TX: State Mandated Canon

Back in 2023, a bill passed by the Texas legislature to spice up their education code required the State Board of Education to specify a list of required vocabulary and at least one literary work to be taught in each grade level. But the Texas Education Agency (the Texas version of a state department of education) has decided to go the extra mile.

Rather than just one required work per level, TEA has decided that they will go ahead and lay down the canon for Texas K-12 students.

It’s a hell of a bold move. English teachers regularly wrestle with the questions of 1) what is actually in the canon, 2) what ought to be in the canon, and 3) what part of the canon would best be used in my classroom?

TEA is just going to skip all of those. The proposal is here. On the high school level, there are five major works per grade, plus an assortment of supporting texts grouped by units. These works (around 20 per grade) are all required.

Some of the supporting works are a pretty heavy lift all on their own (”Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Federalist Paper #78, “The Open Boat”). The Bible is included at least in every grade level. The rightward tilt is not hard to spot (do sophomores really need to read Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan?) and even when Black authors are included, it’s in forms that are comfy for conservatives. The one major Black work is Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and Martin Luther King, Jr, is, of course, represented by “I Have a Dream” and not “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” (And King appears only in the 8th grade list). Frederick Douglass’s comments on the Fourth of July is about as feisty as Black folks are allowed to get on this list.

The major works are--well, see if you can spot a pattern here--

English I

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Antigone - Sophocles

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

The Odyssey - Homer/Fagles

Night - Elie Weisel

English II

Beowulf - translation by Burton Raffel

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Julius Caesar - Shakespeare

English III

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The Crucible - Arthur Miller

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

English IV

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington

Walden - Henry David Thoreau

It’s really white and really male, with only Coelho, a Brazilian, as any brown voice at all. Some of the supporting works are odd choices-- do we really need to get through Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and the Minister’s Black Veil? Why are all the supports for The Crucible focused on democratic institutions? Thomas Sowell’s “Flattering Unction,” a screed about elites, is supposed to support Fahrenheit 451. Teachers with advanced classes may find the time to squeeze in more works to balance the list, but most teachers will be hard pressed to “cover” all of this in the course of 180 days. And yet, at the same time, the list misses so much else.

Arguing what does or doesn’t belong on the list is both beside the point and also directly on it, because here’s two things we know about the canon.

One is that the discussion and debate about what should or should not be in the canon is never, ever over or settled. A variety of viewpoints fight for balance even as society’s beliefs and priorities shift under the canon’s feet. Tension between points of view, between generations, between teaching and reading goals-- all those tensions are ever-present and shifting. Trying to set a canon in cement, forcibly resolving all tensions and ending all discussion, as TEA tries to do here, is a fool’s errand.

The other is that the canon is large. One of the few things that AP ever got right was its essays that told students “Here is a list of works. Pick one or a work of equivalent weight, and write a response to the following prompt.” As a teacher, you pick and choose the works that best fit your students, your own strengths, and which create a balanced and varied year’s worth of work.

Should teachers just pick whatever-the-hell list of works they feel like? Absolutely not. But neither should they be locked into a list set by state officials (particularly when those officials seem at least if not more concerned about political concerns rather than literary or pedagogical ones). Set up some guardrails, create a broad a varied list, and give schools and local English departments the ability to choose from a set list. Let professional educators use some of the judgment that you hire them to use.

In other words, this is a bad idea, and I would still think it was a bad idea even if I could personally pick the works for the list.

It matters that this is happening in Texas, one of the giant textbook customers whose choices influence publishers. Because, of course, the foundation of the teaching “canon” in most schools is the basal text, and if TEA’s required reading list was my basal text, I’d be thinking, “Well, this is a pretty lousy selection.”

But it hasn’t happened in Texas yet. The lists are just proposed at this point, and if I were a Texan, I’d be contacting the state board and telling them that this mandatory incomplete and tilted reading list is a bad idea, that even the idea of having such a list is a bad idea.

The 9-12 lists are below. You can see the lists for all other grade levels here.