I have said before that I love Peter Greene. He has turned his four decades of experience as a high school English teacher into a compendium of wisdom. He knows when to listen carefully to new ideas and when to throw them out with the garbage. He usually says what I have been thinking, but writes it up better than I could. This is one of those wonderful pieces that are trademark Peter Greene.
He writes:
Last week I had a bluesky post blow up, a simply referral to Dana Goldstein’s New York Times pieceabout how nobody reads whole books in school any more. It’s a good piece, pretty fairly balanced even as it points out the role of technology, Common Core, and testing in the decline of whole-book reading (and allows some folks to try to defend the not-very-defensible).
The article itself drew well over a thousand comments, most of them supportive of the idea of reading whole books. The responses to my post were a more mixed bag, with responses that included variations on “Students would read more books if they were assigned good stuff like [insert your fave here] and not crap like [insert author who bugs you and/or Shakespeare here].” Also variations on “Aren’t books over, really?” and its cousin “I didn’t read any books and I am just swell.”
Goldstein gives Common Core a few graphs of defense, because the world still includes people who think it’s great. I am not one of those people, and I have filled up a lot of space explaining why. But in the drop in book reading we can see a couple of the long-term ill effects of the Core (including all the versions hiding in states under an assumed name).
One problem is the Core’s focus on reading as a set of discrete skills that exist in some sort of vacuum absent any content, like waves without water or air. The Core imagined reading as a means of building those skills, and imagined in that context that it doesn’t matter what or how much you read. If today’s lesson is on Drawing Inferences, it doesn’t matter whether you read a scene from Hamlet or a page from a description of 12th century pottery techniques. You certainly don’t need to read the entire work that either of those excerpts came from. Read a page, answer some questions about inferences. Quick and efficient.
And that emphasis on speed and efficiency is another problem.
The Big Standardized Test doesn’t just demand that students get the right answer. It demands that they come up with the right answer RIGHT NOW! And that scaffolds its way backwards through the whole classroom process. The test prep emphasizes picking the One Correct Answer to the question about the one page slice o’writing, and it emphasizes picking it quickly. There is no time allotted for mulling over the reading, no time for putting it in the context of a larger work, certainly no time for considering what other folks have thought about the larger work.
To read and grapple with a whole book takes time. It takes reflection, and it can be enhanced by taking in the reactions of other readers (including both fancy pants scholars and your own peers). I reread Hamlet every year for twenty-some years, each time with a different audience, and I was still unpacking layers of ideas and language and understanding at the end. I taught Nickel and Dimed for years, and the book would lend itself very easily to being excerpted so that one only taught a single chapter from it; but the many chapters taken together add up to more than the sum of their parts. And it takes a while to get through all of it.
If you think there is more value in reading complete works than simply test prep for reading “skills,” then you have to take the time to pursue it.
It is easy as a teacher to get caught up on the treadmill. There is so much you need to cover, and only so much time. There were many times in my career when I had to take a deep breath and walk myself back from hammering forward at breakneck speed. And education leaders tend only to add to the problem and pressure (the people who want you to put something else on your classroom plate rarely offer any ideas about taking something off to make room).
And look– I don’t want to fetshize books here. We English teachers love our novels, but it’s worth remembering that the novel as we understand is a relatively recent development in human history. Some works that we think of as novels weren’t even first published as books; Dickens published his works as magazine serials. And reading novels was, at times, considered bad for Young People These Days. For that matter, complaints about how Kids These Days don’t read full works takes me back to a college class where we learned that pre-literate cultures would sometimes bemoan the rise of literacy– “Kids These Days don’t remember the old songs and stories any more.”
Reading entire works is not automatically magical or transformative. But there is a problem that comes with approaches to comprehending the world that emphasize speed rather than understanding, superficial “skills” over grappling with the ponderable complexities of life. The most rewarding relationships of your life will probably not be the ones that are fast and superficial. And I am reflexively suspicious of anyone who does not themselves want to be seen, heard, or understood on anything beyond a swift and shallow read.
If education is about helping young humans grasp the better version of themselves while understanding what it means to be fully human in the world (and I think it is) then students need the opportunity to grapple with works that mimic the depth and size and complexity of real humans in the real world.
The case has been made for slow school, analogous to the slow food movement, and it can have its problems, like fetishizing a selective view of tradition. But I like the basic idea, the concept of slowing down enough to be able to take in and digest large slices of the world. That should certainly take the form of engaging students with complete works, but I expect that it can take other forms as well.
Test-centric schooling has narrowed and shallowed our concept of education in this country, and while there has never been a reason to stop discussing this issue over the last twenty years, much of the conversation has moved on to other issues, like the current emphasis on culture panic and dismantling the system. But we can do better, dig deeper, tap richer educational veins, if we are just honest about our goals and our obstacles. I hope we’ll get there before my children and grandchildren get too much older.
Diane Ravitch's blog 