Parents at Deal Middle School in Northwest Washington D.C. were recently shocked to learn that their 8th-grade students would no longer read full-length books. School leaders at the wealthiest public middle school in the nation’s capital told parents that reading short passages will better prepare students for high school.

The rationale for this change fails even a basic smell test. Higher orders of learning, which should start in high school and continue through college, involves grappling with challenging texts and full-length fiction and nonfiction books. They are not something to be avoided but embraced as a means of guiding students to think more deeply.

A charitable explanation for eschewing full-length books could be that the preponderance of them are unreadable. Rick Hess has pointed out the failings of academic publishing, where “fetishizing the trapping of sophistication at the expense of actual knowledge and instruction” is all too common. Many scholarly books and papers are dry, dense tomes intended to appeal to a specific audience of academics who may never read them. One university press editor said most of his books sell just 300 copies. As Hess writes of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World, 2E, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons (The MIT Press, 2024), the author’s concern with minutiae “turns a significant, lively chunk of contemporary history into a lifeless exercise in arcana.” If academics don’t expect anyone to read their work, it makes it easier for those inclined to ask less of students earlier in their academic career. Books published for the sake of publishing, not reading, may inadvertently undermine the cause of reading at a time when it is in steep decline. Students may wonder why they should even bother with reading if those at the summit of their craft don’t really care about an audience.

In 1970, George Steiner, the 20th-century literary critic, writer, and philosopher, wrote, “The line between education and ignorance is no longer self-evidently hierarchic. Much of the mental performance of society now transpires in a middle zone of personal eclecticism.” There’s no agreed-upon reading list that defines what it means to be “educated,” and the ongoing culture wars over what books should be assigned in public schools reflect this vacuum.

Nor is there a common definition of what makes reading interesting as opposed to boring or challenging. The value of literature is often in the eye of the beholder; it is the role of schools to expose students to many kinds of books so they can develop the personal eclecticism that drives society today. Similarly, academics should want people to read their books and ponder the questions they raise. As Steiner also wrote, “To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding to fragments of reciprocal irony or isolation.” The job of the academic should be, in part, to guide students to ask those larger questions and begin answering them.

We live in an age of vast written content, even as video seems to command ever more of our attention. Amidst the ceaseless deluge of op-eds, blog posts, essays, social media posts, and books, there’s an urge for writers to write to the nichest of niches just as there is an urge for consumers to consume the most digestible content. Both tendencies fail to serve audiences young and old. The larger question facing authors, perhaps, is why write at all?

In a senior history seminar back in college, I wrote a paper on the role of authenticity in defining American history. This was 24 years ago, but I think about this paper often. Writers all search for authenticity in our own lives, some sort of meaning for our endeavors whether they be about history or political culture or sports. People often confuse being authentic with being an expert, or writing the definitive book, or impressing some audience somewhere, which of course only serves to make the result less authentic. The best writers have something to say regardless of whether there’s an audience eager to hear them.

There is a growing meritocracy in short-form writing. Poke around Substack for a few minutes and you’ll find a diverse array of writers and curious individuals commentating. That smart writing can come from many quarters is a positive corollary of Steiner’s growing middle zone of societal mental performance. Serious writing doesn’t have to be boring; serious writing can be difficult. The solution is not to remove full-length books from a curriculum lest students feel a hint of boredom or the discomfort of difficulty. Rather, we should teach readers to know when labeling a work as boring masks the reality that it’s just difficult for the reader to parse.

But sticking with a boring book can also pay off. My 15-year-old son and I read David Copperfield a few months ago. Several hundred pages in, we discussed whether we should continue. We both admitted to feeling bored—and there were at least 600 pages still to go! But we persevered and, by the time we finished, understood why it has long been a classic. Many worthwhile things in life seem dull at points along the way.

This is the other “larger question” at play, one discussed more often in education circles: Why should children read at all?

The worst possible answer to this question is that children should read only to prepare for their careers. Historian Yuval Noah Hariri argues that one of humanity’s defining gifts is that of creating and sharing fictions. “This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language,” wrote Harari in Sapiens. “. . . [F]iction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.” Closely related to this remarkable trait must be the ability to read and think. Something almost magical happens in the brain when you read. New neurological connections are built, and the brain taps into new information and new ideas both consciously and subconsciously. The payoff is not always immediate; it may be weeks later that the brain stumbles on a new idea or finds a connection between one text and another. Computer scientist and author Cal Newport writes that “there’s only so much time you can usefully think.” Reading helps create the conditions for that time.

Almost 200 years ago, French novelist Gustave Flaubert gave an answer to this question of why we should read. “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction,” he wrote. “No, read in order to live.” Learning and entertainment are perfectly reasonable byproducts of reading, in Flaubert’s logic, but there is something more profound that should drive us to read. School should be a place that asks children to read material they might hesitate to pick up on their own. Harry Potter is wonderful storytelling; Dracula also involves the supernatural but might not be an obvious choice for 21st-century kids. When students say, “This is boring,” parents and educators should query whether the student is truly bored or has been tasked with wading through a difficult section of text. There’s a thin line between boring and difficult. Our cultural values right now seem bent on avoiding boredom at all costs, which almost certainly means sacrificing difficulty.

Ultimately, I don’t know the right balance between expertise and entertainment. But all of one with none of the other is unhelpful for advancing serious thinking. Nor does tacking to either extreme provide opportunities for children and young adults to develop the critical thinking and curiosity that schools should cultivate. If we want readers young and old to grapple with challenging texts, perhaps we should not dismiss dense academic writing wholesale. We need a culture in and out of school that embraces difficulty—reading hard works including full books, acquiring tricky skills, trying and failing—while having some fun along the way.

Liz Cohen is vice president of policy at 50CAN and the author of The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.