How the Challenges of Public Education are on Full Display in Whalers

A few weeks back, The Atlantic published an article titled: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” In the article, Rose Horowitch speaks with college professors across the country about their English curriculums and the students who struggle with longer texts. In her conversation with Nicholas Dames, a professor at Columbia University, he shares the story of a student who expressed her difficulty keeping up with reading assignments in his humanities course. Dames laments that this student revealed, “at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.” You can find the article posted on my X account, @kylefarnworth.

There has been a trend in modern education, especially in English classes, toward the accessible. This trend can be viewed from many angles, but it’s hard to deny that the decline in longer texts being read in middle and high school is at least partially linked to the rise of standardized testing.

Standardized tests are how students, teachers, and schools are assessed and judged by the state and by the media. Accountability and funding are directly tied to test scores, such as those from the MCAS in Massachusetts. The kicker is, there are no novels on these standardized tests—just short excerpts that students answer questions about and write analyses on. So no class time is “wasted” reading a novel.

Gone are the days when 7th graders would read Chapter 10 of The Outsiders for homework, and there would be a buzz in the halls the next morning. “Holy shit,” they’d say. “Dally got shot. I can’t believe it. Did you read it? Did you have English yet?”

Instead, students are told to read a short excerpt from a book and then spend four days writing an essay about how the characters internal monologue develops the plot. Because that’s an MCAS question and they might see it in March.

One could argue that standardized testing isn’t the sole reason for this shift toward excerpts and shorter texts. Studies have shown that students’ reading skills improve more quickly when reading shorter texts, as it allows them to focus on analysis and decoding. But something is missing in the modern educational landscape: the love of reading and literature.

This love of literature is a defining trait of Ethan Callahan, the protagonist of my novel Whalers. Literature is the lens through which Ethan views the world, yet as a middle school teacher, Ethan is not allowed to teach the novels that mean so much to him. He’s not allowed to teach anything that isn’t given to him by programs and the system. He witnesses firsthand the apathy in his students—children of a generation hooked on dopamine and ease of access—and their lack of curiosity about the world around them, but he’s powerless to change it. That will drive any man insane, really.

For the first time in human history, our access to the internet allows us to know anything instantly, yet students seem to know less today than ever. Ethan wonders whether this ease of access to information has contributed to the decline. When you need to learn something, there’s a sense of urgency. But when you know the information is always there, waiting for you, that urgency fades.

So much of education is about caring. How much you care about a subject influences how much you learn, and how much you care about learning shapes the effort you put into it. But that’s the challenge with many young people today. When it comes to art, literature, books, math, science, history—many of them just don’t seem to care. Are our schools giving them anything to care about as presently constructed? Or are we just drilling test taking strategies to the point where they rebel against learning altogether?

As Ethan reflects in the novel: “It feels like we’re only going backward.”

These challenges are just one of many that Ethan faces in Whalers. His cynicism and deep disdain for institutions stem not only from his worldview but from witnessing firsthand the struggles and failures of one of the institutions he holds dear. Like Ethan and the city of New Bedford, the world of education was once great and now finds itself treading water.

Something’s got to give. Maybe Whalers will kick-start a conversation about the current state of things. One can only hope.

You can read all about Ethan’s experiences in the classroom when Whalers debuts in 2025.