much urgency and anticipation as an eighth grader wondering if Atticus Finch will win his case, or a tenth grader unsettled by the sense that something is about to go awry at one of Gatsby’s lavish parties.

When I was a high school teacher (2014-2022), my students rarely saw me reading. For every teacher everywhere, grading and lesson planning is forever in competition with reading. I realize this is nonsensical, but over time I got less comfortable with the prospect of getting caught with a book in school. To children and adults alike, having a device in front of you looks like work. It looks like you analyzing and processing data. Having a book in front of you looks like…not work.

How often do students see their teachers reading or hear them talking with a colleague about a book they both read? For all the data we have on kids and the books they aren’t reading, I feel pretty certain few researchers have data on this question. My hypothesis is that these numbers have dwindled in direct correlation with the declining numbers of young people reading for fun. Decreased stamina for reading affects all of us, after all, not just children.

Jamie Gregory

, Librarian Extraordinaire at the high school where I formerly taught, distributed laminated signs to all the teachers so we could advertise our current reads outside our classroom doors. Sometimes mine sparked a conversation with a student. Once, a student recommended a book to me. But those things happened rarely. And students rarely saw me or any of my colleagues actually engaged in the act of reading. The lesson was clear: “Work,” even for educators, happens on a device, never in a book.

Most resistance to the decline of book-teaching in schools emphasizes the benefits of reading for individuals, like developing a deeper intimacy with fictional characters and more sophisticated forms of empathy for real people as a result, as well as more sustained habits of attention and persistence. But what are we hoping children will persist for? Do we even know anymore?

Ultimately, there are no tests or grades or report cards. Children will only develop a sense that life has meaning to the extent that they are able to partake in a shared reality together, one with stakes they collectively agree on, even if they disagree vigorously about how to respond politically and culturally to those stakes.

Fragmenting that reality–shattering its potential to be elucidated in narrative form–is social media’s raison d’etre.

Jonathan Haidt

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Jean M. Twenge

have researched and written at length about rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among teens since smartphones became ubiquitous around 2012. Part of the problem is that so much of children’s socialization now happens virtually rather than in institutional spaces and rarely involves intergenerational interaction. Books can resist that trend. They can at least provide young people with alternative ways of experiencing school and time, even if they can’t reverse all the consequences of the colonization of attention.

As a Rhetoric instructor at the University of Iowa, I teach Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). In 1990, Postman published The End of Education, in which he wrote that our genius as a species “lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future...Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.”

Students are telling us as much by not showing up to their classrooms consistently. Most children, even the youngest of them, have a deep sense of when school is compulsory for reasons other than its actually being valuable. Teaching books can help us reanimate the value of school. Reading in community makes learning a collective experience and endeavor. Technology, which was supposed to bond us and bestow upon us the Luxury of Time, does much the opposite.

For Neil Postman, “education” referred to the process by which people felt themselves being altered through encounters with complex texts. For him, the point of reading—and school—was to preserve one’s capacity to change and be changed by narrative. He differentiated between motivations and reasons for learning, which exist inherently and in the absence of motivation or incentive.

Themed dress-up days will not fix students’ apathy towards school, nor their atrophying reading skills. Neither will home visits to determine why students are chronically absent or sending texts or postcards to parents to alert them to the number of classes their child has missed, though these measures are well-intentioned and not for nothing. These initiatives are more concerned with accountability than with learning, to say nothing of intellectual growth, social-emotional development, or community formation. None of these measures will give students a sense of who they are in the world, who they want to be, what their society requires of them, the stakes that require their attention and energy, and, ultimately, the ends to which they’d like to hold themselves accountable. If children grow up knowing that books can guide them through all of this, we won’t need Pajama Day to keep kids in the schoolhouse.

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As mentioned at the top of this post, I will be launching The Book Talks in February, a series of interviews with fellow teachers committed to Fighting the Good Fight for Full-Length Books. The goal is to celebrate teachers who teach books and share great literature and ideas for teaching. Below, I’ve included some notes about the project and a link for proposals at the bottom.

The Book Talks Submission Notes

• K-12 teachers and college instructors are welcome to participate. There is no hierarchy of valuable books. Do your kindergarteners sprint to your classroom to hear you read a Berenstain Bears story? Let’s talk. Did you have a particularly good experience teaching War and Peace to your college juniors last term? Let’s talk. Are you a retired educator who thinks a particular book you taught decades ago should come back into fashion? Let’s talk.

• Interviews will be published as text, similarly to this 2007 interview with Neil Postman. Though I will not be publishing audio/video, contributors are welcome to do their interviews via recorded Zoom. If you prefer questions via a few rounds of email, that works, too!

• If you are on Substack, I will make you a guest contributor so we can publish your post jointly.

• Even if you aren’t on Substack, all contributors will have editing privileges.

• I am not planning to charge for this newsletter, so this is not a paying gig.

I’ll start publishing sometime in February. If you think books are great and kids should read them, and if you’d like to be featured as an interviewee on The Book Talks, click this link and fill out the interest form!