In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.
Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times.
Twelfth-grade reading scores are athistoric lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.
Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video, the forms that are dominating in the era of mobile, streaming media.
We wanted to find out how students and teachers feel about the shift, and what role schools can play. So The Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.
More than 2,000 people responded.
Many were longtime teachers who reported assigning fewer whole books now than they did earlier in their careers. Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.
Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.
These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.
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Students using excerpt-based curriculums are often assigned snippets of classic novels, which they access through a web interface. This program, StudySync, offers an 859-word segment of “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison.Credit...StudySync
Popular curriculum programs like the one above were created by publishing companies, in part, to help prepare students for state standardized tests. Many schools and teachers are under significant pressure to raise students’ scores on these end-of-year exams, which feed into state and federal accountability systems. Test results are also prominently featured on school-ranking and real estate websites.
By the time teachers get through their required curriculums and prep students for exams, they often have little or no time left to guide classes through a whole book.
Andrew Polk, 26, teaches 10th-grade English in suburban Ohio, not far from where he grew up. As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
But as a teacher, Mr. Polk must use StudySync, which centers on excerpts. Many colleagues do not believe students will read whole books, he said, though he noted his own experience had not borne that out.
He still assigns several longer works each year, and has taught “Macbeth,” “Fahrenheit 451” and the more contemporary “Paper Towns,” by John Green. Teenagers still feel “passion for a good story,” he said. “Students absolutely can and do rise to the occasion. It’s just a matter of setting those expectations.”
When whole books are assigned, they are most often from a relatively stagnant list of classics, according to research from the scholars Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman.
