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On May 6, the Texas House Committee on Public Education discussed S.B. 13, a bill seeking to remove from public school libraries and classrooms all “profane” and “indecent content.” At the hearing, Republican Rep. Terri Leo-Wilson focused on the concern that the legislation could harm the transmission of cultural heritage by depriving students of “classics.” She explained, using an adjective that in our current culture wars has come to describe a type of humanities education favored by conservatives, that her “kids were classically trained, so they had their graduation picture with all sorts of books … classic works of literature.” When an activist commenting during the hearing remarked that among renowned writers, Toni Morrison’s work is singularly “very sexualized,” Leo-Wilson replied, without reference to any one book, “She might be famous, but that’s not considered, I don’t think, a classic.”

Here, Leo-Wilson abused prose: She used the passive voice to avoid disclosing who it is whose consideration of “a classic” matters to her. I wonder what she meant to admit by her awkward, qualifying insertion “I don’t think.”

I am an English teacher at a New York City public high school, and I am closing out the year by reading Morrison’s Song of Solomon with 11th graders. It is my favorite of her novels. I will be less coy in citing the authorities that support my selection. Long before Morrison died, in 2019, she had earned National Book Critics Circle, Nobel, and Pulitzer prizes. The novel was published in 1977 to wide acclaim, and outlets with broad readerships, like the Atlantic, still refer to Song of Solomon as a “great American novel”; an unabashedly conservative Commentary critic once described it as “a spiritual journey of great energy, depth, and exhilaration.” For decades, public high school students across the country have learned from it.

In 2010, when parents challenged the novel’s place in an Indiana high school English course, the National Coalition Against Censorship’s letter in its defense cited Supreme Court cases establishing that obscenity was a true curricular concern only in the absence of “serious literary value.” But the current legislation in Texas, and elsewhere, is poised to nullify this consideration. Virtually any community member may initiate proceedings to ban virtually any adult book from public school based on its offense—in that person’s view—to decency. The question of serious literary value vanishes.

This legislation shows that right-wingers believe in the importance and impact of literature. The book challenges and bans represent real fears, naturally, but there would be nothing for Republicans to fear were it not for their recognition that literature, and especially works of “serious literary value,” has the power to articulate and transmit cultural heritage. I suggest that we look, seriously, at the cogency of the right-wing case for literature and against Morrison.

Conservatives who despair about the state of cultural transmission in public schools are on to something, as this year’s spate of “College students can’t read books” articles corroborates. Red and blue state legislatures alike have for decades been framing public education as “workforce development,” and Republican and Democratic administrations at the federal level no less so. The flagship achievement of this cooperative effort was the Common Core State Standards, which expressly aligned public schooling with the interests of the “corporate community.” Some states, like California and Connecticut, still adhere to the Common Core. Mandates by other names also emphasize job training. New York claims to have initiated “a gradual removal of the ELA Common Core Standards in 2022. This transition reflects the Department’s commitment to aligning education objectives with … evolving industry demands.” Oklahoma Academic Standards emphasizes “employability skills.” Starting in 2026, Pennsylvania will require kindergartners to “identify entrepreneurial character traits of historical and contemporary entrepreneurs,” and middle schoolers to “identify ways to market yourself as a job candidate.” Across the country, state standards still frame reading and writing largely as depersonalized skill sets, which makes for a narrow vision of what these activities might do for students outside the workplace. The American dream of economic mobility should not come at the expense of lost tradition and diminished spirit.

In tandem with the interests set forth by Common Core, corporations seek dominance of public education through standardized assessments and the promotion of tools that aid in test prep. For example, to maximize revenue through broad appeal, programs like the College Board’s Advanced Placement English unit plans and testing must promise efficiency and compliance with as many state requirements as possible.

These guiding values are anathema to contemplation. Two out of three of the courses the company recommends for high school English—AP Seminar for 10th graders and AP English Language for 11th graders—discourage, via their structure, the assigning of literature. Inexplicably, even the AP English Literature course framework recommends nine units, none of which extends over enough days to indulge in the reading, analysis, and discussion of long, adult novels. Even when teachers draw excerpts from works that would pass muster with just about everybody as exemplars of “serious literary value,” fragments eliminate intricacy in favor of ease. And drilling requisite, sterile “course skills” is not the same thing as appreciating art.

I am in the fortunate position of having some autonomy with respect to decisions about how and what I teach. If I followed the company’s directives, the result would be a lifeless, technocratic framing for literature. Even when students do encounter whole books instead of excerpts under these circumstances, and even when serious teachers really do try, tools like Khan Academy’s Khanmigo “Writing Coach,” an A.I. chatbot designed specifically to help students prepare predictable essays for AP English Literature tests, not only excuse but reinforce mechanization. A.I. can guide students to write five paragraphs that comport with the College Board’s rubrics. But it cannot reward insight, ambition, or integrity. Students can neither challenge nor astonish it. Why would they even try?

Republicans are claiming they want to restore the cultivation of virtue and the transmission of civilizational heritage to American education, and they, perhaps more than Democrats, are enlisting the teaching of serious literature as the means to fulfill that promise. Tea partiers were some of the fiercest opponents of Common Core. Loud critiques of the College Board, a billion-dollar corporation backed by Jeb Bush and charter movement champions, are also now coming from the right. Some conservatives recognize that broad redefinition of reading and writing in terms of soulless, technical outcomes poses political and cultural problems. In 2012 academics Sandra Stotsky and Mark Bauerlein argued, “College readiness will likely decrease when the secondary English curriculum prioritizes literary nonfiction or informational reading and reduces the study of complex literary texts and literary traditions.” Bauerlein, now a trustee at the newly “classical” New College, recently called on the Trump administration to “make sure that the right kind of culture is at the headwaters of the river today” through directing National Endowment for the Humanities funding toward “traditionalist projects.” Earlier this year, Leo-Wilson, the Republican representative in Texas, expressed her faith in classical education through legislation designed specifically to combat the College Board’s dominance, by requiring public universities’ admissions departments to consider scores on the Classic Learning Test, a challenger to the Common Core–aligned SAT. Jeremy Wayne Tate, the CLT’s CEO, frequently laments a narrow focus on education as job training in public schools. He aims to give the College Board a run for its money.

On some level, you might think that I, and others interested in the democratization of humanities education, would welcome a movement that champions literary “classics” as the embodiment and inculcators of beauty, truth, and goodness. But often, the rationale from classical education leaders for teaching literature fails to resonate with me, as a public high school teacher responsible to students from a broad range of backgrounds, from families with an array of religious and political commitments.

Phil Christman Read More

The classical movement is rooted in rejection of pluralistic democracy, and its current expansion relies on policy that privatizes education. One 500-plus-school network, the Association of Classical Christian Schools, welcomes only “members who hold to traditional, conservative Christian orthodoxy.” Conservative and Christian Hillsdale College, famous for its 1776 Curriculum, is at the fore of promoting “classical education” from kindergarten through 12th grade for a slightly broader public. It explicitly claims to reject the encroachment of “corporate interests” in schooling. Its Barney Charter School Initiative encourages citizens to establish schools and adopt its curriculum without any special qualifications or training. Its signature coursework emphasizes “study of the American literary, moral, philosophical, political, and historical traditions,” an ethos that might seem like welcome news in the face of widespread failure to hold artful writing in high esteem. But its approach to reading and writing demands conformity to what it calls “objective standards of truth, goodness, and beauty.” The Great Hearts charter network, which includes schools across Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, and, soon, Florida that promote a purportedly “classical liberal arts” approach, similarly makes clear that “we believe that beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder, and that the classic forms and works of Western music, drama, and visual art should play the central role in forming aesthetic judgment.” Neither organization’s materials recommend Song of Solomon.

These programs promise reading, and their proponents see children as more than workers in training. There are some efforts at diversification within classical education. But in many of these models, uniform ideological and religious outcomes seem desirable. Wresting discernment from teachers and students by demanding acquiescence to incontestable aesthetic standards, aligned with predetermined understandings of truth and of the good, does not align with the goal of cultivating individual perspectives.

In truth, the right wing owns neither American heritage nor the books and philosophies of education required to transmit it. Morrison’s beautiful prose poses serious challenges to the notion of straightforward or “objective” goodness. It complicates what we mean by the word Western. Song of Solomon is about reckoning with the legacies of chattel slavery. Its opening chapter is a cascade of subversions of rigid norms and easy interpretations. Milkman, the book’s protagonist, realizes as he comes of age that “smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.” I find this sentence both meticulous and surprising, like much of the rest of the book. Its scenes depicting sexuality and violence can be shocking. One of my students recently asked why I’d assigned Song of Solomon, considering “all the incest.” She had been accustomed to reading young adult fiction in school.

In my view, the greater harm to adolescents is not subjection to uncomfortable art but failure to help them understand that the world is, and has always been, big, complicated, and unpredictable. It requires an unsustainable and, I believe, unserious view of America, of democracy, and of education, to hold that sharing cherished art with young people should be secondary either to “efficient” job training or to the whims of any iconoclast seeking to destroy a sacred part of our cultural record in the name of “decency.” In 1989 Morrison wrote, “Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense.” She celebrated a “provocative, healthy, explosive melee” about literary merit. She felt that culture and arguments about it had power. So do I.

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I think Morrison’s words are still worth minding. In her Nobel lecture, she warned, “When language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference, and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat … all users and makers are accountable for its demise.” While rejecting chauvinism, we should share time-tested, complicated, transcendent stories like Song of Solomon with as many students as possible. We should help them argue, with precision and style, about what they believe to be true. We should afford them aesthetic experiences. We should help them understand for themselves what it means for a beautiful piece of writing to withstand scrutiny and to be the focus of honest conversation across generations. There are many reasons to include books like Song of Solomon in public schools. Chief among them is that adults should not abandon our fundamental responsibility to invest time in teaching young people how and why to use words—to take care in how they speak to themselves, and to each other, in a country rife with provocations.

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