Editors note: the following is a guest editorial from Theodore Bacon
A defining element of the conception of the West, Western culture, and the paradigm of the Western world is depicted in what is referred to as the Western Canon. The term canon itself comes from Middle English, Anglo-French, and late Latin and is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a criterion or standard of judgment”. This meaning derives from the term’s original sense: an authentic, authoritative list accepted as Holy Scripture. What is the relevance of the grammar of the word, and what on earth does it tell us about the state of English literary education in academia and scholarship today? Well, it conveys that the works that are to be included in such a listing are, in a certain sense, worthy of veneration and are meant to be used as the standard-bearer by which other works can be judged. It follows that what we ascribe to this literary canon and how it is applied has both educational and cultural implications of the utmost importance.
It is here that we can turn to the sorry state of English education, in both primary and secondary schools as well as college campuses today. According to USAFacts, only between 30-35% of American children in grades 4-12 were considered “proficient” in reading as of 2024. This alone should be alarming. Even worse, in 2024, Johns Hopkins University Press published a study called They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities. The disappointing conclusion of this study was that, even after being given a myriad of resources to translate sections of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, students were able to “answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and were usually able only to infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives”. This is consistent outside of the bounds of this single study. An article for the Harvard Independent by Ellie Guo cites a study connected to the University of Memphis, stating that: the literacy levels of assessed first-year college freshmen are above 5th grade but below 12th grade, that only 32% of these freshmen are reading at a 12th grade level, and that this high-performing group has only a 69% chance of passing the reading portion of the GED high school equivalency test.
Ok, so unsettling information has been provided about the state of English education in the United States over the last several decades, but what does this have to do with the Western Canon? If Americans generally, and even those with an expensive undergraduate education from some of our country’s top universities, cannot read, comprehend, or explain the “criterion or standard of judgement”- the tools that we have available by which we can evaluate quality material- it should be no surprise that Americans are reading less and reading below their expected proficiency. The impact far exceeds the discipline of English literature, however. For centuries in the Western world, engaging with the literary canon was how students received insights into what it means to be human. Before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries solidified the curriculum of what we know today as the “social sciences” ( i.e., psychology, sociology, anthropology), literature was the primary source outside of philosophy that helped illustrate the human experience.
What is interesting to note is that following the formal introduction of post-structuralism and deconstructionism into the discipline during the Languages of Criticism and Sciences of Man conference in 1966, it only took roughly a decade for these lenses to capture educational institutions across the United States. The fallout occurred when Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory became the industry standard for interpreting and bloating the traditional Western Canon. Proponents of these ideologies often attempt to ground their revolutionary interpretations in ancient Greece, but this simply confuses aesthetics as a branch of philosophy and art evaluation with the modern sense of the practice that emerged in the twentieth century. The very idea of critical theory is summed up in its name: it challenges the “power dynamics” behind these works and aims to insert sociopolitical analysis as the foundation for evaluating literature. The problem then becomes quite obtuse. One cannot expect to deconstruct the weighing mechanism or criterion of measurement and expect to get reasonable results. The critique that English education and student comprehension have declined in correlation with the insertion of critical theory, especially Marxist deconstructionist critiques of the Western Canon, is thus quite perceptive.
What shifted was not just the content, but the pedagogy itself. Rather than textual or historical analysis, the waves of critical theorists have increasingly placed English education in primary, secondary, and university settings towards what we might call literary revisionism. Journalist Jay Schalin describes the situation well when he says in an article titled The Decline of the English Department that, New historicism examines older writings from a perspective of the contemporary world—and a left-wing contemporary world at that. This generally translates to exploring classic literature to ferret out authors’ attitudes on such contemporary issues as racism, the treatment of women, and so on.
As anyone who has studied philology or engaged in historical exegesis can tell you, authorial intent and original reception are key to understanding texts, including but not limited to English literature. Serious academia has no place for eisegesis, not to be confused with the formally mentioned exegesis. Eisegesis consists of superimposing one’s own biases, agendas, or presuppositions into a text. Think of it like competing in an easter egg hunt after you hid all the easter eggs. It is incredibly disingenuous.
One has to ask, even though English departments and increasingly the core curriculum of primary and secondary schools are dominated by those who align themselves with the political left, this certainly can’t be the only reason why the quality of English education has declined, and people are seeking fewer degrees in the field, right? While it is certainly true that people are choosing to pursue other more “vocational” disciplines over English, it cannot be ignored that increased politicalization of English, as well as many other humanities disciplines, is discouraging more students than it attracts and disincentivising quality scholarship. As Schalin concludes, “Continued promotion of radical politics as scholarship, the banal as important and meaningful, and entertainment as equivalent to serious study, will certainly lead to repercussions in both enrollment and purpose.” Literature transposes culture. Before we were writing, we relied on oral tradition to pass on important information across generations. English curricula bear this heavy but necessary burden, and it should not be allowed to sink into the quagmire of postmodernism. Rather than forcing a dwindling number of disinterested students to have Marxist feminist critical garbage shoveled down their throats, we owe it to generations present and future to hand them the keys to a vibrant, edifying, and time-tested gift through which to understand the beauty of the Western paradigm that we ourselves have inherited by those who cared enough to preserve it for us.
https://heidelblog.net/2025/07/the-literacy-crisis-in-america-english-majors-cant-read/
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percentage-of-students-in-the-us-are-proficient-in-reading/
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED596352.pdf
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED560869.pdf