By Carol Jago
This is the first entry into the Bring Back Whole Book Reading series. Check the landing page for new posts.
Reading whole books can make kids both smarter and nicer. Don’t believe me? In study after study, cognitive scientists have found that students who read stories are not only better able to understand others but also better able to understand themselves.
This alchemy doesn’t happen when students read excerpts.
It is not hard to understand how short passages came to replace novels. After all, high-stakes assessments feature excerpts to measure reading comprehension. Mirroring that approach seemed a logical way to raise test scores. Except that it didn’t work. According to results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), reading scores across the board are the lowest they have been in 30 years. Most worrisome are the survey results that show lowest performing students never or hardly ever read for pleasure. In my experience, if students don’t read with pleasure, they can never be persuaded to read enough to become fully fluent readers. Maybe instead of focusing on raising test scores, we should be thinking about raising readers.
No one becomes an avid reader on a diet of text tidbits. Practicing reading skills on paragraph-long excerpts lacks authenticity; it is absent of purpose apart from “doing school.” From a student’s perspective, it is just one more reason to let artificial intelligence do the work for them. On the other hand, reading a whole book — a much more strenuous and time-consuming task — requires students to use their reading skills for real reasons: to watch a character stumble, to figure out a mystery, to enter a world they never imagined. Part of the rationale for employing short passages has been in the hope meeting screenagers where they are. What if we instead invited them to read books that took them to places they have never been?
To be clear, the move away from whole works was well-intended and, in many cases, a practical solution. For one thing, it solved the homework problem. But assigning only short texts robs students of the pleasure that can only be experienced when grappling with longer, more complex literature that more fully reflect the complex world they are navigating. This includes contemporary young adult works with appealing (sometimes lurid) covers.
In Teens Choosing to Read, Gay Ivy and Peter Johnson describe a study they conducted with middle school students who were reading almost nothing. Their teachers invited these students to read books of their own choosing with no strings attached, providing classroom time for both reading and discussion. Over time, not only did students’ reading scores improve, but students reported that reading helped them manage their stress and feel more in control of their own behavior. Students felt that the books were helping them to become better people. Later interviews with family and teachers corroborated the students’ observations. While adults often worry that the topics in some YA fiction – self-harm, poor decision-making, graphic violence — might be dangerous, these young readers reported that they learned from the mistakes the fictional characters made.
Volume in reading matters. We get good at the things we do. The challenge is finding ways to make reading part of this generation’s everyday habits. To facilitate this, teachers can:
- Provide students with a generous classroom library
- Make reading together an everyday experience
- Talk about the books you are reading
- Offer choice when assigning books
- Give students time to talk about the stories they are reading
Today’s young people are in desperate need of the things that whole books can offer. According to a recent New York Times article, we are in the middle of a youth mental health crisis. Jia Lynn Yang reports that, “Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates.” Many young people feel lost, swallowed up by social media and seduced by AI chatbots.
Teachers report that their students are disaffected, disengaged from school, barely putting in seat time, stuck in neutral. Absentee rates are appalling. Some of this is a continuation of habits formed during the pandemic and/or a result of too much screen time, but the moment for excuses is past. Let’s move on from an excerpt-based curriculum and get back to real reading.
Books are more than tools for teaching children how to read. They are the reason to read.
Works Cited
Ivey, Gay and Peter Johnson (2023). Teens Choosing to Read. Teachers College Press.
Paul, A. M. (2013, June 3). Reading literature makes us smarter and nicer. TIME Ideas. https://ideas.time.com/2013/06/03/why-we-should-read-literature/ ideas.time.com
Yang, J. L. (2025, November 24). Youth mental-health crisis in schools. The New York Times Magazine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/magazine/youth-mental-health-crisis-schools.html
Carol Jago is a long-time teacher and past president of the National Council of teachers of English. She is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA and the author of numerous Heinemann books including The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis.
