Ray Bradbury gave a characteristically prescient interview to the Seattle Times over 30 years ago, in 1993. “The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading,” the Fahrenheit 451 author said. “Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us — it’s all junk, all trash, tidbits of news.”
Then came the kicker: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Publishing houses and English teachers alike now lament that “nobody reads these days,” but it’s more complicated than adults scrapping their novels for more Facebook time. The stifling of literary exploration starts young — and it happens even in the classroom.
A middle school in Washington, D.C., recently decided that eighth graders simply cannot be expected to crack open a novel, thumb through its pages, and read from cover to cover. Never mind that adolescents have been skimming books for as long as SparkNotes has existed (and even well before then). Now, they simply won’t be expected to try.
One parent at the school wrote that “it can feel like the whole world is conspiring against our children’s ability to read and write in substantive ways — from texting to social media to AI …. Having an 8th grader read several novels as part of their English curriculum seems like another easy and effective way of pushing back on this.”
The supposed rationale for leaving novels in the dustbin is that reading excerpts from books will do a better job at preparing students for high school. But what about for life?
Unfortunately, this particular public school is far from alone. The New York Times reported last week that “many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year.”
Today’s high school curricula, the paper reports, “often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.” A cynic might say schools are simply preparing students to skim news articles in order to tweet about them.
Excerpts can provide information, of course. But there is little literary value in reading a handful of disconnected paragraphs. Many students will never have to wrestle with Shakespeare’s English or William Faulkner’s impossibly long sentences. They will just learn that William Shakespeare was a brilliant playwright and that Faulkner was a bit of an eccentric show-off. But they will never experience these things for themselves.
Educators may think they are merely setting realistic expectations or even helping students by teaching to the test, but the loss of long-form reading in schools, the only place some students may be expected to practice it, can only result in a more intellectually and emotionally stilted populace.
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“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors,” C.S. Lewis once said. “We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented.”
Whether or not today’s teachers know it, they are not just preventing their students from expanding their attention spans beyond TikTok shorts. They are trapping them in tiny worlds.