Texas is once again at the center of a familiar but unresolved debate about literacy, culture, and the proper role of schools. A proposed statewide list of books, plays, poems, and other literary works that all students would be expected to read has prompted criticism—and, in some quarters, predictable alarm.
The draft list, released by the Texas Education Agency pursuant to recent legislation, is now before the State Board of Education, which is expected to debate, amend, and vote on it in the coming months. It proposes roughly 15 to 30 works per grade—far more than many expected—including novels, plays, poems, and shorter historical texts such as presidential speeches and founding documents. That scope came as a surprise, since the State Board of Education had asked the agency only to identify “at least one literary work” per grade. The selections lean heavily on classic literature and are organized into optional groupings, pairing anchor texts—often full books—with shorter literary and historical works to build knowledge and context.
In an interview last week, Texas education commissioner Mike Morath reminded me that the Texas Constitution charges the state with promoting “a general diffusion of knowledge.” It is a striking phrase—at once modest and demanding. The framers did not speak of skills, competencies, or dispositions. They spoke of knowledge and of the need for it to be broadly shared.
In this respect, those 19th-century statesmen turned out to be fair—if accidental—cognitive scientists. Long before anyone spoke of background knowledge, schema, or cognitive load, they hit upon a foundational truth about literacy: Language proficiency depends on access to a common stock of knowledge that writers assume and readers recognize. Comprehension is not a content-neutral “skill” that can be reduced to decoding symbols on a page and finding the main idea. It’s a sense-making process that rests to an extraordinary degree on references, idioms, allusions, and stories that are common and broadly shared among the literate.
That insight helps explain why Texas, alone among states, has taken the unusual step of proposing a specific, statewide list of literary works—books, plays, poems, speeches, and stories that all students would be expected to encounter over the course of K–12 schooling. The list is not an attempt to freeze culture in place or settle arguments about the canon once and for all. It’s honest about what literacy actually requires: not exposure to print in the abstract, but familiarity with the texts and traditions that enrich, inform, and structure the English language.
An essay on my Substack by my AEI colleague Annika Hernandez anticipates—and answers—many of the objections now being leveled against the Texas list. As she observes, “Many educators have forgotten that, no less than history and science, English class exists to deliver a body of knowledge: specifically, knowledge of the literary canon” [emphasis mine].
Of course, for some the word canon itself is a provocation. Hernandez’s point—and Texas’s—is not about canon-making as an exercise in reverence or exclusion. It can be understood as curation. These are the works literate speakers and writers know, draw upon, and assume their listeners and readers know, too. To decline to teach them is not an act of humility or inclusion; it is to deny students access to the shared references and background knowledge that make language intelligible in the first place. Hernandez puts it well: “An educated person is expected to know what ‘to be or not to be’ means and where it comes from. We might think that’s unfair, but we cannot wish it away.”
The current controversy over Texas’s reading list reprises the arguments over its 2024 Bluebonnet curriculum. Then as now, critics objected, most particularly, to the inclusion of biblical stories, which the state planned to teach explicitly as literature and cultural source material. The charge was that the curriculum was “Bible-infused,” as if this were an evangelization attempt rather than a linguistic reality. Of course it’s “Bible-infused,” I argued at the time. So is English. Our language is saturated with biblical idioms and references (as well as references to Greek and Roman myths, Shakespeare, and classic literature) not because anyone decreed or imposed it, but because centuries of common usage made it so.
This is the point that is too often missed in debates like these. Language is not a moral project. It doesn’t bend to our will and it cares not one bit for our politics. We don’t get to vote on which allusions, idioms, metaphors, or background knowledge gain traction. Usage decides. Unconsciously, writers assume what readers know, not what curriculum designers wish they knew. Schools can pretend otherwise, but students—particularly low-income and minority students—pay the price when they encounter texts that assume knowledge they were never taught because it made someone in a position of power uncomfortable—or worse, because they thought they were helping, honoring, or elevating them by demanding “representation.”
This goes a long way to explain why Texas, at the moment, is more clear-eyed about language proficiency than any other state. Rather than treating literacy as a collection of transferable skills, Texas has begun to treat it as what it actually is: a knowledge-dependent capacity that grows through sustained exposure to shared content. That clarity has led the state to make choices—naming texts, sequencing knowledge, and insisting that some things be commonly taught—that inevitably run afoul of long-standing education homilies from both the left and the right about local control, personalization, child-centered pedagogy, and content neutrality.
The backlash is predictable. A curriculum that names what students should know will always be criticized for what it leaves out. But refusing to name content is not a neutral act. It simply shifts the burden of acquiring cultural and linguistic knowledge away from schools and onto families—rewarding those who can supply it at home and penalizing those who cannot.
In the final analysis, then, the debate over Texas’s reading list is not about religion or ideology. It is about whether schools are willing to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: literacy requires shared knowledge, and shared knowledge requires choices. Those choices will never satisfy everyone. But refusing to make them carries a cost and, frankly, an inequitable one—borne disproportionately by students who depend on schools to provide what others acquire by chance.
If the state is serious about its constitutional duty to diffuse knowledge broadly, it must be willing to say what that knowledge is—and to ensure that students who don’t get it at home still get it somewhere.
The question is not whether Texas’s list is perfect. It is whether it is better than the alternative.
And the alternative—a curriculum that names no texts, assumes no common ground, and leaves cultural literacy to chance—has already failed too many students to recommend itself again.
