Reading Like a Citizen

In July 1987, with Ronald Reagan deep into his second term as president, 60 English teachers from across the country assembled at the Wye River Conference Center, in Queenstown, Maryland, about an hour’s drive from Washington, D.C. In the buggy, humid air of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the educators—including faculty from private and state universities, an HBCU, and community colleges, as well as K-12 teachers—spent three weeks on the 100-acre campus contemplating the future of English education. It was a contentious time for the English Coalition Conference to take place, with debates raging about skills vs. information, credentials vs. content knowledge, multiculturalism vs. nationalism, and pluribus vs. unum—issues that had come to define the school reforms of the Reagan era. And unlike other academic conferences, where people could come and go as they pleased, this one was different. No one could leave.

It was like being “locked in a cruise ship,” retired University of Florida English professor Gregory Ulmer told me of his experience at the conference. Separated from spouses and oath-bound to make the conference all work and no play, Ulmer and the others found commonality in their commitment to literature and language learning—and in their shared opposition to the conference’s keynote speaker: E. D. Hirsch, the University of Virginia English professor whose controversial bestseller Cultural Literacy had appeared in the spring. Even before his private jet landed in Maryland, Hirsch had won the endorsement of William Bennett, Reagan’s education secretary, who championed the idea of a canon of shared knowledge as if it were the legend at the bottom of a map, a resource for an increasingly diverse, multilingual student population navigating majority culture. Hirsch, a Democrat, attempted to split the partisan difference as he sold his thesis, that every American needed to know some 5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts. For example: What happened in 1492? Or: Who was W. E. B. Du Bois?

“People hated it,” said Ulmer, characterizing the cold reception the faculty afforded Hirsch’s presentation. The notion that knowledge of a common set of references granted membership in literate culture struck many as “ideologically conservative,” Ulmer said—for many, it smacked of a too-simple type of American patriotism. Ulmer, however, took a different view. “Clearly Hirsch was on to something,” he said. “Democracy itself is the invention of the collective self, and that’s connected to language and literacy.”

In response to Hirsch, the teachers formulated a striking countervision, presented in a report titled Democracy through Language. Published in 1989 by the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), two of the eight professional organizations that sponsored the conference, Democracy through Language explored “why different ways of reading can find different meanings in the same text” and how that experience can support students in “understanding and appreciating opposing perspectives” even as they may remain committed to their own. The report proclaimed that “enhancing this ability is a major aim of language arts education.” Nearly 40 years later, at a time when many Americans see the country in a state of democratic disrepair because of our inability to find any shared meaning across the political divide, those lines seem particularly apt.

Political controversy about the purpose of English education is nothing new, of course. But in its ambitious vision for the future of the field, as much as in the conflicts it chose to ignore, Democracy through Language offered a script about why the language arts—the intellectual practices of reading, writing, interpreting, speaking, and listening—are essential to civic learning. By the time students leave the sixth grade, the elementary teachers asserted within the report’s 100-plus pages, they will “recognize when language is being used to manipulate, coerce, or control” and “use language as an effective response to such attempts.” As students proceed through secondary education, they “should be invited to read deeply in our diverse literary traditions,” the high school instructors insisted, “including writing by men and women of many racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.” And through a yearlong course, college freshmen would learn how to navigate the “information age.” The professors pronounced that “citizens need to make meaning—rather than merely consume information.”

Democracy through Language seems like a time capsule meant for our present moment, when civic education initiatives are resurgent. Educating for American Democracy, a national framework for K-12 civic learning spearheaded by the Sandra Day O’Connor–founded nonprofit iCivics, debuted in 2021. In 2023, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars launched College Presidents for Civic Preparedness; more than 100 campus leaders have responded to the New Jersey–based nonprofit’s push to recenter the civic mission of higher education through programming and course offerings. These movements focus primarily on academic disciplines such as U.S. history, political science, and the law. What’s missing? Language studies and literature—which are, in many ways, the fields that allow us best to make sense of and find meaning in the world.

To the 60 teachers sequestered on the Eastern Shore in 1987, English education was civic education. And if the vision of a one-room schoolhouse where English and civics students sat alongside one another seems hopelessly quaint, the idea behind that vision is far from outdated. At a time when both reading and the civic fabric of American democracy are at risk, the idea warrants a serious second look.

That democracy emerged as the congealing concept for the English Coalition Conference surprised almost everyone who participated. “Never in the four years of planning could we have guessed that we would achieve a single coherent consensus about the teaching of English at all levels,” wrote Phyllis Franklin after returning from the conference. Franklin, who served as MLA executive director from 1985 to 2002, was a central force behind the event.

As it turned out, the broader political environment induced a sobering urgency that made “democracy through language” an easy theme to ratify. In 1983, with plans for the conference already underway, A Nation at Risk, a report published by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, sounded the alarm about America’s poor global position in education. When the teachers met four years later, they knew that William Bennett had proposed abolishing his entire department, and that they themselves were viewed as impediments to the administration’s desired education overhauls. A month after the conference ended, a Lynne Cheney–led National Endowment for the Humanities issued American Memory, which invoked Matthew Arnold’s belief that students should read certain texts to learn “the best that has been thought and known in the world.” Hirsch served as an adviser for the report.

“Of course, the phrase [democracy through language] is hopelessly general and has a patriotic if not sloganeering ring to it,” acknowledged Peter Elbow in his 1990 book that covered the conference, What is English? Still, the late University of Massachusetts, Amherst, English professor, best known for his research on the democratization of writing instruction, recognized the rationale. Elbow understood the theme first as an attempt “to fight against the way Hirsch and many educational conservatives claim a monopoly on patriotism—that anyone not interested in teaching lists and a single culture (and ‘English only’) is anti-American.” But he also saw the slogan as seeking to communicate the aim of English studies to the American public. He wrote that “good work in English needs democracy and democracy needs good work in English.”

That principle is something that Paula Krebs, MLA’s current executive director, takes seriously. “Democracy is under threat at least in part because we haven’t paid enough attention to the values represented by language and literature,” she told me when we spoke last summer. She revisited Democracy through Language in preparation for our conversation and noted that the values the English teachers highlighted in the report—close interpretation and analysis, attention to modes of representation and differing perspectives—remain central to her work in leading the MLA, a professional association composed of roughly 20,000 members, most of whom are employed in higher education.

Krebs, who had a long career as an English professor and dean before taking on the MLA’s top post in 2017, understands why some faculty might worry about mingling values like nationalism or patriotism with English studies. Historically, the teaching of literature in American public schools served the practical purposes of promoting patriotic citizenship for immigrants, often in reductive ways. And when Democracy through Language first appeared, one skeptical professor complained that, in rendering the study of reading and writing as “an extension of high school civics courses,” the report ignored the experience of “delight” that is the real reason anyone would want to study English.

At the same time, Krebs told me, “democracy demands wisdom,” and so for “the humanities to be left out is deeply flawed.” I thought the phrase might have been Krebs’s coinage—her own slogan for the advocacy of English studies today—but she explained that it comes from the legislation that established the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts more than six decades ago. “Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens,” Congress declared in the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Recognizing that a democratic way of life cannot sustain itself on science alone, the act continued, it “must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

Now Krebs is advocating to keep that vision alive. In May 2025, the MLA filed a joint lawsuit in federal district court arguing that the executive branch’s cuts to the NEH, whose funds Congress had already appropriated, violated the separation-of-powers principle enshrined in the Constitution, as well as federal statutes. This past May, a judge sided with the plaintiffs in finding the termination of NEH grants “unlawful.”

It was funding from the NEH that in part enabled the 60 teachers to meet in Maryland in 1987.

What is the proper place of English studies in cultivating democratic wisdom? The answer is not self-evident, despite what the conference’s participants believed. Civics itself is a decentralized field, with researchers operating in far-flung disciplines such as history, political science, and education. In the siloed world of academic disciplines, it’s not always easy for a civic-minded English professor to locate an intellectual network, or a like-minded legal researcher to identify a co-investigator in literacy. In K-12 schools, teacher training and certification enforce disciplinary divides between English language arts (ELA) and social studies. And the latter, which includes civics, often plays the part of second-class citizen. According to a 2018 report from the Center for American Progress, fewer than 10 states mandate a full year of U.S. government or civics instruction. A 2022 study performed by the RAND Corporation found few state or federal incentives to improve social studies learning in the face of high-stakes testing, with schools often singly focused on raising students’ reading and math scores.

That doesn’t mean educators stay in their assigned disciplinary lanes. When I asked Anton Schulzki, a former interim executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCCS), why civic education doesn’t include ELA, he resisted the framing. “I give students Federalist 51 and ask them to annotate it, ask them what is the point of view and perspective, what is the argument?” Schulzki said. “That’s ELA. Social studies teachers are ELA teachers.” Schulzki taught history, civics, and American government for 41 years in southern Colorado schools before stepping into a temporary leadership role at the professional association for social studies education. In 2013, the NCCS published the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework that identified ways to bring literacy instruction into the social studies classroom by focusing on such skills as how to read a chart or how to approach sources. The NCCS’s report was a response to Common Core State Standards, which required that social studies teachers share in literacy instruction duties.

When Tonya Perry taught middle school ELA in the 1990s, long before Common Core, she wouldn’t necessarily have labeled herself a civics teacher. Still, she wanted students to envision “themselves as active participants in this world of information and not just receivers.” Those aims, she told me, no matter what you call them, are finally about preparing students for democratic citizenship. Perry shared a moving example, from her fifth year of teaching. Following the death of a beloved coach at her urban Alabama school, Perry invited students to compose messages to the late coach in which they reflected on their time together. Students were so engaged in the assignment that they compiled the letters into an anthology, sold copies for $1 each, and made a $300 donation to the coach’s family. Through the experience, Perry reflected, students “saw themselves as citizens in the classroom, citizens in the school, citizens in the country.”

An education scholar who is now provost and vice president of academic affairs at Miles College, an HBCU in Fairfield, Alabama, Perry also formerly served as president of the National Council of Teachers of English. Although today’s NCTE doesn’t necessarily refer to the 1987 meeting or the report the attendees produced, Perry explained, the belief that “language is a powerful tool that we help [students] hone” is central to the organization’s mission. The NCTE originated from early-20th-century efforts to counter the influence of college-entrance examinations on the high school English curriculum, and secondary school teachers have always represented its largest constituency. In 2022, with funding from the Educating for American Democracy initiative, the organization released “Reading, Writing, & Raising Voices: The Centrality of Literacy to Civic Education,” a guide to support ELA teachers and school leaders in activating the civic dimensions of language and literature instruction. “English language arts is a foundational source of civic learning,” the document states, in words that could well have come from Democracy through Language 35 years earlier.

This resonance is not lost on Brook Thomas. From his position as chair of the English department and as director of the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine, in the late 1990s, Thomas was mounting the case that reading and writing instruction can help students learn “how to think like citizens,” much like law schools claim to train graduates “how to think like lawyers.” Thomas saw the value of this disciplinary approach as distinct from the broader aim of teaching critical thinking.” Pretty much anyone can claim to teach critical thinking—“even the business people,” he quipped. Yet Thomas often found the toughest audience in fellow English professors. “I had more success with that argument outside the department, rather than within it, because there in English, everyone had their own ideas about the function of literature,” Thomas, now an emeritus professor, told me.

By the time I finished my PhD in English in 2012, Thomas was renowned for his books on law and literature, a field he helped to create. Later I discovered that he also authored the lesser-known Civic Myths. The 2007 study made the case for treating American literary works as resources for civic education. Civic Myths sprung in part from Thomas’s teaching of China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1980 book about the Chinese-American experience. “Not every literature class should be civic education,” Thomas clarified. “But there are areas of opportunity.” After we spoke, Thomas mailed me eight pages of handwritten notes outlining ways that college-level literature and composition courses can support students’ development as citizens. Among the suggestions: asking them to think closely about the meaning of words, having them adjudicate the validity of various arguments, and having them debate difficult questions in a civil manner.

Scholarly interest in democracy and citizenship hasn’t disappeared among college English professors since Thomas’s Civic Myths appeared almost two decades ago. But according to Andrew Newman, who teaches American literature at Stony Brook University (and who studied with Thomas while completing his PhD at Irvine), recent work is “academicizing” the topics, rather than exploring in a more general and practical way what changes could be implemented in the classroom. Through NEH professional development seminars that explore the relationship between ELA and citizenship education, Newman has collaborated extensively with high school English teachers, and he’s currently writing a book on the history of the high school canon. Though high schoolers today are as likely as their parents were to encounter To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby, students are also less likely to read complete works, given the shift to excerpts and informational texts in many state standards.

Newman doesn’t want to return to an era when every student read a list of great books. But he added, “I do believe that reading whole books, sharing them with others, and arguing about their significance foster capacities for citizenship and what earlier scholars have called the ‘social imagination.’”

As they walked the banks of the Wye River between meals and meetings, the Coalition Conference participants might have smelled the smoke rising from the canon wars. Although E. D. Hirsch never called for a standardized set of texts that everyone must read, for many attendees, his emphasis on a singular national culture grated against the pluralist campaign to teach more works by women and writers of color. “We can’t give you any list without creating the whole dynamic we are trying to fight,” Elbow remarked in his 1990 book about the conference, conveying the majority sentiment. So, the teachers avoided the canon altogether. Their report affirmed that students should “read widely in both traditional literature and literature that reflects the diversity of American culture.” But it remained silent on what works such reading might include.

It’s easy to understand why. The teachers had bonded around their shared identity as educators in the language arts, not literature; centering the contentious canon question could have splintered that solidarity. That same summer of 1987, at the Institute on Writing, Thinking, and Citizenship Education held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Sandra Stotsky was weaving a different story about the civic ends of literature and language learning. Stotsky earned her education doctorate from Harvard in 1976 and later served as senior associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education. She believed that ELA teachers were civic educators and that they ought to teach canonical texts. In a 1997 paper on the “anti-civic forces now at work” in literature curricula, Stotsky decried the disappearance of “the experiences of European ethnic groups” from the expanding canon. “Selections abound in classrooms today that portray members of racial minority groups as saints or as victims of white oppression,” Stotsky wrote in the 1997 paper, referring to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. (Interview requests sent to two publicly available email addresses for Stotsky, who is now in her 90s, went unanswered).

Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that almost everyone I interviewed hesitated when asked about the role of the canon or specific reading lists in English education today. The reasons varied. For K-12 educators, corporate textbooks and prescribed standards mean that text selection is often made for them; pedagogical approaches like student reading clubs, or thematic inquiry around a set of books, also deemphasize a great-works mentality. For college literature teachers, meanwhile, the canon debate feels slightly less urgent than in decades past. Meanwhile, faculty members who teach composition, who have long struggled to establish their discipline as distinct from English literature and theory, never cathected to the canon as a central concern.

Still, questions—and controversies—about content endure. The Supreme Court’s June 2025 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, affirming the religious rights of a group of Maryland public school parents to opt their children out of certain instructional content, turned in part on the justices’ reading of LGBTQ+ storybooks in the ELA curriculum. Morrison’s name surfaced again in a Texas State Legislature hearing about Senate Bill 13, a law passed last summer that prohibits library material containing “indecent content.” And Hirsch carries on the cultural literacy campaign through his nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, whose curriculum emphasizes “citizenship readiness,” and “the ability to speak with, listen to, and respect different perspectives of people from across this country.” Readings included in the Core Knowledge Foundation’s ELA curriculum range from Homer’s Iliad to Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming.

Controversial or not, texts deserve a central place in civic education in the United States, where the “idea of citizen as interpreter is very, very deep,” Roosevelt Montás told me. Montás, who was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to Queens, New York, two days after his 12th birthday, authored the 2021 book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. “Any form of teaching, particularly humanistic teaching, runs the risk of being co-opted by an ideological agenda,” Montás said. “You have to be on the alert for that.” Keeping watch means approaching a foundational text like the U.S. Constitution with a spirit of inquiry that encourages students to think in nuanced ways, continued Montás, who, after a long career at Columbia University, began as the Bard Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College last July. “Is it a document that establishes and solidifies slavery in America? Or is it a document that put slavery on the path to its ultimate extinction?”

“Liberal education lives in the questions, not in the answers,” he said. “And civic education must be the same way.”

When I started asking Gregory Ulmer questions about the English Coalition Conference more than two years ago now, the retired University of Florida professor didn’t cite the “democracy through language” theme or the report bearing that name as the most vibrant memories of the gathering. What stood out to him was the very democratic coming together of primary, secondary, and tertiary educators who might otherwise never have met. For Annie Abrams, too, the democratic coalition is the point. Abrams has inhabited two different worlds of English education that sometimes feel like different planets. She holds an English PhD, with a focus on American literature, from New York University and has been teaching English in the city’s public schools since 2016. “One of the reasons I became a public school teacher is that I spent so long reading about theories of American democracy, and I wanted to practice American democracy,” Abrams told me during a phone call, as the fifth-period bell rang in the background.

Abrams sees her English classroom as a component of students’ civic education, and she hopes that college faculty members think about their work in the same way. But she wonders if forcing ELA and civic education to walk the hallway in single file ought to be the goal. “Instead of trying to fit ELA into the civic ed framework, maybe there’s an opportunity to be deliberate about literature’s role in public schools,” said Abrams, whose 2023 book Shortchanged asserts that the Advanced Placement curriculum has veered from its early democratic ambitions into an educationally impoverished testing regime. Abrams wants students to think about the books she assigns as engines for democratic possibility. Henry David Thoreau kept a commonplace book to record his reading and ruminations; Abrams invites her students to do the same. It’s not about using books for some determined end but about learning from their “traditions and habits of mind,” she said.

From his administrative post in the Somerset Hills School District in suburban Bernardsville, New Jersey, Michael Catelli likewise wonders about what it might mean to bring civics and English together in a public school system already stretched for time and money. “It would sort of be hard for ELA teachers at the middle and high school level to fit their work into the ‘how-the-bill-becomes-a-law’ frame of civics,” he told me. The former social studies instructor does not doubt that “ELA is a natural partner for lived civics, for a more expansive view of civics.” Earlier in his career, at another New Jersey school, Catelli co-taught an American studies course that blended history with literature. He attributed better student engagement and richer discussions about concepts like personal liberties and civic rights to the interdisciplinary approach.

Still, Catelli, who’s writing a dissertation about how teachers and administrators can work together to support the best civic education experience for students, isn’t sure that simply adding civics standards to ELA courses will do much to help matters. Instead, he imagines a future world in which guidelines for civic education might cut across the entire school curriculum, not housed under one subject or discipline but touching, and maybe transforming, all of them.

For now, however, there aren’t enough minutes in the day, Catelli said, and overworked teachers naturally expend their energy on reading and math instruction, the subjects that students are tested on and that consequently attract the resources of time and money. “Literacy and numeracy are king.”