Friends, I have a question: If you are a parent, I am curious what your child is reading in school. Please write to me. I am mostly interested in junior high and high school students, but if you have thoughts on what your younger child is reading in school, I will take those.
Here is why. I am at least beginning to do some reporting for a long-planned article about the disappearance of books—that is, books read in English class, as literature—from high school curricula. This topic has been covered elsewhere, I know, but I have not yet read the piece I want to write, exploring the extent of books’ disappearance from schools and the root causes—and why the degradation of English/lit curricula is so much worse than anything going on with math/science.
A few basic observations undergirding the story I want to write (and here I should say that while, admittedly, I am beginning with some hunches, drawn from anecdotes in my own life and the observations of friends, if my reporting doesn’t bear out these hunches, of course I’ll revise my conclusions):
• When I was in junior high—I turn 50 this summer, so do the math—junior high students were expected to read books, in school. I went to a fairly mediocre private school, and I remember reading The Pearl, by John Steinbeck, and The Human Comedy, by William Saroyan. I think we read about four or five books a year, not much. But something. I also remember that my friends who went to the adequate but unremarkable big public junior high school were assigned The Deerslayer, by James Fenimore Cooper, as summer reading. That book is not easy, and it’s over 500 pages long. I remember my friends all sharing the yellow Cliff’s Notes companion to the book, which they read in place of the book. But still—the school had aspirations for them.
• Today, the children I know in the public schools of my city almost never read a book. This is true in junior high, and it’s true in high school. The reading in English class is a mix of poems, short personal essays, excerpts from books, and op-eds or opinion pieces. When I ask teachers why they do not assign books, they have told me that students won’t read for homework. The same students will, they say, do problem sets in math or science, but they will not read books.
• This all holds true even at “excellent” or “competitive” schools, including several nearby high schools whose top students regularly get into Ivy League and other elite colleges. These schools seem to have built their reputation as excellent schools, and to reap the garlands of these college acceptances, entirely because of their excellence in STEM: a lot of their students take calculus, or engineering, or coding. In terms of extracurriculars, they have Matheletes and robotics teams and other science-oriented clubs. They have numerous AP offerings in math and science. In other words, “excellence” means “excellence in STEM.”
• There are caveats here. I know of one small charter high school, with an explicit social-justice curriculum, whose students read some works of literature that relate to the social-justice, social-studies aims of the curriculum. Some high schools have a senior AP English class in which books are read—though relatively few, compared to what was expected of me in AP English—but they have no classes in their earlier grades that seem to be stepping stones to the AP class. That is, students read 0 or 1 book a year for grades 9-11, but then, if they happen to have developed a passion for reading or writing—or, more likely, if they come from a home in which such a passion was passed on to them—there is a class they can take senior year. (It doesn’t take a genius to see how this model reinforces inequality: children from print-rich households, or whose parents read to them, find their way to an elite class in 12th grade; students who lack that background are presumed not to have proclivities for reading and writing.)
• It may be that the achievement gap is just much harder to close with reading than with, say, math; that if you take a child with weak academics, or low self-confidence in academics, the objective gains needed to be a strong math student are more easily taught, and mastered, than the squishier, more subjective strengths needed for literature.
• There is also the fact that a subject like calculus can’t be faked or fudged. The teacher either knows calculus or doesn’t, and the students either learn it or they don’t. But the ability to finish a book and then write or say some interesting things about it? It’s easier for the whole class—teacher and students alike—to pretend they are reading, then pretend they are analyzing or discussing, without anyone ever noticing how few clothes the emperor is wearing.
• My concern here is not the future of books, or book sales. In a country of 330 million people, there will always be a market for literature, and there will always be some jobs for people like me, who produce it. The schools don’t teach movies or video games, and yet there exist robust markets for movies or video games. One could even make the argument that as long as students have basic literacy and writing skills—can read fluently, and write a cover letter, say, or a thank-you note—there is no reason for schools to march them through long books of the kind they will never write. Public schools don’t teach us to watch (or make) movies or ballet; those who are interested, and exposed, come to those arts on their own.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up on reading works of literature, having those texts in common. And we largely have given up. At least in our schools. The decision was made without any debate, or any attempt to reach consensus. It seems to have had something to do (and this will be a subject of my reporting) with the common core, No Child Left Behind, pandemic, smart phones, teacher shortages, and fears that so many of our classic texts have become “problematic” or politically incorrect.
Anyway, you can likely tell that, so far, these thoughts are half-formed at best. You can help me form them better, by writing to let me know, with as much specificity as possible, what your children (or, if you are a teacher, your students) are reading, and in which grades. Thanks!
Why books and stuff matter
If you have read this far, and are scratching your head and asking, “But why does reading matter?,” let me tell you a quick story.
I had a rather chilling conversation the other day with an older gent, born right after World War II, Jewish, on the political left. The conversation worked its way around to Israel/Gaza, and he said to me, about the Jews who settled in Israel after World War II, “They should have just all gone to Brooklyn.”
I have heard versions of this line from time to time over the years, expressions of disdain, dismay, or even disgust at the Holocaust survivors who were so silly as to settle in a desert populated by Arabs (and, yes, some Jews) when they could have gone to Canarsie or Park Slope—or maybe even Miami Beach! Or Beverly Hills! Or the Upper West Side! Why, they could have taken in Broadway shows instead of sweating in the sun, trying to make the rocks give water. If only the Zionists hadn’t lured them to Palestine.
The problem with this argument, of course, is that the United States wouldn’t take these refugees. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, passed in a time of fervent nativism (and antisemitism), severely curtailed the number of Jews (and others) who could enter the country. Here’s a bit more on that law:
In 1924, the United States Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, revising American immigration laws around individuals’ “national origins.” The act set quotas, a specific number of visas available each year for each country. The quotas, inspired in part by American proponents of eugenics, were calculated to privilege “desirable” immigrants from northern and western Europe. They limited immigrants considered less “racially desirable,” including southern and eastern European Jews. Many people born in Asia and Africa were barred from immigrating to the United States entirely on racial grounds.
The United States had no refugee policy, and American immigration laws were neither revised nor adjusted between 1933 and 1941. The Johnson-Reed Act remained in place until 1965.
Potential immigrants had to apply for one of the slots designated for their country of birth, not their country of citizenship. After Great Britain, Germany had the second highest allocation of visas: 25,957 (27,370, after Roosevelt merged the German and Austrian quotas after the Anschluss). The total allowed was approximately 153,000….
Between 1938 and 1941, 123,868 self-identified Jewish refugees immigrated to the United States. Many hundreds of thousands more had applied at American consulates in Europe, but were unable to immigrate. Many of them were trapped in Nazi-occupied territory and murdered in the Holocaust.
In 1948, under pressure, President Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act, which created more immigration spots; the spots were not specifically for Jews or other camp survivors, and the admission process actually favored ethnic German refugees over Jewish refugees by making ineligible for a visa anyone who had entered a displaced persons camp (!); it also barred anyone suspected of being a communist by virtue of living in Russia or Soviet-occupied Poland—i.e., returning to the village one had been deported from. By one estimate, 90 percent of Jewish refugees were ineligible for these immigration slots, many of which were taken by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who breezed in.
Although some countries were slightly better about admitting refugees, the bottom line is that Holocaust survivors—malnourished, penniless, orphaned or widowed, their old houses now occupied by Gentiles—couldn’t just “go” to Canada or England or Australia any more than one could “go to Brooklyn.”
Such is the cost of ignorance, and the place where knowledge and ethics meet: there is an ethical cost to the ignorant view that Israel was a country founded and populated by people who simply preferred it to Brooklyn, one seaside land instead of another. Rather, it was a country founded by refugees who, to quote Arendt, “had come out alive from the nightmare of absolute helplessness and abandonment—as though the whole world was a jungle and they its prey—[and] had only one wish, to go where they would never see a non-Jew again.”
They “had only one wish, to go where they would never see a non-Jew again.”
Whatever one thinks of the current conflict, an intelligent conversation about it requires knowing some basic history. The question is how a good man, a learned man, a professor in fact, who has spent his lifetime reading—but seldom, I would imagine, about Jews—could know so little about his cousins, and care so little about learning more.
In praise of Nick Hornby
There are few writers who make writing look more effortless than Nick Hornby, and few writers whom I enjoy re-reading more. I like his fiction, but I love his nonfiction, especially his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column, which ran in The Believer (once our greatest magazine) for twenty years, from 2003 until approximately yesterday. He seems to have moved that column, or at least the spirit of it to Substack, where the frequency of his writing, while much appreciated, means he has more misses among the hits. Nevertheless, it’s pure joy to have a regular infusion of his essayistic voice. Today, he wrote about his first jacket cover:
My first book, Fever Pitch … had the same cover for nearly ten years, from its publication in 1992 until I switched publishers at the beginning of the new century, and my backlist switched too. Nobody expected the book to sell in enormous numbers—it was about football (and the conventional wisdom at the time was that football fans didn't buy books), and it was a memoir, by someone nobody had ever heard of. The great advantage of my obscurity, and the low commercial expectations for the book, was that we, the publishers and I, could choose whatever cover we wanted. We were beholden to no-one, not even anyone at Tesco.
And here’s the thing about that cover for Fever Pitch: it existed, more or less in its finished form, before I’d written the book. I sold it on the basis of an idea and a few pages, and in the end two publishers were interested in it: Gollancz, who ended up with it, and Penguin, my publishers now. One of the reasons that I chose Gollancz is that the art director, the husband of my editor. had already found this image. They used it for the cover of the offer they made to me, in which they outlined their plans for the book were I to go with them. I loved it; more importantly, I wanted the book I had not yet written to feel like that. Is the boy yelling or crying? Is he lost? Why is he looking in a different direction to everyone else? These questions, it seemed to me, had real metaphorical value. In other words, the jacket photo helped me to shape and focus the content of the book, in an extremely helpful way. It wasn’t as though I would have taken an entirely different direction had I not seen the picture. But that boy helped me to find my own voice, encouraged the book to become its better self.
We never managed to find the photographer, and I still don’t know who the boy is; at a reading in Dublin a few years back, someone told me that it was his cousin, at the open-top bus parade to celebrate Arsenal’s 1971 Double triumph. I do know that I owe him a drink.
And while we’re on “football”
I helped (a very little bit) produce this charming short doc about the Jewish-American roots of European soccer anthems:
And now for something completely different…
On Tuesday, I begin my job at Washington University’s Danforth Center, where I will be editing this journal. My plan is to relaunch the journal, which has been on hiatus for a year, after Labor Day. I’ll spend the summer (when I am not editing my forthcoming biography of Judy Blume) commissioning pieces, working on a redesign, etc. Exciting stuff.
For the near future, it’s unlikely, as I move into this new job, that I will get this newsletter out more than once a month. For those of you who have paid, expecting something more frequent, I am happy to refund your money or donate it to the Friends of the New Haven Animal Shelter. If you stick with me, many thanks.
As ever, thank you for reading.