What We Lost When We Stopped Teaching Literature

Q: What did children really lose when we stopped teaching literature?

- Children lost reading stamina and the ability to sustain engagement with a book. Like the short bits and bytes of information we consume through social media and YouTube videos, we inundated our children with the “practicality” of quick forms in print. Articles, essays, infographics, and test prep passages were preferred over the universal truths found in stories. - Children lost the shared reading experience. When kids read a book with their peers it turns a quiet, solitary act into an active collaborative one. When children read together, they build skills beyond the fluency, vocabulary expansion, and comprehension of the language arts. They create shared references, are exposed to diverse perspectives, and construct personal modes of inquiry that underpin true critical thinking and reasoning. - By forsaking imaginative literature for the factual, children have become disconnected from their own creativity. From the dawn of time, story has always been at the center of the human experience. Before there were textbooks or standardized tests, there were stories told around fires, passed from generation to generation by word-of-mouth. And those stories carried wisdom, warning, and wonder of what it means to be human. For what is a song but a story put to melody? What is art but story made visual? When we removed story from education, we did not produce better thinkers; we produced limited imaginations and innately creative beings severed from the oldest and most essential way of being human. - Children lost opportunities to develop patience, empathy, and ethical frameworks. Great stories put readers inside impossible situations where there aren’t always clear answers. They are meant to confront these complexities head-on until the story meets its denouement — whether it is resolution or catastrophe. There’s no skimming or scrolling away from that confrontation; it can only come to a meaningful end through full immersion from the first page to the last.

Laurel Eberle
3 days ago
5 min read

I am probably dating myself into oblivion, but I remember when English and Literature were two different subjects — two different ways of approaching the language. In English class, we learned the structure: its mechanics, its grammar. That understanding of structure was put into practice through writing in various modes and proper oral communication, about which my stickler of a 6th grade teacher, Mr. Newton, was most adamant.

Literature was a different party entirely. Where English class served as a practicum for our study of the language, Literature class helped us see the beauty of it working through story. We took our time. We sat — sometimes as a class, sometimes in small reading groups, sometimes alone under a tree — and we read and we questioned for weeks. We learned context, tried to bridge the gap between the author's time and circumstances and our own through historical research, and we grappled with the ideas presented. Not just what happened in the story, but how characters developed in their respective fictional worlds and whether their deeds were righteous.

And even as English and Literature classes fused into the all-encompassing catch-all we now call "Language Arts," sitting with a classic novel (or a few) was still understood to be the name of the game in most American classrooms.

Enter Common Core.

What Changed in the Teaching of Literature and What It Cost Us

Adopted by 45 states by 2012, the Common Core Standards called for more informational or expository reading by 12^th grade. And not by a little…by a whopping 70%! This leaves only 30% for literary fiction.

What is a school district to do when their value and their funding is tied to the assessments based on these standards? They adapt. Hard.

In practice, this translated directly into ELA classrooms where teachers began to replace whole novels with nonfiction articles and informational passages with the rationale that such texts are what kids will be asked to read most outside the classroom. Therefore, it was deemed strategic to teach kids how to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate said texts and interpret data over the motivations of characters. Expository texts teach life skills, they said. They promote critical thinking and problem-solving, they claimed. We were made to believe that sacrificing the novel on the altar of information and media literacy was best for our children.

You know, because it’ll be on the test...and college and career readiness, workplace skills, innovation… the list goes on.

As a result, fiction was sent out to pasture, and only an unholy ghost of it in the form of “excerpts” was left to nourish the minds, hearts, and moral imaginations of our children.

The Great Gatsby? Excerpt.

To Kill a Mockingbird? You’re lucky if you get a few pages.

In so doing, the teaching of literature with whole books, sustained reading, and animated discussion had been quietly pushed to the margins. And the context, craft, and textual richness of the novel in English has been all but lost to an entire generation, and the damage goes far beyond losing the literary masters as models for one's own understanding of language and the art of the written word.

The Consequences of Abandoning Literary Teachings

The consequences are now showing up in college classrooms. In a 2024 investigation by The Atlantic, professors at elite universities including Columbia, Georgetown, and Stanford reported that students are arriving on campus having never read a single book cover to cover. This is not a surprise, since only 17% of 3rd through 8th grade teachers report that they teach whole texts. This means that most students reach college without ever having been asked to finish a book.

The result is a phenomenon college professors across the country have been witnessing with growing alarm: students who stare like deer in headlights at required reading lists, suffering mental exhaustion as they attempt to read dense volumes of Dickens and Austen in a mere two weeks.

The anxiety is not laziness. It is disorientation. Students are being asked to take a cognitive leap their brains have never been prepared for; they are asked to sit with an entire text, to think and feel something about it, to follow a narrative thread woven across hundreds of pages. But they have never given literature that kind of sustained attention. They were taught instead that literature (or excerpts of it) was a vehicle for test preparation rather than a springboard for transformation.

What did children really lose when we stopped teaching literature?

It turns out, quite a lot.

Children lost reading stamina and the ability to sustain engagement with a book. Like the short bits and bytes of information we consume through social media and YouTube videos, we inundated our children with the “practicality” of quick forms in print. Articles, essays, infographics, and test prep passages were preferred over the universal truths found in stories.

Children lost the shared reading experience. When kids read a book with their peers it turns a quiet, solitary act into an active collaborative one. When children read together, they build skills beyond the fluency, vocabulary expansion, and comprehension of the language arts. They create shared references, are exposed to diverse perspectives, and construct personal modes of inquiry that underpin true critical thinking and reasoning.

This is precisely what Story Seekers Literary Quests are designed to restore. Small groups of curious middle grade readers, reading the same great books together, and doing the hard, joyful work of thinking and talking about them out loud. Grab a free sample guide and see what a Literary Quest looks like from the inside.

By forsaking imaginative literature for the factual, children have become disconnected from their own creativity. From the dawn of time, story has always been at the center of the human experience. Before there were textbooks or standardized tests, there were stories told around fires, passed from generation to generation by word-of-mouth. And those stories carried wisdom, warning, and wonder of what it means to be human. For what is a song but a story put to melody? What is art but story made visual? When we removed story from education, we did not produce better thinkers; we produced limited imaginations and innately creative beings severed from the oldest and most essential way of being human.
Children lost opportunities to develop patience, empathy, and ethical frameworks. Great stories put readers inside impossible situations where there aren’t always clear answers. They are meant to confront these complexities head-on until the story meets its denouement — whether it is resolution or catastrophe. There’s no skimming or scrolling away from that confrontation; it can only come to a meaningful end through full immersion from the first page to the last.

Some Good News

Homeschoolers are not bound by Common Core Standards or "the test." You can give your reader the whole book, and the space to truly live inside it. You can teach literature the way it was always meant to be taught: as an act of the imagination that is fundamental to who a child is and who that child will become. Story is not a luxury added to education when there is time for it. It is the original curriculum. And it is time that we re-invite children into that conversation.