High School English and the Making of American Readers

The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars. This essay examines the literary canon of US secondary schools alongside the co-curricular institutions—from Advanced Placement to CliffsNotes and the Common Core—that have shaped classroom practice since 1945. Cold War investments in cultivating the nation’s youth contributed to the foundation of the Advanced Placement program, as well as to the practice of reading for “character development,” an interpretive strategy that transforms every text into a bildungsroman. In the same period, New Critical notions of reading for “theme” became central to high school English, but also worked to dehistoricize and deracinate texts, especially those by writers of color. Since 2010, the Common Core State Standards have de-emphasized the reading of literature altogether, a major yet often undiscussed factor in the decline of university English. Reading novels by J. D. Salinger, Colson Whitehead, and Jennifer Egan through the lens of the classroom, this essay argues that understanding high school English is essential for those who study American literary history as well as those who seek to ensure its future.