Many Schools Don't Think Students Can Read Full Novels Anymore (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0180527671
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/06/1614223/many-schools-dont-think-students-can-read-full-novels-anymore
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/06/many-schools-are-assigning-excerpts-of-novels-to-read-instead-of-full-books-why
Schools increasingly rely on curriculum products like StudySync, which takes an anthology approach to literature rather than requiring complete books. Teachers acknowledge that teens now read far fewer full novels than previous generations, though some educators push back against the trend. "Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books," said Heather McGuire, a New Mexico English teacher who responded to the survey.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/06/many-schools-are-assigning-excerpts-of-novels-to-read-instead-of-full-books-why
Reading (Score:2)
So what are schools doing to fix the issue.
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MORE TESTING! smh...
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What we need is more social programs. We need more anti whatever training because kids are disproportionally affected by something or another. The overweight kids need more food because obviously they are starving or something. And also, more after school programs and later start times for schools because reasons. For all this, we need more administration and testing for our students so that we can know more about what they aren't learning in pretty reports and stuff. And tech, we need more distracting tech
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It's sarcasm.
It is literally every talking point that beats around the bush about why kids aren't learning.
They aren't learning because we're spending more time fixing everything BUT why they aren't learning.
Nothing (Score:2)
Teachers don't want to teach full books. I don't know why. Most of the English teachers I've talked to think it's a waste of time. They seem to want lessons that can be taught entirely in one class session, so no long-form anything. My son's newspaper teacher says it's a huge problem, as students aren't used to doing anything that takes more than an hour or so to complete, and newspaper articles can take days to finish.
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They are doing this to meet the standards set forth in the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act.
We are incentivizing this plan with a disastrously bad federal law. Virtually every expert warned that it would discourage thinking and analysis in favor of "teaching to the test". Subsequent amendments to the law have failed to improve the situation; I believe it needs to be repealed entirely.
In case you're inclined toward team sports, I'll note that Republicans controlled the White House, the House of Representati
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This requires involvement from parents as well, so it wont ever be “fixed”. Schools, even the best ones, are not magical places where everything can be instilled into a child, especially where the childs home life doesnt support the school.
Parents are to blame (Score:5, Interesting)
Kids who don't see their parents reading books won't read books themselves. Parents who don't share what's to love about reading raise kids who don't read. Of course, we'll blame the schools so we don't have to look inwards. But the problem ultimately lies with parents who don't themselves properly value the things they expect schools to instill in their children.
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> Kids who don't see their parents reading books won't read books themselves. Parents who don't share what's to love about reading raise kids who don't read. Of course, we'll blame the schools so we don't have to look inwards. But the problem ultimately lies with parents who don't themselves properly value the things they expect schools to instill in their children.
Does it ultimately lie with parents, or does it lie with the publishing companies who are only publishing a handful of blockbuster authors. If those books don't interest you...
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> Does it ultimately lie with parents, or does it lie with the publishing companies who are only publishing a handful of blockbuster authors. If those books don't interest you...
Publishing companies are publishing lots of books. There are a literal ton of books out there being published all the time. Lots of pulp but every genre has its own signature publisher that goes beyond the big names. And the big names often have imprints that handle specialist subjects.
And authors can also self-publish - sites like lu
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Bullshit.
I read every day, for at least an hour.
My Kindle stats say I have read every day now for 5 years without a day being missed. Much longer than that if you just count weeks.
There is no shortage of good books out there, there is just a lack of wanting to find something that interests you.
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Kids don't have to see their parents reading every day, but the parents should at least encourage their kids to read. I used to read to my kid before bed until he was about 12, or so, and we read all kinds of stories. I'd read, and he'd play with figures he made on his own, while listening. And he picked it up so he was happy to read on his own, too. When Goosebumps was popular, we'd go to the bookstore, grab a new copy, and he'd almost complete the book before we got home from the store. (Anyone want
It's not just kids (Score:3)
> Rather, teens are given excerpts of books, and they often read them not in print but on school-issued laptops, according to a survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents by the New York Times.
As an old reader, here's my take...
There is still nothing like a paper book. For me, enjoyment of reading comes with immersion. For that I have to disconnect from distractions. Ebooks are convenient but laptops are a mistake. I personally struggle to read for hours on a screen, but time just flies if I browse at the library. And that's a best case scenario, where I WANT to read the book. If I HAVE to read some book, then the screen is definitely not an option.
So schools might be doing it wrong now.
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Eh, I'm also an old reader, and I much prefer reading most things from my phone. There are some technical manuals which work better on paper - depending on who did the electronic version; I don't care for Kindle or Google Play Books because the illustrations are often crap and cumbersome to zoom in - but for most of my casual reading, I prefer to just have all my books in one easily carried device. If I find myself free for a moment, I can open my phone and pick up reading where I left off. I don't have
Reading on a screen sucks (Score:2)
One good way to make sure students don't like reading long-form literature is to make them read it on a cheap school-supplied laptop screen.
We didn't read novels in the 1990's either (Score:2)
When I was in school, many decades ago. Instead of reading English literature from a complete novel, we had text books that had excerpts from several books. So instead of reading all of Great Expectations, we'd read what amounted to a single scene, not even a full chapter. Then have to do assignments based on that snippet. I think roughly 30 minutes out of a 45 minute class was given to reading, sometimes the whole class but usually what the teacher called "silent reading" (that is, the kids need to STFU).
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
> ... a belief that students have shorter attention spans ...
Dear Educational System: It was YOUR FUCKING JOB to make SURE that students had either sufficiently long attention spans, or skills to cope with shorter attention spans. As one who suffers from ADHD and still has always been able to read and enjoy even long, complex novels, I tell you that you get ZERO respect or tolerance from me for caving in like this.
> ... an anthology approach to literature rather than requiring complete books.
Of course - because that literature has all those inconvenient EXTRA WORDS that the writers put in even though they weren't needed.
/sarc Has it ever occurred to you that many of the lessons to be learned from literature aren't in the stories, but rather in the sentence structure, chapter structure, style, and word-play? If you're going to do that 'summary' shit, why bother with summaries at all? Why not just have AI make a movie? After all, that's where all this bullshit is heading anyway, isn't it?
School shouldn't be simply a glorified babysitting service - but if that's what you're going to make it, then just drop the pretense and explicitly transform K-12 schools into daycare. It will be a lot cheaper and a lot less confusing, and the 'students' will be no less competent and no less capable of original thought than they are from your current campaign of stupefaction.
If "children are the future", then given current educational practices we are SO fucked...
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Overworked and underpaid teachers can only do so much. A lot of the problem lies with parents raising their children in front of iPad screens. Nowadays teachers can't even fail or discipline students or else the parents threaten lawsuits or even physical violence. The admins don't stand behind the teachers either. Simply not worth it anymore.
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Thanks. It doesn't seem to be that bad here in Canada. My wife and I are close to a couple of neighbours who are teachers and have three kids of their own. They complain about some of the restrictions and bureaucracy, but on the whole I get the impression that things are better here. A functioning set of social safety nets may have a lot to do with that. There's still a lot of Capitalist parasitism in our system; but at least higher education is more reasonably priced, and we don't go broke when someone in
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The school can assign work and grade output. They cannot "make sure" that students develop the necessary skills. Lack of reading for joy, reading comprehension, and literary rates are societal problems. The schools are just a fraction of that problem.
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> The school can assign work and grade output. They cannot "make sure" that students develop the necessary skills. Lack of reading for joy, reading comprehension, and literary rates are societal problems. The schools are just a fraction of that problem.
I totally agree, and my assigning too much responsibility to the schools was probably the result of 'writing from the hip'. My bad.
So in a society where parents have to work multiple jobs, and teachers don't have the autonomy / responsibility / conscientiousness / resources they need to do a good job, what are some things we can do to give kids better upbringings?
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I don't know. I would start by completely eliminating tech (computer based learning, ipads, laptops) from schools so kids at least are forced into offline mode for part of the day and then hope those habits carry over.
Dude it's rage bait and you fell for it (Score:2)
As I explained on another comment the problem isn't attention spans the problem is teachers have more material that they need to get the kids ready for then they have time in a year. The standardized tests are brutal and there is very little overlap between what you need to know to be a useful and productive member of society or go on to college and what's on those damned tests.
So teachers have to simultaneously teach the kids what they really need to know and then they have to double that effort to tea
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Good points - thanks for making them. Aside from eliminating all the billionaires and creating a much more level playing field, do you have any thoughts on how to make the situation better?
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School can't do shit when the parents are actively working against the goal of education by not just being big idiots, but not even trying not to act like big idiots.
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> School can't do shit when the parents are actively working against the goal of education by not just being big idiots, but not even trying not to act like big idiots.
Too true. However, I suspect that a lot of kids whose parents aren't big idiots are still behind the eight-ball. Parents who work multiple jobs just to keep food in bellies and to keep their families physically healthy, may simply not have the resources to provide much emotional and intellectual support and guidance. So I'd say that it's a societal problem and we need to deal with it at that scale. But of course the billionaires don't want that to happen...
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Dear Educational System: It was YOUR FUCKING JOB to make SURE that students had either sufficiently long attention spans, or skills to cope with shorter attention spans.
Nope. You're confusing schools with parents.
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>> Dear Educational System: It was YOUR FUCKING JOB to make SURE that students had either sufficiently long attention spans, or skills to cope with shorter attention spans. Nope. You're confusing schools with parents.
Can't have it both ways. In an awful lot of homes both parents work, and often have two or more jobs. And the State says the kids must go to school.
In a society that has both strong social safety nets and a high regard for same, your point has a lot of weight. In today's America, it's just not a compelling argument.
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Dear Educational System: It was YOUR FUCKING JOB to make SURE that students had either sufficiently long attention spans, or skills to cope with shorter attention spans. As one who suffers from ADHD and still has always been able to read and enjoy even long, complex novels, I tell you that you get ZERO respect or tolerance from me for caving in like this.
Point of fact, it is not. It is their job to provide such education/training/tools to students to utilize, but the job ultimately and always belongs to th
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> It's past time for parents to realize our children's futures are our responsibilities, not the education system and certainly NOT the governments. Neither of them care, nor could they ever care as much as we do.
You've raised good points. That said, when I was in public school and high school, schools and teachers took a fair amount of responsibility for how kids were doing. It's possible that I was just luck; or maybe the ensuing decades have seen the enshittification of education.
Also, when the government mandates that students attend school, the parents' ability to exercise responsibility is limited. Very few parents have the wherewithal to home-school, so outside the relatively few hours they can spend with the
Harry Potter novels (Score:3, Insightful)
The last ones were far from slim, and the sold millions of copies.
Novel types (Score:2)
Just give ladies the monster porn smut and dudes the litRPG stuff and suddenly they're all reading the novels again.
Dystopia (Score:2)
Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books
Well, that's dystopian. Holy crap.
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> Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books
> Well, that's dystopian. Holy crap.
Yeah, that sentence hit me hard too. I know it's trendy to let ADHD have full reign, but god damn if you have to be a secret revolutionary AS A TEACHER to assign full books. And we wonder why we're falling behind on the world stage?
It's the standardized tests (Score:2)
The standardized tests are basically a pork project for well connected Rich assholes. They have very little to do with what students actually need to learn in order to be employable let alone well-round it. This means that as a teacher you basically have to do double school. You have to prepare your kids for the real world and try to get them ready for advanced education so that they have a shot at a middle class life but you also have to make damn sure they can pass that standardized test.
And there is
Reading rainbow (Score:2)
butterfly on the sky. . .
Tell them they are spoilers cheats for TV (Score:2)
Tell the kids a secret, that there are spoilers cheats out there for the TV series or anime they watch which will let them know what happens after the end of what that were watching call LNs (ssh, it means Light Novel). Don't tell the other kids but if you read a LN you will know what happened next to their fav MC.
"I love the poorly educated" (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody said.
Does it matter? (Score:2)
Maybe the real issue is that the majority of books aren't engaging. The attention span isn't an issue, if the book was engaging, it would grab your attention and keep it.
Standardized Tests, never really tested anything, I remember taking them and they were terribly written. I remember in grade 10 when we took the “Literacy Test” (Ontario, Canada), you had to read short passages, and answer questions. The problem, you couldn't give objective answers, they had to be subjective, and the right
Wow (Score:2)
Everything really does suck now.
fer sad (Score:1)
We're loaded up with microplastics and don't know the medical effects of this, nor the degree of it, nor how much lying has been done about it. Also we've been retardinating every single thing we could for forty six years now, since the right wing abdicated the concept of duty of care with Reagan and Thatcher.
I recently bought the dnd 5e books to introduce my kids to the game. Last i owned was 2e. Every useful reference page - every page where, once you understood the game, you could go for a table of co
It's a Times story, why take it from The Guardian? (Score:2)
Oh, because the editors are idiots who think The Guardian is something other than a propaganda rag.
Please remove your head from your ass msmash.
Re: (Score:2)
Since this is rated as a 2, not 0, I'll respond: everything you read and listen to, clearly, is fascist propaganda. You clearly can't read well enough to understand the lies you're being fed.
Enshitification is not just for products (Score:2)
It's not reached the education system. My kid is struggling though A Tale of Two Cities right now so I'm of two opinions. The stories that schools assign totally suck. That said, you gotta learn how to grind through the suck.
Not new. (Score:2)
While sad. THis is not new for most palces.
In the 80s/90s I was only ever asked to reasd specific chapters. Yes I read the entire book,. but I was not asked to.
Maybe it's just a US thing? But I doubt US had better requirements for the last 40 years.
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In Finland in the early 90s we also had to read complete novels. You could pick from among options or propose your own to the teacher. The tests were not questions but you had to instead write a 2-3 page summary of the book including a short review, and then briefly present it to the class. Since most pupils read separate books, I think the concept was different from the US concept where I assume there were then discussions about the books in class?
I remember reading Catch-22 and Crime and Punishment this w
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We did. I was in AP classes, I don't know what the regular class was like.
But this was also a rural area in Tennessee in the 80s - there were also illiterate kids who attended until 16 when they could drop out and work on a farm.
US (Score:2)
I went to school in the same time frame in the US and I probably read a dozen full books as required reading, complete with book reports. For one high school class I had to read three books over the summer. I can almost remember them all in order: Rascal, A Wrinkle in Time, Johnny Tremain, Shane, Beowulf, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Great Gatsby, 1984, Great Expectations, A Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Walden, and a few more I can't remember :)
My son, who is graduating soon, I think has read two entire nove
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In the 80s/90s we were tasked to read several novels from grade school through high school; The Incredible Journey, Where the Red Fern Grows, In the Heat of the Night, The Hobbit, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet are some that I remember reading for school. I know Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and Farenheit 451 were also on the curriculum as friends took those in other blocks. And those are just the ones I recall... there were others.
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It is everywhere.
Before I noticed that, I never really got that "reading a whole book" is kind of separate skill from "just reading".
But recent years I often met people who said "I can not read a whole book", instead of "I do not like reading books".
Pretty odd ...
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Sounds like a learned helplessness thing.
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I had to read whole books in school in the 80's and early 90's. I absolutely hated it. Then I discovered that I could go to the library and pick out a book that I wanted to read, and that changed everything.
So maybe just let kids pick out a book and read it. Any book. They might like it. The only thing worse than reading excerpts from Of Mice and Men is reading the whole damn thing.
Re: Not new. (Score:2)
I like this approach. When I was growing up they'd assign six books a year, every year. Invariably, they'd be the most boring, dry reads to me. Once I discovered SparkNotes / cliffnotes, I would read the first chapter or two to see if it was another boring book, decide it was, and then just rely on the summaries. I'm very fortunate to have read other books so I still developed an enjoyment of reading. But I've never thought I cheated myself by not reading all of Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice. There
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Moby Dick is actually a good read, but forcing kids to read Pride and Prejudice should be considered a war crime.
I will say that teachers make a huge difference in the reading experience for kids/teens (at least in my opinion). My 4th grade teacher gave me 1984 to read (the reason for that specific choice was that it was either fall of 83 or winter/spring of 84 at the time) because it was obvious to her that what the rest of the class was reading was utterly uninteresting to me. From her point of view it
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Mixed bag response .. I was an avid reader in high school (late 80s), but there was a lot of garbage and quality books I was forced to read. I don't recall hating Of Mice and Men, and the Pearl was depressing as fuck, but I didn't hate it. What I did hate was the Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter. Both are atrocious American literature. My wife, ten years younger, loves the Great Gatsby. It could be the fact that I had to read it through the whole symbolism lens, which ruined any potential enjoyment o
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> It could be the fact that I had to read it through the whole symbolism lens, which ruined any potential enjoyment of it.
Almost certainly the case, I think.
I always loved the scene in 'Back to School' where the professor tells Rodney Dangerfield that his paper on 'Slaughterhouse Five' (I think) was atrocious and he obviously had no understanding of the material... and the next scene is him on the phone yelling at Kurt Vonnegut (who he had paid to write the paper in question). Making people interpret things through your preferred lens is almost always going to kill any enjoyment they might otherwise have had.
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I graduated high school in '05 (yeah, I'm a youngin around these parts) and was assigned full novels regularly. Some of the books bored me so I read the SparkNotes, some of the books were complicated to understand (I hate reading Shakespearean English) so I would use SparkNotes the way they're purported to be used.
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I grew up in the US and went to high school in the late 1990's (graduated in 1999). We were assigned "summer reading" every summer where we'd have 2 or 3 novels we were supposed to read over the summer and we'd be tested on them when we got back to school.
In general though I don't think you're going to convince kids to read novels when they don't want to. By the time I made it to college I'd discovered SparkNotes. I'm sure kids of today can ask most of the big AI systems for a summary of key points and g
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We were assigned entire books in the 90s in Canada. They keep reducing the requirements to make it easier for the lowest common denominators, and we're finding out that reflects by dropping adults behavior to the lowest common dominator as well.
Society loses, disparity increases. Those who can / the haves grow further apart from those who can't / the have nots.
It's working backwords than how it's presented and I suspect it was intentional.
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Like most posters here I went to public school in the 80s/90s. I think I read ~a dozen books as part of regular instruction, starting in 7th or 8th grade, and then 9-12th grade we read one novel per semester. In a couple of instances we read plays instead of ovels, like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet. The only two exceptions to this were Moby Dick, where we only read ~20 excerpts (it's a weird book to give to 15 year olds to study, doesn't follow traditional novel format) and then Fiddler on the Roof, because th
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In Canada in the 80s and 90s we were required to read full novels / books / plays in high school.
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(and grade / elementary school for that matter)
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Class of '96. I had to read at least 1 YA novel/semester (stuff like Narnia and Beverly Cleary) starting in 5th grade. There was a little library in the classroom we could check books out from as well as the school library, which we visited once a week, and could also stop by during recess. You were expected to pick a book, read it, and do a little 2-3 page book report, mostly just to prove you actually read the thing.
In higher grades all of my English classes up through High School included at least 2-4
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> In the 80s/90s I was only ever asked to reasd [sic] specific chapters. Yes I read the entire book,. but I was not asked to.
> Maybe it's just a US thing?
Definitely not "a US thing."
In the late 80s in 7th or 8th grade (NYC) I remember being assigned (the entirety of) 'Flowers for Algernon' (one of my favorite books ever) and 'The Catcher in the Rye' (which I absolutely loathed at the time and still do). Admittedly, those are not very long novels.
My oldest daughter (who is not a fan of reading anything other than manga and sheet music) also got assigned 'Flowers for Algernon' in 8th grade (rural East Tennessee in a Title I district) last year along with two
Re: Not new. (Score:2)
I graduated from an American high school in 1998. I definitely had to read full novels. Even in some classes you might not expect, like world history.