Start Assigning Great Books in English Class

A recent EdWeek op-ed offers a revealing look into how middle and high school literature classes have been drained of their substance.

Editor’s Note: Regular readers of The Next 30 Years will already know Annika Hernandez, even if they haven’t yet seen her byline. She has been a frequent researcher, editor, and intellectual sounding board for many of the essays published here, helping to sharpen arguments and ground them in classroom reality. This piece marks her first solo contribution to the newsletter.

Annika brings a rare combination of deep humanistic training and practical teaching experience to the questions she takes up here. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies—its Great Books curriculum—she went on to teach middle school literature and a high school Great Books seminar at Chandler Preparatory Academy, a Great Hearts charter school in Phoenix. That background gives her an unusually clear lens on what it means to take timeless texts seriously in real classrooms, with real students. I’m delighted to feature her voice here for the first time. – RP

A couple of weeks ago, EdWeek published an op-ed arguing that schools shouldn’t assign classic novels, titled “Stop Assigning Boring Books in English Class.” The piece was written by Erich May, superintendent of Brookville Area School District in Pennsylvania, and unintentionally serves as a primer on the misguided ideas that have drained middle and high school English classes of their substance.

May, a former high school English teacher, opens the piece by declaring, “Frankly, it’s a mistake to assign anything from the [Victorian] era—or anything older. Forget about Charles Dickens and Jane Austen; forget about Chaucer and Shakespeare.” May explains that these works are “neither accessible nor interesting to most high schoolers” and that schools ought to “leave the canon to the English majors.”

Alarmed by declines in recreational reading in America, he writes, “Are [teenagers] reading on the bus? No. Are they reading on the plane? No…And what are we doing about it? Assigning Crime and Punishment!”

To be clear, there is little evidence that we are doing any such thing. Indeed, there’s been a great deal of reporting lately about the paucity of books in American classrooms. According to a forthcoming survey previewed in The New York Times, English teachers assign only 2.7 books per year, on average, and Wonders, one of the most popular reading curricula in the US, includes no books in grades 4–6. And when schools do assign books, they aren’t Dostoevsky. The most common high school books tend to be short, relatively modern works like The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, and Night, as well as a smattering of Shakespeare.

So, May is perhaps not being as transgressive as he thinks he is. Other than excising Shakespeare, he’s essentially advocating for the status quo.

Still, as a former English teacher myself, I found the article interesting because it illustrates many of the assumptions that shape middle and high school literature classes today. It’s worth identifying and probing some of them to better understand why, despite the surface-level allure of these ideas, we’re not doing students any favors by cutting them off from the canon.

Assumption 1: Schools should assign the books that they think students will enjoy the most.

May argues that “English teachers should be instilling in students a love of reading—or even just a willingness to read” and that there’s “no excuse for assigning inaccessible or boring novels and plays when there are so many books out there that teens would be more likely to enjoy.” He makes some recommendations: dystopian works like 1984, Brave New World, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun; Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which “anticipates the narrow beauty ideals” of social media; and Stephen King novels.

There are some good books on that list, and as May points out, Ishiguro and Morrison are Nobel Prize winners. The problem isn’t May’s preferred books but his assumption that the criterion for a good read in English class is the uncultivated tastes of American teenagers. Doug Lemov has written, “If you had asked me what I wanted to read in 7th grade, it would have been a sports biography. But a teacher handed me The Old Man and the Sea instead. At first, I thought: no way. But not for long. Soon I saw that a book was something much more substantial than I had previously believed.”

Lemov realized that literature is not merely a source of entertainment, but also of meaning and beauty. This is the job of educators: to expose students to worthwhile books that they wouldn’t pick up otherwise. Often, that will require assigning some works that students initially deem “boring.”

Furthermore, if May is correct that teens are naturally drawn to dystopian fiction, that isn’t necessarily desirable. There may be plenty of young people who wish to learn more about political philosophy and totalitarianism, and 1984 is an excellent way to do that. But for others, the casual interest in dystopias may have more to do with teenage cynicism, the suspicion that adult institutions are irredeemably phony. Recently, schools have taken a strange turn toward encouraging and amplifying that cynicism, a phenomenon that Robert Pondiscio calls “the unbearable bleakness of American schooling.” Assigning books based on student taste reinforces, rather than elevates, students’ existing views and mores.

Assumption 2: English class is about developing a set of cognitive skills, and it doesn’t matter what you read to develop them.

In addition to a love of reading, May wants students to develop certain skills through studying literature. He explains:

Comprehension is crucial to our students’ success and the maintenance of our democracy. Literary analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are skills that carry over from sonnets and short stories to movies and stump speeches…Our society can’t succeed if its citizens can’t think for themselves. Those goals are more important than reading any particular piece of literature. After all, what’s at stake is more than shallow aesthetic preferences; it’s the capacity for deep thought that literacy unlocks.

Here, May offers a skills-based vision of education. To his credit, the literary analysis skills he champions are less vacuous than the typical, vague paeans to “critical thinking” and “collaboration.” He seems to understand that part of why you take English is to hone the skills of close reading—to be able to identify literary devices like metaphors and symbols and make a claim, supported with textual evidence, about what the author is trying to do.

Nevertheless, it’s an incomplete account of what English class is for. Many educators have forgotten that, no less than history and science, English class exists to deliver a body of knowledge: specifically, knowledge of the literary canon.

What is canonical knowledge good for? To start with, it develops the literary analysis skills for which May advocates. Books, especially good ones, are full of allusions to other books. They also share certain cultural symbols, images, tropes, and phrases (think blind seers, Christ figures, a cup of hemlock, a ghost in armor, “abandon hope,” “like the generations of leaves…”). To identify those literary elements—and, more dauntingly, appreciate the full scope of their meaning—you need to be conversant in the canon. This is why it will not suffice to read only modern books. Like it or not, books are in conversation with one other, and as C.S. Lewis put it, “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.”

All of this connects back to “cultural literacy,” the insight of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. An educated person is expected to know what “to be or not to be” means and where it comes from. We might think that’s unfair, but we cannot wish it away.

A final note in this vein. In addition to literary analysis, May suggests that English class should teach students “deep thinking” and the ability to “think for themselves.” If that’s our goal, it’s hard to think of a better way to accomplish it than exposing students to the best that’s been thought and said—broadening students’ horizons and inviting them to join the great conversation.

Assumption 3: Classic literature is only for intellectual elites.

May eventually clarifies that he’s not actually against assigning Shakespeare, only assigning him to certain students. He writes,

I don’t mean to reject the canon. Shakespeare is special, of course, and so are Milton and Spencer [sic], Browning and Blake, and countless other playwrights, poets, and novelists from the 1500s through the 1800s. But we are teaching teens for whom the 20th century is long ago, for whom screens have replaced paper as the dominant medium, and for whom even this sentence is a long one. Leave the canon to the English majors.

This reminds me of a great line from the novelist Francine Prose: “We’ve forgotten the difference between a student who has never read a nineteenth-century novel and an idiot incapable of reading one.”

When I taught high school English, one of my students was a charismatic, popular boy and the captain of the football team, a struggling reader who, as far as I know, didn’t plan to attend college. All of the students at the school were required to take drama, and in his junior year, the boy was assigned to play Macbeth in the school play. Something about Shakespeare’s character spoke to him. Long after the production ended, teachers were raving about his performance, how he would pause before lines as if mulling them over. He later chose Macbeth as the subject of his senior thesis.

About 40 percent of American 18- to 24-year-olds attend college, and of that group, less than 3 percent major in English. And even those students aren’t necessarily reading the classics; according to the Open Syllabus database of the most-assigned books in college literature courses, Homer is #89, Emily Brontë is #98, and Dostoevsky doesn’t even make the list. If we are to “leave the canon to the English majors,” that means only a tiny group of elite students gets to read the greatest books of our civilization.

That’s a loss, because these books speak to everyone, including academically struggling, screen-addicted teenagers in May’s rural Pennsylvania school district. A distinctive feature of education in our liberal democracy is that we aim to create an “aristocracy of anyone,” not an educated few.

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I don’t wish to minimize the challenges of teaching literature to young people in 2026. But while it’s touching that May wants students to love reading, he risks making the same mistake as Lucy Calkins, author of the discredited “Units of Study” curriculum: failing to appreciate that before students can love a subject, they need sound instruction in it. That means exposing them to great works outside of their narrow frame of reference, building their knowledge of literary history, and recognizing that “what is best for the best, is best for all.”

At the beginning of his op-ed, May accuses the prose in The Scarlet Letter and Wuthering Heights of being “ugly.” It’s not ugly—it’s hard. And in education, the most difficult pursuits are also the most vital.