The New Sobriety About Reading

Traditional ideas about what children should know and read suddenly don't sound quite so old-fashioned anymore

During my years at TIME magazine, the newsroom had a rule of thumb: If something happens once, it’s news. Twice is a coincidence. Three times? That’s a trend.

We’re not quite at three, but within the span of 10 days, The Atlantic and The New York Times opinion sections published surprising essays in support of Texas’s much-debated statewide curriculum and mandated reading list. Neither piece embraced Texas politics or dismissed concerns about religion in public schools. But both did something remarkable that would have been hard to imagine even a few months ago: They evaluated Texas’s efforts not on predictable culture-war grounds, but on their educational merits.

In his Times op-ed, veteran journalist James Traub writes that Texas is right to insist that students encounter a common body of important texts, including the Bible. Invoking E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s work on cultural literacy, he notes that we become good readers “by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information that allow us to make sense of a text.” He praises Texas for moving away from a skills-based, content-neutral approach to reading instruction.

Similarly, poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch’s essay for The Atlantic argues that “for a high school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.” He points out, for example, the value of the Psalms for understanding Lincoln’s speeches or the Book of Jonah for reading Moby-Dick.

Having spent two decades in the news business, I can attest that it would be easier, and surely more gratifying to the measurably left-leaning readership of both publications had each opted instead to publish yet another story about Texas’s “Bible-infused” curriculum or the supposed attempt by fundamentalists and right-wingers to sneak religious content into schools under the cover of a state-approved English language arts curriculum.

Instead, both the Times and The Atlantic put before readers the possibility that Texas’s curriculum architects and defenders (including yours truly) have been making a serious educational argument all along: that the Bible, along with Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespeare, and other canonical works, is not being taught as religious doctrine but as part of the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge that undergirds reading comprehension and that literate adults draw upon, often unconsciously, to make sense of literature, history, political rhetoric, and the English language.

I don’t want to overstate the case—remember, it takes three to make a trend—but it’s hard not to wonder if something remarkable is afoot. Call it a vibe shift, or perhaps simply a new sobriety about reading and what it will take to arrest its long decline.

Perhaps there is a third data point: The Atlantic’s current print edition cover story laments the decline of reading itself. Staff writer Rose Horowitch observes that Americans are reading dramatically less than they once did. She notes, almost in passing, that we are now more likely to spend leisure time gambling than reading books—a statistic that would have sounded absurd a generation ago. Hers is more than the elite hand-wringing of the ink-stained literati. Horowitch sees the decline of sustained reading as a civilizational risk, threatening not just literacy but the habits of attention, reflection, abstraction, and reasoned argument on which a literate culture—and ultimately democratic self-government—depends. “What’s at risk,” she writes, “is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself.”

Horowitch’s essay has been among the most discussed articles of the summer. It follows a steady drumbeat of similar pieces rehearsing a now familiar parade of horribles: Reading achievement has declined. Teachers and college professors report that students struggle to complete whole books. Reading stamina is collapsing as smartphones compete relentlessly for kids’ attention. Artificial intelligence makes it easier for students to produce the appearance of having read without necessarily reading—or thinking—very much at all.

When you’re no longer confident that schools are producing capable readers at all, old arguments about what children should read—and how they should be taught to read—begin to sound different. If you’re honest and fair, you become open to other ideas.

The change in mood has been building for several years, ever since Emily Hanford began publishing and broadcasting her series of public radio reports on the failure of American schools to align instruction with the “science of reading.” Hanford didn’t discover anything new or novel about how children learn to read. Cognitive scientists, reading researchers, dyslexia advocates, and a determined minority of teachers had been accumulating evidence for decades that many accepted classroom practices rested on surprisingly weak foundations. But her reporting, culminating in the popular series Sold a Story, asked a devastatingly simple question: If we already know a great deal about how children learn to read, why aren’t schools teaching them that way? Many states responded by passing laws mandating instruction and teacher training grounded in learning science. School districts abandoned balanced literacy. Parents who had never heard the phrase “three-cueing” suddenly knew exactly what it meant and why it’s not a very good way to learn to read. Lawmakers banned the practice in more than a dozen states.

All of this has done more than change reading instruction. It has also made it respectable, on both sides of the political aisle, to wonder whether education orthodoxy is often wrong. It helped that Hanford’s landmark reporting ran on public radio, which tends to enjoy revered status on the left. If the teaching profession can be shown to have been misled about something as basic as teaching kids to decode, what else might they be mistaken about?

For years, much of American education had tremendous confidence in a child-centered, pedagogically progressive vision of literacy. (In this context, “progressive” refers to an educational philosophy, not political affiliation or policy stance.) Students would become readers through authentic encounters with books. Choice would foster engagement. Reading comprehension was treated as a transferable skill. Teachers would facilitate rather than prescribe. Students would construct meaning rather than receive it.

The work of journalists like Horowitch and Hanford, along with declining NAEP scores, has made the failure of these ideas difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. The science of reading offers insights that sit in tension with these long-dominant practices. The first phase of the science of reading movement focused, appropriately, on decoding or “phonics.” But now the conversation is shifting toward harder questions. Once students can decode, what enables them to understand what they read? The answer turns out to sound remarkably traditional—and prescriptive. Fluency. Vocabulary. Background knowledge. Familiarity with canonical texts. The very things that education spent years deemphasizing have returned to the center of the discussion. Indeed, there’s rising interest in classical education, with its emphasis on the Great Books and old-school pedagogy. That doesn’t mean every item on Texas’s reading list is beyond debate. It does suggest, however, that confidence in the educational assumptions of the last two or three generations has begun to ebb.

It is fair to wonder if we are approaching the end of education’s postmodern moment—its rejection of a fixed canon, deference to students’ personal interests, and fixation on “culturally relevant” curriculum. Neither Derrida nor Foucault have ever been K–12 faculty lounge staples, but to have been a teacher in the last several decades has invariably meant acculturating oneself to a broad and largely unquestioned educational sensibility that is “student centered,” skeptical of authority, and allergic to prescription. Common curricula yielded to student choice. Knowledge yielded to skills. The canon yielded to personalization. Teaching itself yielded to facilitation: Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage. None of these shifts were ill-intended. But in the aggregate, they conspired to enshrine a deep suspicion of the idea that adults should decide what children ought to know.

Accuse me of wish-casting and I won’t argue the point, but I detect a change in the weather. The shift isn’t toward traditionalism or conservatism per se. It’s simply less certain. It puts back in play many ideas that had long fallen into disfavor or been discarded:

Maybe adults really do have to decide some things for children.

Maybe students need to read books they would never choose on their own.

Maybe knowledge has to be deliberately sequenced and explicitly taught.

Maybe a common curriculum is not a tool of oppression but an instrument of democratic inheritance and equity.

I’m still not ready to declare a trend. Two opinion pieces, even in unlikely outlets, do not constitute an intellectual realignment. But there’s another lesson I learned in the news business: By the time everyone recognizes that a trend exists, it’s usually been underway for quite some time.


This essay first appeared in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly newsletter.