For most of its history, American high school English has been primarily devoted to the study of literature. A democratic nation couldn’t impose a national reading list – that was a feature of totalitarian education – but convention, tradition, standardized examinations, curriculum committees, the textbook industry, inflexible budgets – these brought a broad consensus on what to teach and when. So generations of students across the country have read a set of books including The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, and a suite of Shakespeare plays.
To some extent, that consensus still exists: seven of the ten most-frequently assigned books in 1988 are still in the high school “top ten” today. 1
In other respects, however, the period in which reading high school classics was a widely-shared experience is at an end.
Even as politics have cemented the canon by making it harder than ever to get new titles approved, students see fewer books in total. Instead of the traditional whole-book, whole-class reads, students spend more of their time honing analytic and information-processing skills on excerpted passages, preparing for standardized exams.2 Literary texts make way for “informational” texts. And what’s actually the purpose of teaching literature? 3
Moreover, literacy experts warn that in the age of the smart phone and artificial intelligence the century-old fears that new media will shatter our capacity to sustain our attention to books have finally been realized. 4
In these ways, we’re at the end of the canon era, and it’s a time to look back and consider the lessons learned.
Exploring American education, history and culture through the prism of high school books, this study will address general-interest readers as well as specialists. Without advocating for a return to the canon, it will attempt to recover and reformulate a vision for the role of literature instruction in a democratic, diverse society.
I
- Arthur N. Applebee, “A Study of Book-Length Works Taught in High School English Courses. Report Series 1.2,” April 1989; Andrew Newman and Jonna Perrillo, “State of Literature Instruction Survey” (Stony Brook University and University of Texas, El Paso, 2024).[↩]
- Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman, “English Teachers Work to Instill the Joy of Reading. Testing Gets in the Way,” The 74, September 8, 2025.[↩]
- Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” Atlantic Monthly 334, no. 4 (November 2024): 14–16; Andrew Newman and Annmarie Garcia Sheahan, “Is Literature Still the ‘Heart’ of English?,” English Journal 113, no. 5 (2024): 67–76.[↩]
- Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).[↩]