Why Reading Books in High School Matters

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Last month, Rose Horowitch wrote the article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” which sparked a lot of debate. Professors told Horowitch that their students felt overwhelmed at the thought of finishing a single novel, much less 20, so they’ve begun to drastically shrink their assignments. They blamed cell phones, standardized tests, and extracurriculars, and they mostly agreed that the shift began in high school. Young people don’t read entire books in college because they rarely or never read them in high school. Horowitch, not long out of college herself, hypothesized that these young people might be perfectly capable of reading books, but maybe they never learned the value of reading a book versus other ways you could spend your time.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we make the case for reading books, one memory at a time. We talk to Horowitch about what she heard from professors, and we hear from several Atlantic writers about the books they read in high school that stuck with them, and how their views of these books and the characters in them changed over time.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: It may not be surprising that Atlantic writers and editors grew up with a deep connection to books, but American students today might not get to have that experience.

Rose Horowitch: I spoke with 33 professors, and the majority of them said that they noticed a clear change in their students in the last 10 years.

Rosin: This is Atlantic assistant editor Rose Horowitch.

Horowitch: A Columbia professor said that his students are overwhelmed at the thought of reading multiple books a semester, that they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

A professor at the University of Virginia told me that his students shut down when they’re confronted with ideas they don’t understand. And the chair of Georgetown’s English department said that his students’ struggle to focus comes up even when they’re reading a 14-line sonnet.

Rosin: Rose wrote about this for the magazine, and what she found comes down to one basic point.

Horowitch: Students are really arriving in college struggling to read books in a way that they were not a decade ago.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week: the strange disappearance of the book-reading American student—what’s causing it, and what we lose throughout our lives when we don’t read books as teenagers.

[Music]

Rosin: So is the idea, like, a book itself seems overwhelming?

Horowitch: That was what the professors were saying, that it really showed up when they were asking their students to kind of attend to something longer and that it just seemed like something that they were unaccustomed to.

Rosin: What were some examples they gave you? Because I’m sure they’re adjusting how they used to assign. Because when I was in college, I was assigned many, many, many books per class versus how they’re assigning now.

Horowitch: Well, I spoke with one professor who used to teach a survey course on American Literature, and then now he teaches “Short Works of American Prose.”

Rosin: That’s very specific. (Laughs.)

Horowitch: Yes, and—

Rosin: I’ll just call the course “Short Works of American Prose.” Yeah.

Horowitch: And he did see some advantages to that. You know, he was talking about how it is nice sometimes to really go deeper into a shorter text. But he was also talking about how, you know, you do have to change with the times and with what your students are showing up able to do.

Rosin: And what were some of the reasons that came up for why students couldn’t get into the books anymore?

Horowitch: Well, definitely smartphones and social media and the fact that people’s attention is just constantly pulled in many different directions, so they just don’t get the practice or kind of accustomed to focusing on something for an extended period of time.

But one thing that I found really interesting that kept surfacing in my interviews, that professors were talking about: There was a change in the way that students were prepared to read when they arrived at college. It really seems that high schools are assigning far fewer books.

I spoke with some education experts who study high school and then with some high-school teachers themselves, and they were talking about how educational initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Common Core really emphasized informational texts and standardized tests.

And so in response, teachers at many schools shifted from books to short, informational passages to kind of mimic the format of reading-comprehension tests. And that has left less time for teaching books and just made it harder for students to read books, because they just have less experience doing it.

Rosin: So the root is what happens in high school.

Horowitch: Yes. It’s that when these students arrive at college, nobody’s ever asked them to do anything of the magnitude that a college syllabus is.

Rosin: Right. So you can’t go from reading portions of books to suddenly reading like, you know, 20 novels for a course. That just doesn’t make any sense.

Horowitch: Yes. Yeah. So it’s sort of the change in the preparation that’s leading to this problem.

Rosin: Yeah, one thing that your reporting evoked for me is not just, like, Kids today—they don’t read, but a feeling of empathy for how much kids have to do in high school to get into college and how much pressure there is on kids. I almost felt like, Oh, telling them to read a novel—it’s a luxury to read a novel when you could also be on the swim team or writing for the school newspaper or whatever. What do you think about that?

Horowitch: Yes, that was something that came up in my reporting a lot. It’s not just, Oh, students today are lazy. It actually seems like students today are busier than they ever were before. And teachers were saying they can’t believe what’s on these students’ schedules.

But because of grade inflation and also the pressure to get into a top school, students really have to differentiate themselves outside of the classroom. And that just takes an exceptional amount of time. You don’t have the time in the day, maybe, to just sit down and read a long novel or finish all your class reading, because you do need to also be doing extracurriculars or getting a job or starting a charity or something. That just makes it really challenging to find the time to read.

Rosin: Right. Like, you can imagine if a high-school kid were to say, I actually don’t want an internship this summer. I don’t want to go to any camps. I don’t want to work. I would like to spend my summer reading novels, it would almost land as an act of rebellion, and people might question that. It wouldn’t be seen as an inherently valuable thing. It would make people nervous.

Horowitch: Yeah, I think you would have to be very courageous to do that because, you know, probably most students are going to get A’s anyways, and so the colleges can’t really tell, you know, who actually did the reading or not. And you really have to be different outside of the classroom in a way that leaves you much less time for reading.

Rosin: Right, and that might be considered lazy. Like, Oh, you’re just sitting around, reading books all summer.

Horowitch: Yeah, I think one thing that came up is, sort of, that it might not be a shift in skills but just a shift in values, and young people are responding to that.

Rosin: What do you mean by “a shift in values”?

Horowitch: We are sort of not valuing young people reading, even if we kind of think that we do. And we lament the loss of it. We aren’t actually setting up schooling and admissions in a way that shows that we actually do value just reading for reading’s sake.

Rosin: Right. We all say we want people to read, but, in fact, the message we’re actually conveying is: You need to have skills.

Horowitch: Absolutely. Yes. So we’re sort of telling them, you know, Do everything you can to get into a competitive school, and then get a prestigious job. And I spoke with professors who were saying their students say that they love their humanities courses, but they need to major in something that is going to be more useful to a future career, and that’s a real difference in the way that we conceive of what college is for.

Rosin: Right. So, Rose, the argument is that college professors are finding that people are unprepared to read books, and it’s probably because they haven’t read books in high school. And what I noticed in your reporting was that a lot of people didn’t necessarily see the value of reading books. It’s not just that they were afraid of them, or they didn’t have the attention span—they didn’t necessarily see the positive reason or what role books could play in your life.

So do you think the case needs to be made—like, it’s not obvious why you should read books?

Horowitch: One hundred percent. I think that students sort of aren’t getting the message as to why reading is important. They’re kind of, instead, being told that they need to be using high school to prepare for college, and college to prepare for a job, and not that they need to be using all of these times to sort of just prepare to live.

Rosin: I love that: “to prepare to live.” So how does something like a book—because it’s obvious to me how skills help you live. Like, they help you get a job, and then the job pays the salary, and then the salary pays the mortgage. But how does a book help you prepare to live?

Horowitch: By reading about someone else or something else, I think it helps you reflect on yourself and sort of become more human and sort of figure out who you are. You end up learning the kind of life that you want to lead.

Rosin: Right. So it’s like you’re in that tender moment in your life where you’re just starting to realize, There’s a bigger world outside my family, outside my school. And who am I in that world? And, basically, What’s out there? And this is your first guide—a book is your first guide—and I think that’s why so many people remember the books they read in high school, and that’s why they make such a lasting impression and stay with you, in a very different way than books you read later in life.

So if you love the book enough, it moves along with you.

Horowitch: Yeah. And, I mean, I had that with Anna Karenina. I think the first time I kind of idolized Anna, and then as I read it again—which I know is probably not how you’re supposed to respond to the book, but as I read it again—I sort of was much more interested in Levin and Kitty and the other characters.

I had a professor who talked about how you read books to notice new things in them and also to see the way that you yourself have changed, in the way that you sort of come at it differently.

Rosin: Yeah. And there’s only a handful of books you read like that, where you read them—I mean, I have, like, a dozen where I read them over and over again, and they’re different always.

Rose, I wanted to thank you for having this conversation with me, because it actually gave us the idea to have a bigger conversation about books—and mostly about what you lose, basically throughout your whole life, when you don’t read books as a young person, when you don’t have books that you carry with you throughout your life.

So we asked a lot of people around The Atlantic, and also listeners, to share books that were most important for them at that age, which is what we’re going to hear next. So very grateful to you for having this idea and, like, being the muse for this episode.

Horowitch: Well, thank you. Yeah, I’m super excited to hear what people sent in.

[Break]

Gal Beckerman: Reading books at that age was tremendously important to me. It’s hard to think of this outside of my own biography, which was as a kid who grew up in a house without books, an immigrant household whose parents didn’t graduate from high school, so books and literary culture was not a big part of our surroundings and sort of what I grew up with.

Rosin: We’re going to broaden out now. We asked Atlantic writers to tell us about the books that helped shape them most in high school. So I’m going to step aside, but I promise to share mine at the end.

Beckerman: It didn’t take me long to think through what book impacted me most in high school. Right away, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being came to mind, a choice that I’m a little bit embarrassed about, as I imagine a lot of people will be embarrassed about what affected them most at that impressionable age. But it was a book that meant a lot to me. And I had a kind of a Kundera moment where I read everything I could by him.

The book, which is sort of an exploration of a group of friends and lovers around the Prague Spring, in 1968, is wonderfully romantic in the way that it engages with ideas. And for somebody who is 16: incredibly thrilling to encounter those ideas. Mostly, he’s talking about existentialism. The title of the book, in a way, says it all.

These are characters who are sort of dealing with what you could call the paradox of freedom. On the one hand, they don’t want to be pinned down. They don’t want to be attached. They don’t want to be weighed down by anything. They want to be free.

But at the same time, there is a kind of unbearableness to that freedom of being able to be anything and anyone. And so they seek opportunities to be grounded— grounded by relationships, grounded by obligations. And this, I think, speaks to a teenager’s mind as they’re trying to figure out who they’re going to be. How much lightness and how much weight do they want in their lives?

And I just remember, the distillation of that philosophy—of what is, essentially, Sartrean thought—into this very simple and evocative metaphor of lightness and weight really spoke to me when I was at that moment in my life where I wanted to kind of understand how I was going to shape my own identity through the choices that I made.

My name is Gal Beckerman, and I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Jenisha Watts: The book that impacted me the most in high school was The Color of Water, by James McBride.

It is a memoir of a young Black man from Brooklyn trying to come to terms with who he is as a Black man, with having a white mother—or a Jewish mother. The great thing about the book is that he’s also using his reporting skills, interviewing his mom and also telling his story. So the thing about the book is it’s layered; it’s two stories in one. You have James McBride telling his story, and then in the next chapter, you have his mom telling her story. So it kind of goes back and forth. It’s intergenerational.

The book made a person like me be able to dream outside of my reality, outside of living in Kentucky. It was almost like the book was like, Look—you don’t have to be a straight-A student. You can mess up. You can fail. You can get back up. And then you can still make something out of your life.

I was a senior in high school. My teacher’s name was Miss Dees at the time. And I think she was a recent college graduate, because I remember her being young and disheveled. But she also, in a lot of ways, believed in me. I remember after the class, after reading the book, I got some kind of special award for English. And I think it was because of how I finished a book or maybe how I responded to the questions for the class. But I just remember her giving me that award.

It showed me that someone else was able to see me in a different way, outside of the classroom. She was viewing me then as more of a scholar or an intellect, you know? And like I said, like the character in the book, James, I wasn’t the top student. I wasn’t considered a student that had the most promise.

So when my teacher, Miss Dees, when she gave me that award, it was just like, Oh, I see you. I see what this book is doing for you. And I don’t know—actually, I’m just now thinking about that. I didn’t even think about it until, like—yeah, it just hit me. But yeah, Miss Dees—she was the one that kind of planted that seed in me.

My name is Jenisha Watts, and I am a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Walt Hunter: A book that I remember making a strong impact on me was John  Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, from the early 17th century. This is a collection of poems that I found, initially, completely elusive but enthralling because of the language.

There’s something about the extravagance that Donne brings into a simple metaphor. For example, a poem in which you’re apart from your beloved: He used a metaphor of an old-fashioned compass with two legs, the kind you used to draw, and as one leg goes farther away from the other, they’re still kind of united in their trajectory. That image is one that’s always been, I think, present in my mind whenever I’m teaching poetry at all.

This book made it possible for me to teach poetry without fearing its difficulty, because I think that one of the things that students really fear when they come to poetry is that there’s a huge barrier to entry for them. And although Donne is one of our most difficult poets, it’s also very true that the images he uses are very clear, very excitingly distinct from a lot of other poetry.

And the music with which he writes is instantly memorable. And I think that one of the ways in which the poems have endured for me and ramified through my adult life is as little mantras that I can repeat in my head whenever I’m going through, you know, a difficult situation or a joyous situation.

“As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go,”—I mean, these are just go-to lines and rhythms that I hold onto. They are other voices that live within me, and I find a lot of comfort in that.

I’m Walt Hunter, professor of English and chair of the English department at Case Western Reserve University. And I’m a contributing editor at The Atlantic, where I focus on poetry and fiction.

Rosin: So it’s my turn. I was thinking about the book that stuck with me the longest, Portnoy’s Complaint, the Philip Roth book, and I read it in high school.

We had read some Philip Roth in the class, and they’d said, Oh, go find another Philip Roth book. So I picked out Portnoy’s Complaint, and it was just an absolute revelation because when you’re in high school, you’re reading dutifully. Like, you’re trying to be a good literary citizen. You’re trying to understand what serious things are and how grown-ups write. And I thought, This is literature? Like, This is hilarious, you know?

It was such a freeing revelation to realize that someone could write in such a funny way about such insane, ridiculous things. So then I went down that train. I was reading John Cheever and Saul Bellow and all the Philip Roth novels. And I just kind of imbibed the notion—not that those were specific. What I wish I had done was read them and think, Oh, this is the specific perspective of a specific kind of man at a specific kind of period.

And that would have been amazing because so many of them are incredible and so beautifully written. Instead, I think I absorbed them as like, This is what great literature is. This is the universal perspective. This is not, like, a specifically male perspective. It’s just the universal perspective.

And if you’ve ever read those novels, the women are kind of flat, shall we say? Two dimensional? Their inner life doesn’t matter as much, you know? And so I feel like it took me a long time to work through that. I went back and back again to those novels, and it took—sort of over the decades, I started to tune into how the female characters were portrayed, and I started to understand it more as, like, a singular perspective and not a universal perspective. And it just took me forever to kind of work through, you know, what it meant to have imprinted that as the things that matter at a young age.

Now it’s been many decades, and I read many, many great female novelists—so many that I can hardly name them. And even of that era, like Renata Adler, and I was glad to have added that, but I was left with this feeling like I wish that instead of picking up Philip Roth, I had picked up, like, Virginia Woolf at that moment, when I was so impressionable. Because it’s just hard to shake. These imprints that you have at that age are so impressionable.

I’m Hanna Rosin. And I am the host of Radio Atlantic.

That, of course, was my contribution. But we have many more—so many, in fact, that we’re going to let this run into the holiday break. Next week’s episode will include more Atlantic writers, as well as you, members of our audience who shared your thoughts and memories about the books you read in high school.

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Katherine Hu fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Thank you for listening. Have a lovely holiday, and enjoy a good book no matter what age you are.