In a stupid-hard literature course at the University of Michigan, the poet and critic W. H. Auden assigned 32 books for one semester, not counting a heap of recommended supplementals. Just the books totaled to 6,000 pages. What’s worse, there was no specialization. This course wasn’t about one movement or one moment. Those 6,000 pages started in ancient Greece and ended just a couple of decades before Auden taught the course in 1941.
Cut the required reading in half, and you still have a course too formidable for most people, even most great students. It works out to about two hours of reading a day. But its rigor doesn’t matter so much as its scope. Auden called it “Fate and the Individual in European Literature” but you can feasibly replace that with “Step right up and read a continent’s worth of books in five months” for a more realistic effect.
That course right there is not such a bad idea. The execution is crazy, especially if we want to make it accessible, but new books can only stand on old books, and imagining literature (or really anything) as a conversation over centuries makes us feel less like we were cut out of time and shoved into a random world.
But since people like Auden, we have almost completely forgotten the value of that kind of education.
George W. Bush pushed the No Child Left Behind program because the Internet was set to make books irrelevant. He basically forced teachers to teach with articles and speeches instead.
“There’s been this push — and it was a national push when we had a standards-based curriculum that was [national] — towards non-fiction and towards argument,” Michael Crain (English) said.
The fatal blow came about a decade later, when CollegeBoard made AP Seminar — a course about data and research — an English credit, turning it and AP English Language & Composition (“AP Lang”) into the beaten path for any student who wants to look high-achieving.
There is a bigger point in here about the absurdity of putting CollegeBoard’s judgments about rigor and what matters for students in some holy place, but even if we assume good intentions on their part, those two courses together are, at best, unnecessary. Speeches are good to analyze, and so are essays. Writing research reports is also a good skill, at least for the sheer experience of getting all of that information together. But Seminar is not an English class: it is a social studies class with some presentation thrown in. Get the facts of your thesis right, and the rest barely matters.
I wouldn’t care so much about a categorical problem like this if Seminar (and its cousin, AP Research) didn’t have a pretty vital perk: in many schools, including Manual, they satisfy an English requirement. So everything else that you might learn in any plain old English class gets missed in exchange for a Bush-era style of learning that, by the way, education experts have panned.
And you miss a whole lot.
“What it does is it makes us see other people in these really, really impossible circumstances and see how they respond. And that gives us some insight to how we can respond if we want. There’s something to be gained from great works of literature, I think, about your life,” Crain said.
Plenty of people try to fix this by teaching short literature, mostly stories and narratives. AP Seminar even had a personal essay as part of the stimulus material when I took it in 2024–25. It seems like the thinking goes that a story is a story, and that length doesn’t matter.
I said that I’d assume good intentions on CollegeBoard’s part, but this thinking is either really dishonest or really, really brainless. It feels like CollegeBoard, responding to all of those problems, only consulted Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat paragraphs.”Anyone who likes novels, and certainly anyone who studies English, can tell you that the story is only half of it.
The rest requires length, especially for fiction. You sit down with a novel and decide that you will spend hours discovering this person, this world, that you will hold together all the little things that the novel has asked you to hold — maybe you’ll even try to tie them into something.
“[Reading] makes us more sophisticated thinkers, and it makes us more aware of what goes on inside of us and how we can interact with the world, even if the world that is being described in the novel has been dead for 100 years,” Joshua English (English) said.
But most people struggle with this. The Atlantic reported a couple years ago that the elite Columbia University’s students can’t read whole books. The picture is even bleaker for Americans and students at large — who, along with Columbia students’ lack of skill, are also less motivated. Phone bans will help, but until there’s a cultural wave against social media, frictionless scrolling will remain a way more popular pastime than books.
This is why English classes matter. They may not make people love books, but they’ll at least convince them that they can read books. Classroom-taught novels will at least encourage young people, whom social media forces into aesthetic caricatures of their full selves, to get in a narrator’s head for hours.
The freshman-year English class is a decent model for this. Some writing, rhetoric and presentation are in there, but they’re mainly about learning and appreciating some of the best books ever written. Just like Auden’s students, freshmen think about how books talk to each other over time, and how they inform our lives.
Ideally, we do this all four years, and leave CollegeBoard behind. Its test-based, numerical, quantitative approach is good for science, not English.
But this is, at best, infeasible. Instead, we get rid of Seminar, or still require another English class while someone is taking it. Sophomores instead take AP Lang, which admittedly has some useful skills at the bottom of all the essay-perfecting (really, score-perfecting) formulas. It’s also way more fun for most of us than Seminar is. AP-interested juniors and seniors would take AP English Literature 1 and 2, a new course which builds on the first, giving people some more time to come around to the artform.
All of this only works if teachers actually teach a lot of books. No one is looking for an Auden-sized number. But the tradition that he followed — of serious, critical, emotional understanding of books — is endlessly valuable. We need to revive it.
