Many schools don't think students can read full novels any more. That's a tragedy

[douglas9]

Reading fiction has been such a joy for me that my heart broke a little to learn recently that many schools no longer assign full books to high school students.

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.

The reasons are many – including the belief that students have shorter attention spans, and schools’ efforts to teach students to perform well on standardized tests.

One factor is the Common Core, a set of standards adopted by many states in the US more than a decade ago. Given those standards, many schools use curriculum products like StudySync, which uses an anthology approach to introducing students to literature.

The upshot is that many teens read far fewer full novels than in the past, teachers acknowledge. Some teachers, however, choose to rebel.

“Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books,” said Heather McGuire, a survey respondent who teaches English in New Mexico.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/06/many-schools-are-assigning-excerpts-of-novels-to-read-instead-of-full-books-why

[RandySF]

1. I can't read one without falling asleep.

[GreatGazoo]

2. I don't think we read novels in high school

if novels means fiction and over 60,000 words

5th grade -- Charlotte's Web, read aloud, passed around
7th grade - The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
8th grade - Flowers for Algernon
9th grade - Future Shock (nonfiction)
10th grade - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
11th grade - The Outsiders by SE Hinton

[txwhitedove]

3. Breaks my heart too. Reading has always been my joy. Many books now banned in schools,

were assigned reading in school in Oklahoma 60 years ago. What happened to us??

[LogDog75]

4. I remember when I was in grade school we were encourage to read books

There was a program in our classroom where we had a large number of short books and we were to read one or two a week. You'd checkout the book and when you returned it it was recorded that you read it. I really got into it and I'd read 4 or 5 of them a week.

In high school, our English teacher would start the class by having us bring a book of our choice to class and for the first 15 minutes read it.

Since then, I had no problem reading novels and now, 60 plus years later I try to read at least one novel a week.