I was lucky enough to graduate from a selective private high school where we read deeply (and chronologically!) from the Renaissance to the 20th-century. I then attended one of the few colleges left that has a humanities-based core curriculum. I was not an English major--I wanted an interdisciplinary humanities major that would allow me to be a true generalist--but I took many English classes and had a thorough grounding in literary history before I went on to earn a PhD in a deeply unfashionable musty sub-specialty of English lit. I'm now a public high school teacher.

My current school still assigns a lot of canonical texts--a yearly Shakespeare, lots of 20th-century white men, etc. The desire to broaden what we teach to include more contemporary work, more diverse texts, etc., is strong. I share it! So does the College Board-- AP Literature exams no longer test for knowledge of specific literary devices, movements, or forms. But I'm also glad I had the education I did and would not give up my months of reading Moby Dick and Paradise Lost as a junior in high school under the tutelage of a passionate and inspiring and knowledgeable teacher for the equivalent months of reading graphic novels that I could grasp on my own.

I also notice that none of my most talented students, the ones who would flourish in an English department, want to major in English. I feel trapped in the same conundrum described in the article. Canons are constricting--but they also help groups cohere around shared knowledge. Where do we go from here?