Hi there Article Clubbers!
I want to thank you again for supporting me and Article Club. Your paid subscription does many things, including letting me to subscribe to a large number of publications and provide gift links to the articles I select for the newsletter.
To demonstrate my gratitude, I have a diatribe for you today. It’s about a guest essay that appeared in The New York Times a while back. The title is, “Let Students Finish the Whole Book. It Could Change Their Lives.” It’s about kids-these-days and the decline of reading. You can read the piece with all my notes here:
Let Students Finish The Whole Book
363KB ∙ PDF file
For context, you may remember my hatchet job last fall of a similar article, published in The Atlantic Monthly. Yes, I know: I should let these things go. But if you write about reading, and you’re snooty, and you complain about kids, and you don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m going to let you know.
So here goes — first the article, then my thoughts. Please enjoy.
Let Students Finish The Whole Book
Tim Donahue teaches English at a fancy independent school in Connecticut. Like many of us, he’s worried about the decline of reading among young people. He laments that reading scores are down. He wants more reading joy.
Mr. Donahue believes the reason we’re in this mess is that teachers at other schools no longer require students to read whole books. Besides citing a 2022 announcement by the National Council of Teachers of English, he does not present any evidence that this trend is actually happening. Still, he wishes other students can be like his students, who read the entirety of Bewilderment, by Richard Powers.
By Tim Donahue • The New York Times • 5 min • Gift Link • My Annotations
💬 My thoughts on the article
Before diving into my rant, I want to be clear: I appreciate that we’re seeing more articles warning us about the decline of reading. The writers aren’t wrong! I feel a similar sense of doom. But what I don’t like is how people are sounding the alarm. In short, they’re all over the place. Here are a couple reasons that I didn’t like this one:
1️⃣ Mr. Donahue snootily preaches to the choir
It doesn’t bother me that Mr. Donahue teaches at a fancy independent school. But it does bother me that right from the beginning of the piece, Mr. Donahue narrows his already elite New York Times-reading audience down to an even-more-erudite sliver of the population. Doing so makes his argument easier to prove, because he’s writing to people who already agree with him.
How does he pull this off? Take a look at the first paragraph:
Yes, that’s a quotation from Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina. No, I didn’t recognize the name. Do you? (In a very unscientific poll, only 1 in 5 of my elite-college-graduate friends did.) This move creates intimacy with people in the know (even if they haven’t read a word of Ms. Allison’s work) and creates distance from people who aren’t adequately well-read to hang with the cool crowd. (What’s worse: His inclusion of the quotation does little to advance his argument.) And we’re just three lines in!
Just in case making your reader feel excluded once in an essay isn’t enough, Mr. Donahue returns to the same maneuver in the conclusion. This time, he namedrops Virginia Woolf. A sigh of relief: I’m familiar with the author and thereby pass his test this time. But that doesn’t mean I’ve actually read her work (except for passing my eyes over To The Lighthouse 30 years ago), which seems important in an essay championing reading.
By making me (and likely other readers) jump through hoops just to feel worthy to read his essay, Mr. Donahue is limiting his audience and therefore his message. If his point is to change high school ELA curriculum and instruction, it’d make sense that Mr. Donahue would want to cast a wide net, making sure to be inclusive of teachers and parents and education policymakers. He does the opposite here.
2️⃣ Mr. Donahue is scanty on evidence
I will reiterate what I wrote last fall: If you want me to believe you, please give me reason to do so. For me, this means evidence.
Mr. Donahue believes high school English teachers do not have their students read enough whole books. This is the problem that we must fix, he argues. That’s the whole point of his essay. So one would think that his first step would be to let it be known that this is in fact the case. He doesn’t do this. Instead, he quotes Dorothy Allison (see above).
It takes Mr. Donahue two full pages to offer his only piece of evidence to support his claim. His evidence: A position statement in 2022 by the National Council of Teachers of English, which encouraged teachers “to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education” and to consider creating sets of texts and a variety of assessments.
This kind of thing I call “peripheral evidence.” In other words, it could be related to the claim Mr. Donahue is making, but in no way is it precise. Just because the higher-ups at NCTE wrote a white paper does not mean that teachers actually read it or followed through with its pronouncements. If I were Mr. Donahue and wanted to use peripheral evidence, I’d much rather go with Rose Horowitch’s move: blaming Common Core’s shift to short, informational texts.
To make things worse, Mr. Donahue then constructs evidence entirely out of his imagination. Here it is:
Just to make sure, I looked at the NCTE position statement to see if this example was there. It’s not. I’m sure that Mr. Donahue got this example from some teacher, but even if he cited his source, it’d be one anecdote from one classroom in one school. That’s not sufficient to convince me.
Here’s a little secret: I actually believe that teachers are assigning fewer books. (Gasp!) In my experience (sample size = 1) as an educator, I’ve definitely seen a decline. But as a reader, it doesn’t matter what I believe as an educator. As a reader, I’m looking for how the author provides evidence. Is there enough? Does it actually line up with what the author wants me to believe?
Otherwise, I‘m just agreeing with the author’s assumptions (see my point above about the snooty choir). Otherwise, I needn’t read the essay in the first place, except to feel good about myself.
💬 Your Turn: What do you think?
Now that I’ve shared my views, what’s your perspective? I’d love to get a conversation going in the comments. You can write about the article, or my opinion on the article. Do you agree or disagree with the author’s claim, “Schools need to be a bastion of the analog experience of the physical book”?
In typical Article Club fashon, be sure to be kind and thoughtful!
Thank you for reading this, and thank you for all your support,
Mark