Parents at Deal Middle School in Northwest Washington D.C. were recently shocked to learn that their 8th-grade students would no longer read full-length books. School leaders at the wealthiest public middle school in the nation’s capital told parents that reading short passages will better prepare students for high school.
The rationale for this change fails even a basic smell test. Higher orders of learning, which should start in high school and continue through college, involves grappling with challenging texts and full-length fiction and nonfiction books. They are not something to be avoided but embraced as a means of guiding students to think more deeply.
A charitable explanation for eschewing full-length books could be that the preponderance of them are unreadable. Rick Hess has pointed out the failings of academic publishing, where “fetishizing the trapping of sophistication at the expense of actual knowledge and instruction” is all too common. Many scholarly books and papers are dry, dense tomes intended to appeal to a specific audience of academics who may never read them. One university press editor said most of his books sell just 300 copies. As Hess writes of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World, 2E, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons (The MIT Press, 2024), the author’s concern with minutiae “turns a significant, lively chunk of contemporary history into a lifeless exercise in arcana.” If academics don’t expect anyone to read their work, it makes it easier for those inclined to ask less of students earlier in their academic career. Books published for the sake of publishing, not reading, may inadvertently undermine the cause of reading at a time when it is in steep decline. Students may wonder why they should even bother with reading if those at the summit of their craft don’t really care about an audience.
In 1970, George Steiner, the 20th-century literary critic, writer, and philosopher, wrote, “The line between education and ignorance is no longer self-evidently hierarchic. Much of the mental performance of society now transpires in a middle zone of personal eclecticism.” There’s no agreed-upon reading list that defines what it means to be “educated,” and the ongoing culture wars over what books should be assigned in public schools reflect this vacuum.
Nor is there a common definition of what makes reading interesting as opposed to boring or challenging. The value of literature is often in the eye of the beholder; it is the role of schools to expose students to many kinds of books so they can develop the personal eclecticism that drives society today. Similarly, academics should want people to read their books and ponder the questions they raise. As Steiner also wrote, “To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding to fragments of reciprocal irony or isolation.” The job of the academic should be, in part, to guide students to ask those larger questions and begin answering them.
We live in an age of vast written content, even as video seems to command ever more of our attention. Amidst the ceaseless deluge of op-eds, blog posts, essays, social media posts, and books, there’s an urge for writers to write to the nichest of niches just as there is an urge for consumers to consume the most digestible content. Both tendencies fail to serve audiences young and old. The larger question facing authors, perhaps, is why write at all?
In a senior history seminar back in college, I wrote a paper on the role of authenticity in defining American history. This was 24 years ago, but I think about this paper often. Writers all search for authenticity in our own lives, some sort of meaning for our endeavors whether they be about history or political culture or sports. People often confuse being authentic with being an expert, or writing the definitive book, or impressing some audience somewhere, which of course only serves to make the result less authentic. The best writers have something to say regardless of whether there’s an audience eager to hear them.
