Cover to Cover

A recent article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” has sparked some spirited conversation in the FA Faculty Room of late. The article’s subtitle, “To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school,” caustically states the case. Somewhat shockingly (says the English teacher), the vast majority of middle and high schoolers in this country are no longer required to read entire books, instead being assigned excerpts, news articles, or abridged versions. According to 33 college professors interviewed for the article, the consequences of keeping books on the shelf are numerous. These professors share similar laments: students with “a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have”; students “shutting down when confronted with ideas they don’t understand”; and students “less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be.”

 

At Falmouth Academy, we have always been a place that reads books—cover to cover—without apology. Our Middle School curriculum places a huge emphasis on reading entire books, with nearly a dozen novels and plays on the 7th- and 8th-grade syllabi. This includes reading canonical texts like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, as well as age-appropriate modern “classics” like Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl—a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew; Black Ships Before Troy—a prose version of the Iliad; Summer of the Mariposas—an Odyssey set on the Mexican-American border; and Dominic Cooke’s Arabian Nights. All of these texts are carefully curated for their literary merit and thematic content, often connected to the Humanities curriculum. In addition to these class novels, all 7th graders have “homework” that encourages reading for pleasure. Our Book Bingo project, for instance, offers students an incentive to read and review five novels each trimester. With exciting, open-ended bingo squares like "fantasy novel," "historical fiction," "graphic novel," "non-fiction book," "book turned into a movie," and "book written by a non-American author," the program’s aim is to foster encounters with different literary genres and voices while promoting a love of learning. At last count, this year’s 7th graders had collectively read over 100 novels, from American Born Chinese to Z for Zachariah.

 

Our goal in assigning so much reading is not simply to give our students a leg up in college, although that outcome is certainly gratifying. Our belief in books is also influenced by those like Lisa D’Amour, whose research on literature suggests positive correlations between reading and raising connected, capable, and compassionate adolescents. D’Amour’s findings, consistent with much of what we have always believed at FA, reaffirm that “reading compelling narratives of lived experiences builds compassion and the ability to take another person’s perspective. Perhaps most interesting, research shows that this effect is achieved only when young people become emotionally engaged with what they are reading... Empathy builds in teenagers only when literature stirs their feelings.”

 

So, if reading entire books exposes students to new ideas, builds resilience, promotes healthy relationships, fosters empathy, gives joy, and gives them a leg up in college, why would anyone ever assign just excerpts and articles? Meet me in the library!

 

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¹Horowitch, Rose. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The Atlantic. November 2024.

 

²D’Amour, Lisa. The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. Random House, 2023, p.16.