Literacy is declining at a frightening rate. Public education has failed, and it’s time to change course. First, though, we need to identify the cause of the problem – and it probably isn’t what you might guess.
People Aren’t Reading Anymore
America has a reading problem. According the Department of Education, more than half of U.S. adults read below a 6th grade level. Meanwhile, the reading skill of students has been trending downward since the 1970s, and the unsurprising result is that everyone is spending less and less time curled up with a good book.
Teachers and researchers have spent a great deal of time discussing this, but I think they’re missing the single most important reason for the decline: the books being assigned in classrooms are absolutely miserable.
Classrooms are Filled with Miserable Books
Like most problems today, this one comes straight from the top… which in this case means higher academia. Here is a list of the most commonly referenced books on the AP Literature and Composition test from 1971 to 2019:
This is a test that many high school students take in order to obtain college credit for literature studies, and it offers a fairly good sense of which books colleges consider most important. If you look at the books favored by the AP test, there is a clear commonality among most of them: they are overwhelming biased towards expressions of hopelessness and negative emotion. More specifically, here are the books that might be reasonably categorized as being “depressing”:
You could argue over some of these, but I’ll point out that the books I’m not listing as depressing aren’t exactly flowers and rainbows – Great Expectations and Jane Eyre have plenty of downer moments, and Huck Finn is among Twain’s darker works.
But the books in this selection aren’t simply dark or tragic – they’re representatives of the most soul-sucking form of darkness. Most of them take the form of dry, miserable slogs through the drudgery of mundane of life, and nearly every single one of them follows characters whose lives are defined by the social injustices they encounter. The overall sentiment these stories convey is that everyone is adrift in a cruel and unjust world, and there is nothing anyone can really do to improve their situation. Out of the vast breadth of human literary works, modern academy is only truly capable of celebrating an astonishingly narrow category of writing: realist fiction that expresses a sense of utter hopelessness.
The Obsession with Misery in Literature is Extremely Damaging
Considering that young people today are in a state of mental health crises, who thought it would be a good idea to force books on them that basically scream “There is no hope. Everything is terrible, and unjust, and it always will be, and there is nothing you can do about.”? That isn’t a healthy message, and the fact that educators actively push it on their students isn’t just poor teaching: it’s genuinely sick – and I mean that in the literal sense of the word. If your goal was to transform students into insecure, passive, unambitious adults who wallow in self-pity, I’m not sure you would change anything at all about this list.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with teaching Othello, or Heart of Darkness, or Antigone – but when that’s the overwhelming emphasis, something is very badly wrong. The great sin of this list is one of omission as much as anything else. A proper literature curriculum should explore the full range of human emotions, and not merely indulge in whatever neuroses happen to be prevalent within contemporary English departments.
Where Are All the Other Books?
Where are the stories that exemplify the spirit of human enthusiasm, curiosity, adventure, ingenuity, faithfulness, or camaraderie? Where are creative works of fantasy, like Lord of the Rings, Lud-in-the-Mist, or The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath? Where is a single science fiction work by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, or Ray Bradbury? Where are culturally critical works, like Le Morte d’ Arthur, the Thousand and One Nights, or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio? Where are intellectually engaging works of mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, or Maurice Leblanc?
If you’ve spent any time around a college English department, you already know the answer: these masterpieces are all contemptuously dismissed as being “genre” works – which is to say, they fall into any genre of literature other than dry, mundane realism. At some point in the last century, English teachers became convinced that any work of fantasy, science fiction, or adventure is intrinsically childish, low-brow, and fundamentally unworthy of respect.
The great irony here is that the most revered works of literature throughout human civilization have traditionally been exactly the sort of thing modern scholars would regard as beneath their notice. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf, the Matter of Britain, A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all of these works would be neglected by modern scholars, if their importance hadn’t already been recognized by previous generations.
How to Fix Things
Now, as tragic as all of this is, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that everything is hopeless and miserable – that’s the job of literature professors, not me. For my part, I’m actually very optimistic that we can turn this around, as long as we’re willing to take the necessary steps.
Step 1 – Stop Listening to the “Experts”
The first thing we need to do is to stop listening to the people who got us into this mess. In the immortal words of Will Rogers, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” The English professors, teachers, textbook publishers, and other experts who are responsible for creating the current state of affairs have proven themselves entirely unworthy of our trust. Escaping their poor judgement is going to require a shift towards homeschooling, or at the very least, towards much greater parental involvement in school curriculum choices.
Step 2 – Give Students Books that Exemplify Positive Emotions
Second, we need to start giving children the sorts of fantastical, inspiring works of literary art that have been embraced by nearly all educated people up until the last century. Boys and girls should be spending their time reading about brave struggles against mighty dragons, treacherous expeditions into the depths of space, and plucky role models who overcome the challenges set before them with a combination of perseverance and wit – not self-pitying diatribes about the futilities of modern life. Children – and especially boys – will be far more likely to enjoy and engage with literature if they are given books that seek to build them up, rather than tear them down.
This means that it’s time to reformulate the Western Canon, discarding all the damage done to it by the past several generations of disingenuous scholars and creating something that offers positive cultural value. Here at Journey With a Destination, we’re working to do exactly this. We’ve recently published a three-volume set of books that are intended to introduce 7th graders to many of the world’s most foundational medieval legends and detective stories. The entire curriculum is available free of charge, and you can download it here. In the near future, we’ll be releasing books for other grade levels which will cover other forms of literature. Alternatively, you can work towards creating a personalized curriculum with the works of fiction that resonate best with you and your child. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to fill a shelf with a wide array of quality literature from many different genres.
Step 3 – Reject the Idea that Emotional Negativity is the Same as Literary Value
Third, we should challenge children with books that are hard and fun. Because the books prioritized in high schools and colleges are often unpleasant works of realism, students tend to receive the impression that harder books are also more boring, or even more emotionally painful to read. If everything above the 6th grade level is emotionally damaging, should we really be surprised that a majority of students stagnate before reaching that point?
The reality is that some of the most fulfilling and pleasurable works of literature are also some of the hardest. Reading Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is difficult for anyone, including college graduates, but I guarantee you that the average school boy would rather struggle through it, than to read Wuthering Heights. Give books to your children that will bring them satisfaction, and you will find that they are more than willing to wrestle with language that might otherwise seem too advanced. Help them learn what genres of literature they enjoy, and find the best, most sophisticated examples they can handle.
Step 4 – Lead by Action
Fourth, those of us who are parents or mentors need to read and be seen reading. We can tell children about the importance of reading all day long, but unless they see us demonstrate it by our actions, they won’t ever believe it.
Finally, please consider checking back for more material from Journey With a Destination. We’re continuously creating literature resources for homeschoolers and young families, and you can find much more throughout this website.
