Who Decided You'd Read The Great Gatsby?

It's Friday, July seventeenth. The Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird. Romeo and Juliet. Lord of the Flies. Of Mice and Men. 1984. The Odyssey. The Catcher in the Rye. I bet you've read at least four of those. You probably read most of them in high school. And if I asked your parents, they'd say they read most of the same ones. And if I asked your parents' parents, same thing. Which raises a question I never thought to ask until this week: why? There's no national curriculum in the United States. Nobody in Washington mandated that every American teenager reads The Great Gatsby. Each of the roughly 13,000 school districts in the country technically chooses its own reading list. And yet, somehow, nearly all of them ended up choosing the same twelve books, and that list hasn't changed much since the 1960s. So who's actually making this decision? The answer involves college entrance exams from a hundred years ago, two states with outsized political influence, parents who want their kids to read what they read, and a self-reinforcing loop that works almost exactly like the QWERTY keyboard. The high school reading list didn't start in a classroom. It started in a college admissions office.

In the early 1900s, colleges set entrance requirements that included specific literary works. If Harvard expected incoming students to have read Shakespeare, then high schools taught Shakespeare. If Yale referenced The Odyssey in its admissions criteria, high schools assigned The Odyssey. The reading list was reverse-engineered from what colleges wanted, and since the most prestigious colleges tended to value the same works, a loose consensus formed across American high schools about which books a well-educated student should know.

That consensus hardened over the next several decades as standardized testing took hold. When the College Board created the Advanced Placement English Literature exam, the test questions referenced specific texts. When the SAT included reading comprehension passages, the passages reflected certain literary traditions. Teachers who wanted their students to perform well on these exams taught the texts those exams were built around. The canon wasn't decided by a committee of literary scholars evaluating the best books ever written. It was shaped by the practical needs of test preparation and college admissions, which is a much less romantic origin story.

By the time education historian Arthur Applebee surveyed high school reading lists in 1989, the canon was remarkably stable and remarkably narrow. The top ten most assigned books included nine works by white male authors and one by a white woman, Harper Lee. Zero books by minority authors were in the top ten. Shakespeare dominated, with Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar all appearing near the top. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, had been a fixture for decades despite modest sales when it was first released. Gatsby became a classroom staple not because it was a bestseller but because it was short, thematically rich, and set during a period of American history that teachers found useful for discussion. Those are practical classroom qualities, not literary rankings. Even without a national curriculum, American schools end up teaching similar content because of how textbooks get made and sold.

Nineteen states adopt textbooks at the state level, meaning a state board of education reviews and approves a list of acceptable textbooks, and every school in the state must choose from that list. The rest leave the decision to individual districts. But the states that adopt at the state level include some of the biggest student populations in the country, and that concentration of buying power shapes what publishers produce.

Texas has historically been the most influential. The Texas State Board of Education reviews textbooks on a regular cycle and its decisions affect roughly five million students. Because producing different editions for different states is expensive, publishers have historically designed their core textbooks to meet Texas standards first and then sold those same books nationally with minimal changes. A decision made by fifteen elected board members in Austin about what belongs in a textbook ends up in classrooms in Oregon, Minnesota, and Vermont.

California exerts similar influence from the other direction, with different political priorities. The result is that publishers try to satisfy both states simultaneously, which often produces textbooks that are compromise documents: broad enough to pass review in Texas, inclusive enough to pass review in California, and specific enough to satisfy neither completely. Florida has recently joined this dynamic, rejecting 41 percent of submitted math textbooks in one cycle for what it described as prohibited content.

The reading list follows the same pattern. When a major state's curriculum framework references specific novels, those novels get taught in states that never made that choice independently. The Odyssey isn't assigned in most American high schools because each of those 13,000 districts independently concluded it was the best use of their students' time. It's assigned because it's been on the list long enough that testing frameworks reference it, textbook publishers include study materials for it, and the infrastructure of American education is built around the assumption that students will encounter it. The reason the reading list hasn't changed much in over sixty years is the same reason we still use the QWERTY keyboard: path dependency reinforced by multiple interlocking systems that are each individually rational but collectively resistant to change.

Teachers tend to teach books they know well, which are usually the books they were taught in school themselves. A teacher who read The Great Gatsby in high school, studied it again in college, and has ten years of lesson plans built around it is not going to swap it out for a novel published last year, even if the newer book is better for their students, because the switching cost is too high. New lesson plans, new discussion questions, new essay prompts, new context to research. The existing curriculum works. Changing it is expensive in time and effort.

Parents reinforce the cycle from the other direction. When a school proposes adding new books or removing old ones, parents who remember reading those books in their own education tend to resist the change. There's a comfort in knowing your child is reading the same things you read, a sense that the education is legitimate because it matches your own experience. Education historian Jonna Perrillo observed that parents "tend to approve of having their children study the same books that they once did," which creates a generational feedback loop where the canon perpetuates itself through parental expectation.

And the testing infrastructure locks it in from a third angle. As long as the AP exam, the SAT, and college admissions frameworks reference certain literary traditions, teachers have a practical incentive to teach those traditions regardless of whether they personally think other books would be more valuable.

The result is a reading list that was shaped by college admissions requirements from a century ago, reinforced by parents who want their children to read what they read, locked in by standardized testing, and distributed nationally through a textbook market dominated by a handful of large states. It's not that the books on the list are bad. Many of them are excellent. It's that the process that put them there and keeps them there has almost nothing to do with whether they're the best available options for students today. The list persists because the system that produced it is self-reinforcing, and changing any one part of that system requires changing all the others simultaneously, which is why nobody does it. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. There's no national curriculum in the United States, but nearly every American high school assigns the same twelve or so books, and that list hasn't changed significantly since the 1960s. The canon was originally shaped by college entrance requirements, reinforced by standardized testing, distributed nationally through a textbook market where Texas, California, and Florida have outsized influence, and perpetuated by parents who want their children to read what they read. In the late 1980s, the top ten most assigned books included nine by white male authors and one by a white woman. The list persists not because someone evaluated every book ever written and chose the best ones, but because the system that put these books in classrooms is self-reinforcing in the same way the QWERTY keyboard is: teachers teach what they know, tests test what's taught, parents approve of what's familiar, and nobody can change one piece without changing all the others. The Great Gatsby has been assigned in American high schools for over sixty years. It sold poorly when it was published. It became a classic because the system made it one.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.