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].