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Thursday
It probably can’t be said enough that the first job of language arts teachers should be to “instill the joy of reading.” So say professors Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman in a recent 74 Newsletter article, arguing that testing “gets in the way” and that “the top-down pressure to measure up on test scores saps the time and energy needed to promote reading for pleasure.”
Although an alarming national study recently revealed that reading for pleasure has declined precipitously over the past 25 years, Perillo and Newman acknowledge it may not entirely be due to testing. After all, teaching to the test has been the case ever since English became a secondary school subject. Teachers have also been complaining for that long since “too many have experienced a radical disconnect between how they are asked or required to teach and the pleasure that reading brings them.”
To be sure, there are teachers who buy into the program. I think of Charles Dickens’s M’Choakumchild, the humorless school master in Hard Times (1854) who bleeds the life out of his charges. If you’ll forgive an aside, mention of the Scottish taskmaster gives me an excuse to share a Bluesky tweet from my English professor son, which had me laughing earlier today. While it’s proper to take literature seriously, we need also to remind ourselves that it can be a lot of fun:
Henry James: The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt—no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries.
Dickens: this guy is named “M’Choakumchild”
James:
Dickens: he be chokin them childs!
Most English teachers I know are not M’Choakumchild’s but humanists who became teachers because reading is essential to their lives. They fit the description that Perrillo and Newman set forth:
Throughout [history], many teachers felt that preparing students for college was too limited a goal; their mission was to prepare students for life. They believed that studying literature was an invaluable source of social and emotional development, preparing adolescents for adulthood and for citizenship. It provided them with “vicarious experience”: Through reading, young people saw other points of view, worked through challenging problems, and grappled with complex issues.
Testing gets in the way of such lofty goals. I vaguely recall some literary character from an 18th or 19th century novel associating a Roman author (Ovid?) with constant beatings, since apparently this was seen as the best way to teach Latin. While we no longer apply a switch for memorization errors, in certain ways the situation has gotten worse. Testing has become a constant and never-ending drumbeat.
Perrillo and Newman note that high school English first became a test-driven subject in the late 19th or early 20th century. Even though relatively few Americans attended college, English classes were nevertheless “oriented around building students’ mastery of now-obscure literary works that they would encounter on the College Entrance Exam.”
These early efforts were followed up by the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1926 and by No Child Left Behind testing in the 21st century. The vast industry of testing that has arisen has only “solidified what was always true: As much as we think of reading as a social, cultural, even ‘spiritual’ experience, English class has been shaped by credential culture.”
Things have gotten so bad, the authors report, that ever growing numbers of students are getting online curriculum packages
that mimic the examinations themselves, composed largely of excerpts from literary and “informational” texts instead of the whole books that were more the norm in previous generations. “Vicarious experience” has less purchase in contemporary academic standards than ever.
Vicarious experience, or what I call immersion, is key. English teachers know full well, as many politicians and educational bureaucrats do not, that enjoyment of reading—“not just a toleration of it”–“produces better writers, more creative thinkers, and students less likely to need AI to express their ideas effectively.”
The irony is that students would probably do better on tests if less emphasis were put on testing. As Perrillo and Newman note that “the best tool for improved academic performance is engagement” since students learn more “when they become engrossed in stories.”
Sadly, because teachers can’t focus on instilling joy, students are being robbed of a precious tool. By the time they graduate from high school, the authors lament, they have lost the window “for learning to enjoy reading.”
The solution?
Instead of the self-defeating cycle of test-preparation and testing, we should take courage, loosen the grip on standardization, and let teachers recreate the sort of experiences with literature that once made us, and them, into readers.
Put another way, read for fun and the aims of testing will be achieved.
