Texas has a new statewide mandatory reading list for all public school students — with whole books on the curriculum. Should other states follow suit?

Guests

James Traub, journalist and professor at New York University. Author of “The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy.”

Also Featured

Markesha Tisby, president of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts.

Tiffany Clark, educator and member of the Texas State Board of Education.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Transcript

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: I’m a late Gen X-er. I was in fifth grade back in 1985. And to this day, I remember just how much the school librarian would come into our classroom. It was about once a month, and the librarian would push a metal cart into the classroom and hand out books.

Now, these books were well-read and well-loved. I remember a bunch of them having their spines and covers held together by clear packing tape. They weren’t the books that we checked out, though, from the library on our own just for fun. They were all the same book, the same title. There was Johnny Tremaine and Red Badge of Courage. Fifth grade was U.S. history, you see, so we also had things like The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Where the Red Fern Grows. There were a lot more. And we read them all together. By the way, I went to public school from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

In seventh grade, same thing. Except this time, my teacher usually just had the books stacked on her desk, and we’d each go up and grab a copy of the book. And I used to love thumbing straight to the inside back cover and pulling out a little green index card from the back pocket and looking at all the handwritten names of the students who’d read the exact same copy of the book in years before.

In seventh grade, we read Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies. Political dystopia was a theme for sure. But also The Diary of Anne Frank, Call of the Wild, White Fang, Flowers for Algernon. I still remember how my teacher, sitting on a stool in the front of the class, cried when we read the last words of that book together that went, “P.S. If you get a chance, put some flowers on Algernon’s grave in the backyard.”

Okay, then there was ninth grade, which was a total doozy. Our English class read, cover to cover, together, Beowulf, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Canterbury Tales. I remember having to find a large cardboard box to sit inside of when we did a group project on our interpretation of the Wife of Bath. We were just, we were in ninth grade. We were super literal. We also read Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet. I was gonna say that we read All Quiet on the Western Front, but now that I think about it, that was eighth grade. The years are starting to actually get a little bit blurry.

Point is, we read all of those books, plus more that I can’t remember, in their entirety, and we did it together. So I compare that to my kid’s more recent experience, and my heart sinks. In the fifth grade, my kid’s class read one whole class book. I think they might have read one or two other books, but those were in small groups that the kids had to lead on their own. So to be frank, I’m not even sure my kid finished that book.

My kid’s ninth grade experience wasn’t even a shadow of what I had. I can barely call it a glimmer — more of a vapor, a faint, faint whiff of whole book reading. Instead, in the ninth grade, my kid’s class read excerpts, a few paragraphs from books that were meant to capture a theme, or articles about the books, which included quotations, supposedly with additional context to make the section make sense to teenagers.

When it came time for the class to study Shakespeare, I kid you not: They did not read one single play in its entirety. They watched movie adaptations. And not even the entire movie! The teacher said he did not think the language in Shakespeare would be accessible or even relevant to teens. What the actual…?! How could Romeo and Juliet not be relevant to teenagers?

I mean, the English language, quite frankly, is just full of phrases we use every single day that come from Shakespeare! When the kids, these same kids, started off the year with activities to “break the ice,” wouldn’t it have been cool if they also happened to learn that that phrase comes from The Taming of the Shrew?

Getting worked up here. Okay. So I could just be another aging Gen X-er pining for my Stranger Things glory days, and we should also always be highly, highly skeptical of any single anecdote that pretends toward explanatory trend, including my own anecdotes. N equals one is simply not enough.

So I’ve got James Traub here. He’s author of The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Democracy.

James, welcome to the show, and please check me on this. Am I going crazy? Am I just sort of being crotchety in middle age, or did my child actually read fewer whole books in class than I did? Or again, am I just being cranky?

JAMES TRAUB: Well, Meghna, thanks so much for having me on the show. And what I was thinking listening to you, so I’m 71, so I was in fifth grade, I guess, in 1965, 20 years before you were. And so what that shows, if our anecdotal experience is comparable, is that my education was just very much like yours. Yours may have been more ambitious than mine, but I also went to a good public school.

And that the change, obviously, is between the time you were in fifth grade and the time your kids were in fifth grade. Because I spent a year in public schools to write this book, The Cradle of Citizenship, the 2023-2024 year. And I can tell you that it’s a bookless world. That is, think of a book as a physical object, and you obviously had very deep feelings about those books as physical objects that sat on your teacher’s desk or were brought to you in a cart.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm.

TRAUB: You don’t see the physical object, a book, in most schools. And by the way, the library is no longer called the library and rightly so. Rightly so, because library means books. It’s called a media center. And it’s where kids can always have a laptop if they need it, basically. And so —

CHAKRABARTI: Actually, James, can I jump in here?

TRAUB: Yes, please.

CHAKRABARTI: Because what you said about physical books, my younger child a couple years ago was in fourth grade, and our local public school has d- actually decided to introduce more whole-class reading, and we’re gonna get to the whole-class reading part of this in a second. So they’ve actually decided to do more. They were doing basically none.

And I remember at the end of the year, my son’s fourth grade teacher said with excitement how excited the kids were to actually be handed a book that the whole class was gonna read. I mean, he looked, the teacher was just like, he looked genuinely amazed. I think he was in his 40s, actually a remarkable educator, wonderful man. But the fact that he was able — he just saw instantaneously how excited the kids were when they were handed a physical book.

TRAUB: Aww.

CHAKRABARTI: And it was, they were all the same books. And he said almost immediately the kids all started talking with each other. They hadn’t even opened the book. They were just like, “Look at this cool picture on the cover. Who’s the title?” I mean, the simple thing that seemed so normal and expected to me when I was a kid, and you, James, as well, seemed like a revelation to a, you know, at this time it was, what, 2024 classroom.

TRAUB: And it also tells you something about the thrill of the actual as opposed to the virtual. That these kids could have been reading the same things, in fact, online, though they probably wouldn’t have been reading a whole book, but they could. But they had completely lost this tactile thing of a book with paper in it. And obviously they were excited, and the teacher was excited to see that they were excited by this physical thing.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I mean, it was remarkable how — and again, this teacher, who was an amazing fourth grade teacher. Again, I think he’s in his 40s, so a good decade younger than me, and it seemed like he probably grew up in a time where we were starting to see that reduction of whole class, whole book readings.

TRAUB: Yeah, yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this is the issue that we’re gonna talk about today. But specifically because of something that recently happened in the great state of Texas. And you wrote about this, James. You wrote about it in The New York Times. You had a guest essay in the Times that was titled The Most Radical Thing About Texas’ Book List Isn’t the Bible.

So the Texas State Board of Education this year passed a statewide mandatory reading list for each grade, grades K through 12. The first blush of media coverage on this really focused on how, like, in each grade, starting in first grade, there were a couple Bible passages that were on this mandatory reading list.

Now, you say that the kerfuffle over having to read in first grade the story of Jonah and the whale misses the point of the true radicalism in this mandatory statewide reading list. So what is the most radical thing, James?

TRAUB: Well, the most radical thing is the idea that you should have a stipulated reading list at all. So, you know, we in the United States have a very powerful tradition of decentralized schooling. And that means the federal government doesn’t tell the states what to do. The states don’t tell the school districts what to do. Very often, the districts don’t tell the school what to do.

So the whole idea that a state would say, “Everyone in this state must read these books,” though by the way, not only these books. The mandatory list is about half of the books that kids would read. That idea is radical. There is no other state that does that. I have no idea when the last time was in history that any state did that. And so it was a response to the problem you just described in your very eloquent opening. If we don’t do this, we know the kids will not be reading good books and maybe not books at all.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm. You know, it’s interesting. I’m just looking at the youngest grades here. The kindergarten list, for example. It ranges from The Lion and the Mouse, an excerpt from The Children’s Book of Virtues. We’ll talk about what Texas is trying to achieve here, by Bill Bennett. But then it also includes April Rain Song by Langston Hughes. Honestly, even in my kindergarten, I don’t think we were reading Langston Hughes here.

TRAUB: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: What do you think the goal of the Texas Board of Education is?

TRAUB: Well, I think I’m pretty sure I know what the goal is. I mean, so let’s put aside this Bible thing — but I wanna talk about that, because there clearly is an ideological slant to this whole thing, and there’s a Christian valence to it, and there are good reasons to be concerned about those things. But let’s put those aside for the moment.

There is a premise to this thing, which I think of not as political at all, but much more pedagogical. And that is, again, kids are not reading books. They’re not reading good books when they read books. And why is that? What’s happened? And there are a lot of answers to what’s happened, and a lot of them have to do with things like social media.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, James, actually this is a good place for me to just briefly take the reins back, because we do have to take a break, and we’ll pick up this thought in just a moment.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI:  So James, you said that there was something more deeply pedagogical that we need to address. And go ahead.

TRAUB: Yeah, so we can find lots of reasons why this thing is a remedy for something. But one of the things it is a remedy for is a way of approaching learning which is very widespread and is broadly thought of as progressive. Though I hesitate to use that word because it calls up all sorts of other things, it’s probably right — which tends to think of content, and by content, I mean not only specific books, specific vocabulary, perhaps also specific historical learning. After all, I wrote a book about civic education and I was really shocked by the lack of knowledge of American history or government.

And you find in not only schools and teachers’ education programs, in the ed world generally, a belief that the way you become a good learner is by mastering certain general skills. And you’ll see these, if you read state documents, you know, every state in America has what are called standards. Standards for English in grade five, standards for history in grade nine, and so on. And in the better ones, you’ll actually see, for example, in history ones, you’ll actually see a list of stuff kids must know. But that is often minimized, and what you see instead is skills kids must attain. That is to say, finding the main idea.

CHAKRABARTI: So let me just jump in here again.

TRAUB: Understanding point of view, things like that.

CHAKRABARTI: So I’m just jumping in to sort of give you a little bit of my, again, my personal experience, not with my own children, but I’ve been based in Massachusetts for some time, and, you know, Massachusetts being a blue state that also for 20-plus years has actually posted some of the highest scores in national standardized tests, so it often, the state often talks about itself as, you know, a great education state.

And I have attended many, many a school board meeting in various parts of this state where in discussing persistent sort of racial gaps, let’s say, in literacy scores, the first thing people talked about until very recently was, “We need to increase the skill of our readers.” That word came up over and over and over again over the course of, I think, maybe I was following this issue for, like, a decade. And yet there was no change in the gap.

But how did this cult of skills in reading — well, actually, I know the answer to this question. Why do you think it’s so pernicious? Let me ask you that.

TRAUB: Because that’s not how you learn. It’s not how I learned. It’s not how most well-educated people learned. They learned by coming into contact with difficult texts that they had to figure out and navigate through. They learned by gaining a stock of vocabulary words that would allow them to understand text. They learned by gaining a stock of expressions and of content knowledge.

And here I need to give a shout-out to the person who I think has done the most to codify this as a pedagogical theory, and that is a gentleman named E.D. Hirsch, who wrote a famous book in 19, I think, 87 called Cultural Literacy, which in turn spawned a curriculum called Core Knowledge. And the premise of Core Knowledge is that the way to gain literacy, the way to become a good learner, is to actually get this stock of knowledge, of words, of expressions, of facts, and it is from those things that one builds the skills.

In other words, all those people who said in your parent-teacher meetings or whatever that, you know, we need to have more skills as readers, they weren’t wrong. But the question is: How do you gain those skills as a reader? And I think the answer is not that you teach these skills directly. It’s rather that you come into contact with the kinds of rich, nourishing, beautiful, difficult texts from an early age that equip you to be able to become a critical thinker, that give you those skills we care about.

CHAKRABARTI: Right. So the thinking about skills and literacy really came from the idea, the hope, that, right, if one was given, um, a certain set of skills to engage with the text, that no matter what the text was in the future, you would be able to engage with it. It comes from a good place, though it wasn’t really backed by a lot of science, I would say. But we’ve been seeing a change in that over the last few years, that to your point, James, that both the skills plus the content, the actually knowing stuff, needed to go hand-in-hand to provide richer reading experiences.

TRAUB: I’ll give you an example, if I can, just for one second.

CHAKRABARTI: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure.

TRAUB: One of the curriculums I like the most, this is in high school, are AP curriculums, at least the AP History curriculum. And if you look at the AP American History curriculum, it goes on for hundreds of pages because it details all the things you must know. But it also says, “And thereby, students will gain this and that and this and that skill.” That is to say, they will gain the skills through this rich immersion in the material and not the other way around.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Okay. So let me ask you then, what do you think a mandatory reading list from the Texas State Board of Education does to assuage this problem at all?

TRAUB: Well, if a lot of classrooms are like the ones that you say your fifth grader and ninth grader are now in, and I believe they are, it means that there has been a kind of truce reached in a lot of classrooms, which is the kids don’t really like to read anymore. They don’t like — first of all, kids never like to do hard stuff, but this is different because probably social media, maybe other reasons, but let’s just stipulate it is the case.

CHAKRABARTI: Although I disagree. I think kids love to do hard stuff. We just don’t ask them to do it often enough. (LAUGHS)

TRAUB: Okay, but you have to make the hard stuff — Okay, here’s a sort of separate thing, which is, yes, kids like to solve hard problems, puzzles and so on, and they need a teacher who has the enthusiasm, the knowledge, the confidence, and so forth to help them do that. And so maybe also there’s a question about teacher training, which we can talk about or not if we have the time.

But so what there is is this kind of truce in a lot of schools, you know, which is “I won’t ask much of you and you won’t have to do all that much.” And so teachers will tell you, as probably your kids’ teachers will say, “I can’t assign them a book. They won’t read it.” And I had a lot of teachers in the year that I spent in schools tell me this in a state of despair because they wanted to be doing something more difficult. Their kids wouldn’t, and when they tried, the parents would say to kids, “You’re putting an unfair burden on my children.”

And so if that is the case in schools, then you cannot simply leave it up to each teacher in each school to decide what the kids are going to read. Because if you do, either they won’t be reading, you know, a lot of books or they’ll find books that the kids are very easy to persuade to read. So you find just millions of young adult novels that kids are reading in eighth and ninth grade, nothing like the novels you read. And their appeal is because they’re really relatable, because they’re young adult novels or about young adults who are having the kind of problems that the young adults in the classroom are also having.

And it is believed that that’s what kids want. Whereas I don’t think that’s actually what they want. They want great stuff.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm. Okay, so basically what you say in your New York Times piece, let me just quote a bit of it. You quote, in terms of getting kids to know more stuff — and again, I appreciate actually that your focus has been particularly on civics — for kids to have a deeper knowledge and skills as readers, you write in your piece that, “From this perspective, it is better to read a classic than a relatable contemporary story, not only because one is beautiful and the other is not, but also because a classic, by the very fact of its persistence over time, has become part of our shared culture.”

Now, this is clearly part of the Texas State Board of Education’s goal here. I mean, they say — the board itself says that their required literature reading list represents a unified curriculum that’s aiming “to give students a comprehensive understanding of the arc of history from the rise of Western civilization to the founding of the United States and the ongoing American experiment in self-governance.”

That’s all well and good. But it takes us back — I do wanna touch right now on the Bible issue, the fact that excerpts of the King James Bible are in every grade from 1st to 12th. I mean, this technically is a nation of separation of church and state. I think it is a reasonable argument to say, well, if you’re going to include any religious texts at all, why just exclusively the Bible?

TRAUB: And I agree with that completely. I mean, here’s my view of this, which is Texas, at least officially, I don’t think honestly, but officially says the Bible is to be read as a literary and historical document. I think what’s going on underneath that is a form of Christian nationalism.

However, as a literary and historical document, the Bible is the foundational document of the Western world. And not just the Western world, of the very broad world. It should be read. I, who grew up in an intensely secular moment, never read the Bible in school, which I really regret. I should have. How can you make sense of a Martin Luther King speech if you don’t know the Bible that it is so heavily drawn on? How can you make sense of so much of the literature you read?

So Bible, yes, though taught as literature and history, no — as literature, I’m sorry. Literature and mythos. However, how can you read only the Bible? How can you not read the Upanishads? How can you not read the Mahabharata? How can you not read the Quran? I would say it makes sense to have more Bible than the others, but I think it’s a mistake to not have the others.

And so, and then, Meghna, you’ve now touched on the broader question of if you say yes to a stipulated curriculum, then you open a vast and necessary debate about what should be in it.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, okay. So let’s just touch quickly upon, I’ve got the grade eight list here.

TRAUB: Okay.

CHAKRABARTI: And also, I just want you to know, James, that we did reach out to people in Texas, so we’re gonna hear from them in just a second. But the grade eight list is quite interesting. The Giver by Lois Lowry; Harrison Bergeron — it’s an excerpt from Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut. The Man in the Arena, that’s an excerpt from a Teddy Roosevelt speech. Interesting.

Then we have Walt Whitman, O Me! O Life!. Then there is a excerpt from Ecclesiastes from the Bible, Night by Elie Wiesel, Book of Lamentations chapter three from the Tanakh, which is, uh, a Jewish publication society from 1917, The Perils of Indifference, again by Elie Wiesel, and there’s Survivor by Primo Levi. Very, very interesting list for grade eight.

So James, hang on here for a second because you asked exactly the right question. How are titles such as these — how are they chosen for the Texas State Board of Education list?

TIFFANY CLARK: I would say about six months ago, we started hearing about the new list that was coming out, and it was meant to be written by the commissioner. So allegedly, the commissioner called several of the state board members asking for their input on titles, authors, who they wanted to see on this list.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Tiffany Clark. She’s a Democratic member of the Texas State Board of Education. And she told us that while members of the board knew that a mandated list of works was coming, they didn’t know just how many titles would be included.

The law allowing for the state of Texas to create the list noted that the board would select, “At least one literary work to be taught in each grade level.”

CLARK: The mandated law says one text per grade level. However, that is not how the agency has taken this information. And from there we have created an exhaustive list of over 219 titles from kinder through 12th grade. It’s an exhaustive list. And me being in the schools every day, I’m wondering, how will there be time for teachers to teach all of this information at this point?

CHAKRABARTI: While the school board was tasked with coming up with the list, Clark says that partisan politics did end up dominating how the final list was curated.

CLARK: I think it’s just come to pass that because we are outnumbered, state board is partisan-based, unfortunately, so it is based off Republicans and Democrats. And the Republicans have the upper hand right now, making it 10 of them and only five Democrats. But as far as giving input, we did go in and try to make some changes. We didn’t have the votes to sustain it. We may give input or voice a concern, but oftentimes it’s null and void.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, that might be the reason why, for example, in the grade 10 list, we see titles such as The Inferno by Dante, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, and the other great work of literature, Eulogy for President Ronald Reagan by Margaret Thatcher.

But Clark also says that only a handful of current school board members are actually educators. And when those members sought input from other educators in Texas classrooms, the board as a whole didn’t really pay attention to the feedback.

Well, Markesha Tisby is president of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. And she says the debate was over what books should be on the list, not whether the list should even exist.

MARKESHA TISBY: I have not heard a single teacher say, “I don’t want a list.” And as an organization, we definitely weren’t fighting against having a list. We are not categorically opposed to a reading list. There is real value in students having common literary experiences. It supports classroom discourse, builds shared vocabulary, and can create meaningful connections across a diverse student population.

But there is a meaningful difference between a thoughtfully constructed, teacher-informed list of anchor texts and a mandate of nearly 200 titles embedded directly into state standards and that are subject to standardized testing. You know, one supports teachers and the other overwhelms them.

CHAKRABARTI: Tisby’s organization reached out to teachers across Texas, a state with nearly five and a half million public school students, in order to get their input on the list. They worked with board members like Dr. Clark to give the state board of education a comprehensive look at titles that would work in Texas classrooms — a balance between bespoke curricula and state standards. But Tisby feels that it happened way too late in the game.

TISBY: There’s a way to do it all. And teachers typically have those skills. There’s no perfect curriculum. There’s no perfect list. Ideally, it’s starting with educators who have expertise and the skill set to do this really nuanced and intricate and important work.

As an educator, it’s really hard, right now in this moment, it feels very hard to explain how we make that happen, but that’s why you need teacher voices at the table. You need to start with educators when you’re having conversations about a list like this rather than end the conversation with educators. Because I believe some of this knowledge, passion, and expertise could have really informed the way the list ended up.

CHAKRABARTI: James Traub, you can hear we’re going to head into a break. I’ll get your response to all of this when we come back.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: James, the reason why we felt it was important to hear from people in Texas as we did a few minutes ago, was to just get head-on and an inside view of the politics behind how certain titles appeared on the list.

But I also don’t want to re-litigate too much the debate over the political bent of the titles, because as you rightly point out both in this conversation and in your Times piece, the choices, because the state board is ultimately a political board, the choices reflect Texas’s conservative bent.

But you’re trying to make a more fundamental point, and you say this, quote, “There is nothing inherently conservative about the idea of a stipulated reading list, or about the belief that children need to be exposed from an early age to great works of literature and to history taught chronologically, that they should memorize poems and speeches, that they should learn grammar.”

I think a lot of listeners might actually say, “No, that does actually sound quite conservative and not what education should be.” Why should the state be pushing what sounds like a very classical, quote-unquote mode of education?

TRAUB: Okay. Maybe it is. It’s an interesting question.

So far as I know, other European, other Western countries don’t have the kind of profoundly politicized debate over what happens inside schools that we do. It really is a uniquely American thing that we believe there’s a progressive way of learning and a traditional way of learning, and if you’re a person on the left of center, you think school should be teaching children this way, and if you’re a person on the right of center, you think school should be teaching that way.

And there’s a history to that, which I don’t think we have time to go into, which gives reason for people to think so. But in the end, this is a question that belongs more in cognitive psychology than it does in politics. How do children learn? And so there is a theory, as I said earlier in the program, associated above all with this gentleman, E.D. Hirsch, who by the way, at age 98 is still very much alive and kicking. That children learn in the way that makes it really necessary to read difficult books and to do that other stuff that I said in that sentence that you very nicely quoted. Memorize things, learn history in a detailed and chronological way.

And so if that’s right, then I just wish people would stop thinking about education in this intensely politicized and partisan way. Let’s take one example. There was a theory about how children learn to read, which was also had a left and a right to it, and the left said this thing called whole language was the right way, which had to do with immersing children in a kind of word world. And the right said, “No, actually, you have to break it down into units that are called phonemes so that you learn phonics and so forth.” Actually, the people on the left side of that debate conceded they were wrong. And now whole language is beginning to disappear from America, and children are learning in that other way.

That shouldn’t be seen as a victory for the right. That should just be seen as a victory for educational common sense, and I would wish that the same would be true of the subject we’re talking about today. Ye

CHAKRABARTI: ah so I want to return to something which I think is fundamental about the existence of a list, right?

Because what it is saying, to a point you were making earlier, it’s much more detailed than a framework. You’re right. Almost every state, in fact every state, does have educational frameworks, these goals that they want every grade to achieve by the end of the year, but they don’t say exactly how to go about doing this.

A list is very proscriptive. It says, “You’re going to read these books.” Now, it may be very heavy-handed, but on the other hand, it takes me back to the joyful experience of everybody in the classroom reading the same text, and I want to go back to why that is important.

Because you write, “As we begin, as we become more diverse and less anchored in the Western tradition, what it means to be conversant in our culture changes as well,” but you argue that becoming conversant requires that we all have some shared literary experiences.

It doesn’t have to be Texas’s list, but we do need to share experience. It can’t just be, like, every kid reading their own, quote-unquote, just right book.

TRAUB: So it’s not only a civic question, though that’s important. That is to say that we have a set of shared understandings. There’s a reason why we all read the Declaration of Independence.

That’s a civic act. The pedagogical act is a little bit different, and that is that if texts have embedded in them words, facts, expressions that were common to the culture and that the writer assumes the reader will know, and the reader doesn’t know them, it’s hard to read. It’s if your French isn’t very good and you try to read Le Monde and you have to look up every third word, pretty soon you lose the drift.

And so there’s a reason why these classic books are important pedagogically. Now, what’s a classic? That’s a huge argument, and the definition of that is gonna be very different in Minnesota from in Texas. They sure as heck will not think Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan is a classic.

They won’t think Ayn Rand is a classic. There’s all sorts of stuff in the Texas list that I think are there for purely political reasons and not for educational reasons.

So let’s not do that. Let’s do something different.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, I’m gonna come back to that in a second because you throw down the gauntlet at the end of your Times piece and it’s really important.

But we did actually hear from some listeners who had questions and concerns about the idea that any kind of mandate comes down from the state level and applies across a state. So first of all, let’s listen to Gabriel, who says he’s concerned with the politicization, as we talked about, of education, and here’s what he wants to discuss.

GABRIEL: I am a substitute teacher outside of Portland, Oregon, and I am currently in the process of obtaining licensure as a regular secondary English language arts teacher. Hearing that a state as big and populous as Texas wants to implement required reading material for all classrooms in the state, my question is dissecting these reading materials going to challenge students’ ways of thinking and is it going to deny them the opportunity to think critically, or will it truly expand their understanding of how other people think and allow them to come to their own conclusions of what’s right and wrong?

CHAKRABARTI: James, how would you respond to that?

TRAUB: That’s a perfectly good question, but I don’t see why mandating the list itself causes that problem. That is, what he’s asking is the very act of stipulating something, a kind of tyrannizing act that says, “You must know this and you must think that.” It oughtn’t be.

In the hands of a bad teacher, maybe it will be. But if you are assigned in eighth grade to read Walt Whitman, as Meghna, you found in the list that you read, where’s the tyrannizing aspect to that? I would have a different concern, which is, are we gonna have teachers in Texas who are prepared to do the kind of teaching that your questioner just asked, so that when you read Walt Whitman, it’s not just gonna be a recitation of the words, it’s going to open out in the way that reading Walt Whitman must, into a broad sense of meaning. What is this man telling us about what it means to be an American at his moment in time? How does he use language to beguile the reader? The questions you ask about any text. Now, I don’t know the answer to that one. That’s a fair question to ask.

CHAKRABARTI: But the point is, you have to read it in order to have those questions.

TRAUB: Indeed you do.

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s another one. This is Michelle from Gambier, Ohio.

MICHELLE: I’m a retired professor from a small liberal arts college, and we struggle to have students read as it is. And I also am the parent of disabled kids, and I think that these blanket statewide requirements that include such a massive tome such as Great Expectations will just lead students to use AI and Claude or ChatGPT to summarize it.

I don’t think they’ll read it at all. I found this to be the case even with just reading short selections of the Greeks and so on. So I don’t think it will end well. I’m also thinking about how I, as a professor, struggle to understand Macbeth as a 10th grader. I’m trying to imagine Julius Caesar being required for everyone to read.

I just don’t think that speaks to our true diversity of intellectual abilities and what we all need.

CHAKRABARTI: James, go ahead.

TRAUB: Maybe they’re too hard. That’s an interesting statement, and she’s not the only person to have said that. But I’ll say this. When I wrote this book, I spent a lot of time in what are called classical schools, which were the kind of schools that take books like this for granted.

And they weren’t schools for rich kids. They were public schools. And the kids in 10th grade were reading Dante. They weren’t, in fact, they weren’t reading The Inferno, believe it or not. They were reading Paradiso, which nobody reads. Kids were reading Greek classics, and the reason they could do it is that from kindergarten they had the kind of education which this reading list presupposes kids will have.

And so I think a hard question that we don’t know the answer to is, as Texas implements this law, which by the way, will not be implemented fully in, won’t even begin to be implemented till 2030, and is first rolling out a new K through five curriculum, which is very much based on this Core Knowledge idea I talked about, will kids then reach the point by the time this thing has begun that they’ll be able to tackle this difficult material?

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. Because today’s 12th graders or 2030’s 12th graders are going to be different than 2040’s 12th graders, right?

TRAUB: That’s what we hope.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s what Texas is hoping. Okay. But in the last few minutes that we have together, James, I think, and this is just as an observer, what Texas is trying to do, politically inflected for sure, but they’re trying to say that struggle is part of the process, that we should be asking kids and helping kids engage with more difficult books, and that’s actually good for them.

That’s what learning is all about. And you say this at the end of your piece. You say, you basically throw down the gauntlet, and you say, “Raise Texas’s bet to blue states everywhere by promoting an equally rich reading list suitable for students in blue states. Show the world that academic rigor is not just for conservatives.”

So I have two questions on that. One, this word rigor, it is the mode du jour in education. I hear it all the time, and it means different things to different people. What do you mean by rigor in that statement?

TRAUB: Okay, but let’s for a second take one step back because you hear from everyone, not just people like me who’ve spent a year in public schools, that kids don’t read books, that kids don’t grapple with difficult ideas, that kids don’t know anything.

There is a sense of crisis about whether you want to call it knowledge or skills almost doesn’t matter. There is a sense of educational crisis.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s measurable also in terms of reading scores on tests.

TRAUB: Of course. So it’s not just a feeling people have. And so that is true. And are we going to say, “You know what? We have to make sure that we lower our demands to meet the place where kids are now,” or are we going to say, “We have to do whatever we can do to raise the level kids are at so that they can deal with this more difficult material”? That’s one thing I would say. Then there’s the AI question that your listener mentioned, which is a terribly hard question, which we haven’t even talked about here.

And I think first of all, I would say kids are using AI to cheat on bad texts. So it’s not oh, if you give them hard texts, then they’ll start using AI. No, that’s already happened. The real question, I think, is can we make kids actually care enough about these things they’re reading that they won’t want to find some shortcut to prevent them from having to read it, but actually might want to read it?

That’s a big, that’s a big hill to climb, and there is no shortcut to climbing that hill. And so I guess rigor, for me, would be insisting on the kinds of serious standards of talk, of reading, of writing, that would enable students to be able to have the kinds of debates, the kinds of disagreements, the kinds of thinking that we feel you must have in order to be an educated person.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay. So actually, it you’re talking about how rigor involves introducing, I don’t want to say controversy. But introducing both the knowledge and therefore the skills in order to have the kinds of debates that we would need for a healthy democracy?

TRAUB: Yes. Okay, that’s civics. So we’ll just say a word or two about civics.

CHAKRABARTI: You only got about a minute, James.

TRAUB: … Civics does not mean learning stuff so you can become patriotic. It means learning stuff so that you can become a citizen of a democracy, an engaged citizen capable of having the kinds of debates about issues that citizens of a democracy must have if they’re going to preserve their democracy.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So right now, as far as we can tell, and correct me on this, Texas is the only state that has this statewide mandated list of reading.

TRAUB: Correct. Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: And so do you, are you saying that you actually think that this is something other states should adopt and it would make a positive difference in the education that kids receive there?

I would say I tend to agree with you, but in education, everything’s also in the sort of how programs are rolled out. What I’m not seeing here is are teachers going to get enough support in order to themselves engage with texts that they may not have read in some time?

We actually have to help the people in the classroom as well.

TRAUB: Yes, and there’s a whole separate conversation we could have about how teachers themselves are educated in order to become the kinds of inspiring figures who will be able to lead the conversations we want them to have.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.