Michael Zwaagstra: Students Should Read Entire Books—Not Just Excerpts

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Commentary

Suppose you asked a movie critic whether they watched the latest blockbuster movie they critiqued in their review. “No,” they reply, “but I saw the two-minute trailer, so that’s just as good as seeing the whole movie.” They go on to explain that they don’t have time to watch entire movies, but they more than make up for it by checking out a wide variety of trailers.

Would you trust this critic to accurately review new movies? Probably not. So why do we allow our schools to de-emphasize the importance of reading books.

According to a recent article in Education Week, it’s become increasingly rare for K–12 students to read entire books in school. Instead, teachers assign individual chapters and articles. After all, one might argue, there’s little point in reading an entire Shakespearean play such as Romeo and Juliet when skimming a 10-page summary accomplishes the same thing.

Except it doesn’t. By not assigning entire books to students, teachers are depriving students of the educational benefits of grappling with a single text for an extended period. If we want students to develop critical thinking skills, we need them to read entire books, not just short excerpts. That’s because critical thinking takes time. Not all concepts worth learning can be grasped in less than an hour.

While the Education Week article focused on schools in the United States, there’s a similar problem in Canadian schools—particularly in British Columbia. Back in 2016, the B.C. government introduced a new provincial curriculum that placed “more emphasis on the deeper understanding of concepts and the application of processes than on the memorization of isolated facts and information.”

In other words, B.C. moved away from a knowledge-rich curriculum and embraced an approach that focuses on the so-called core competencies. Instead of ensuring that all students graduate from school with a comprehensive shared knowledge base, B.C. teachers are encouraged to pick and choose the specific content that their students learn.

One way to observe the devastating impact of this approach can be seen in substandard social studies curriculum guides, since these guides contain little in the way of factual Canadian history content. Even worse, however, are the English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum guides. These guides are so vague that there isn’t a single specific book or author in them that all students are required to study.

This doesn’t mean that no B.C. student will read an entire book during their ELA classes. Because teachers have a significant amount of flexibility, a teacher could take a traditional approach and assign several complete novels each year to students. However, this flexibility also means that there’s no requirement for teachers to do so. A teacher who gets students to read a mishmash of book excerpts, short stories and graphic novels, could follow the provincial curriculum without any difficulty. Frankly, a teacher could even meet most of the ELA outcomes by doing a bunch of puppet shows throughout the semester.

It’s a problem that curriculum guides are so vague that teachers can teach whatever they want. Instead of providing teachers with vague outcomes that can be met by using pretty much any content, they need curriculum guides that identify clear academic standards and specific content that must be learned by all students.

Even independent schools aren’t immune to this mess because independent schools in B.C. only receive government funding if they agree to follow provincial curriculum guides. Imposing a substandard curriculum on independent schools is a surefire way to make the quality of B.C.’s education system decline further. Sadly, the overall test scores of B.C. students in reading, science, and math, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), have been in free fall for more than a decade.

Clearly, it would be a mistake to continue with the same failed approach in B.C. schools. Just as it makes little sense to watch only the trailer of a movie before reviewing it, it’s ridiculous to encourage teachers to get by with novel excerpts and short stories in their ELA classes. It’s time for B.C. students to start reading entire books again. The thin gruel they’ve been served just isn’t enough.

Michael Zwaagstra is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.