Any sensible humanities program must explore the past. But the problem is that today’s students can no longer read long texts. Yet the past was a written culture; documents and stories were written out. Over a very short period of time—25 years—traditional literacy has become rare.

I taught honors humanities courses over the past two decades at four universities–Temple, Lehigh, Villanova, and Drexel.

Recently, I moved to London, a place where one is overwhelmed by a past that stretches back before 1066 and is surrounded by the progressive and diverse cultures of eastern and western Europe. England is an intensely patriotic country–their national flag, whole or in part, is everywhere. And they have every reason to be proud; an island country about the size of Alabama once had the greatest empire in western history. They colonized America, almost an entire continent. The French and Spanish got here first, but they made little of it. America’s history necessarily includes Shakespeare, the various British kings, and Winston Churchill.

When I began teaching honors around 2000, in the first two weeks, I assigned The Brothers Karamazov. Students read it, took a fact-based quiz on it, and wrote a short three- to four-page paper. Of my roughly 20 students, only one failed to complete the assignment. I did not continue the class at this level, but I wanted to push them around a bit so they would understand that real study is difficult.

About fifteen years later, I taught a course on New York City between the wars. This was the time of Prohibition, Fiorello La Guardia, and Babe Ruth. The leading literary figures of the day were F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. They both wrote novels, but I was afraid that if I assigned one, the students would simply go to the internet for plot summaries and discussion topics. So we read short stories, never more than three for each class. It worked.

Quite recently, I taught an honors course on Success and Failure. The idea was to remind them that throughout adulthood, they were bound to fail, but they should understand that even the most successful people fail quite often. They can learn from their mistakes and keep coming back. Two days before my first class, I asked my advisor about how many pages I should expect my students to read in a week. His answer shocked me: forty.

Now that’s a long way from The Brothers Karamazov in two weeks.

Books on tape have allowed adults I know to read and, with recorded commentaries, to understand long, traditional novels. For younger kids and teenagers, most of their understanding of the world comes from internet media specifically aimed at them, which means the present is distorted and the past vanishes. Even movies, which America thrived on for one hundred years, are almost dead.

More recently, I taught an American history course at a private school to very bright 8th- and 9th-graders. I expected them to read only two-three pages per class. After all, a little reading is better than no reading at all. So I figured out a short reading–thorough discussion plan that worked. I turned the class into a self-published book called A Home School Guide: American History, from the Beginning to 1876. You can buy it on Amazon for $19.99.

So here’s the problem, and only we—other people—can solve it. This means more than a few outliers are needed to do the job; it means the culture itself must address it. Understanding the past requires reading because the past is lived by the written word. Fewer pages studied carefully is one solution, and I’m sure there are others I haven’t thought of.

England, I have discovered, is a reading culture. Bookstores are everywhere, and they seem to survive.

The British have avoided the problem of highly politicized literature and history classes by providing only one national standard exam on essential subjects. These are called “A” levels. You can take these tests only once.

This means that in England, a school can not hide its own prejudices. I know a private school just outside Philadelphia that comes close to beginning American history with Reconstruction, the end of the 19th century. They seem to do this so they can emphasize the very recent history and current political issues.

But in England, no school grades itself. Everything gets sent off to someone else to grade. National standards, good or bad, prevail.

So where does it all wind up?

For America to improve, for America to take the past seriously, America has got to agree on a core subject matter for everyone. If that possibility seems too remote, then we’ve got to do it one community, one university at a time. If it takes a generation, so be it. How long did it take the North to stop denigrating Italians? It took the South at least one generation to overcome segregation, but they did it.

Every worthwhile journey begins with a first step. It’s never complicated, but it’s never easy either.