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Record W7128805473 · doi:10.1093/alh/ajaf128

High School English and the Making of American Readers

2025· article· en· W7128805473 on OpenAlexaff
Alexander Manshel

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Literary History · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicThemes in Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsReading (process)InstitutionState (computer science)Making-ofLiterary criticismFoundation (evidence)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars. This essay examines the literary canon of US secondary schools alongside the co-curricular institutions—from Advanced Placement to CliffsNotes and the Common Core—that have shaped classroom practice since 1945. Cold War investments in cultivating the nation’s youth contributed to the foundation of the Advanced Placement program, as well as to the practice of reading for “character development,” an interpretive strategy that transforms every text into a bildungsroman. In the same period, New Critical notions of reading for “theme” became central to high school English, but also worked to dehistoricize and deracinate texts, especially those by writers of color. Since 2010, the Common Core State Standards have de-emphasized the reading of literature altogether, a major yet often undiscussed factor in the decline of university English. Reading novels by J. D. Salinger, Colson Whitehead, and Jennifer Egan through the lens of the classroom, this essay argues that understanding high school English is essential for those who study American literary history as well as those who seek to ensure its future.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.821
Threshold uncertainty score0.997

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.006
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.006
GPT teacher head0.204
Teacher spread0.198 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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