What Will Our Children Read?

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On July 24, 2026, The New York Times published an article titled “Ayn Rand and a Psalm: A New Texas Book List.” It presented the list that the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) had been debating since April 2026 and whose final version was published at the end of June on their website, under HB 1605. The approved list contains the texts that millions of Texas children will be required to read in school, beginning in the 2030–31 school year. It includes nearly 200 required texts—novels, picture books, poems, short stories, speeches, political documents, folktales, and biblical passages or adaptations—divided by grade.

Reading the list made me think about the books I read in elementary school. Some of them have stayed in my mind forever, and I will never forget them. Others made me curious and invited me to read more books by the same author. Some opened my eyes to subjects I had never thought about. Still others made me feel uncomfortable or out of place, and I wanted to forget them. These books were part of a list that all my peers had to read and discuss in the classroom. Even more, I grew up knowing that until a certain age, adults were my censors when it came to reading: they had the power to tell me what to read and what I was not allowed to read.

Now, after decades of reading, I know that there are books we remember because we loved them, books we remember because we hated them, and books we would never have read if someone had not made us read them. School reading belongs largely to that third category: it arrives before we can choose, often before we know enough about ourselves to understand why somebody else has to choose for us.

Beginning in the 2030–31 school year, students in Texas will read books the state has selected for them. Mandatory reading is not inherently wrong. In many cases, it is the only way children encounter Shakespeare or Jane Austen, learn about The Iliad or The Odyssey, or even discover Don Quixote. Education is, after all, about guiding students and encouraging them to read. But the way a reading list is crafted—the titles it includes, those it excludes, and the order in which the works are read—can create not only a canon but also an ideology, a way of seeing the world.

Children in kindergarten will read beautiful books that I have loved reading to my granddaughters, such as The Cat in the Hat, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and The Runaway Bunny. They will, of course, encounter traditional stories such as Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs, together with biographies and stories about figures such as George Washington and Thomas Edison. Books such as You Are Special introduce lessons about virtue and individual worth. This line continues into the following grades, where literature increasingly works alongside history to teach children about American and Texan heroes. A canon can allow us to understand a conversation that preceded us. An ideology tells us how somebody wants us to understand the world. What stories are these books telling? How do they accumulate, year after year, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, to paint a picture of life and society? And here I begin to ask myself: When does a literature curriculum become a civics curriculum?

Looking first at the titles reported by The New York Times, then at the earlier proposed lists and finally at the list approved by the Texas State Board of Education, other questions emerge. What kind of America comes out of this narrative? Who are its heroes, and what are the attributes the books invite children to admire and praise? What do happiness, morality, and freedom mean? Who has the right to possess them? What role does religion play? What does it mean to be the ideal American citizen? And from there, what ideas are presented as universal, to be imposed on others simply because the books taught you that you possess the truth, that you are right and others are wrong?

In the list, as we can see, literary works coexist with passages and stories from the Bible. Unlike countries such as Mexico, where there is a strict separation of Church and State and public schools are not allowed to teach any religion to the students, the United States has a particular constitutional and historical relationship between religion and public education. There is no official national religion, and public schools cannot promote religious belief, but religion can be studied in academic contexts. This distinction becomes particularly relevant when looking at the Texas reading list.

Noah’s Ark appears in first grade, together with the story of “Jonah and the whale”; “David and Goliath” follows in second grade; “Daniel and the lions” in third; and Luke 14:7–11, titled “The Necessity of Humility,” in fourth. By seventh grade, children will encounter Psalm 23 and “The Beatitudes”, and in eighth grade, “Ecclesiastes” and “Lamentations”. In the high-school English classes come the “Prodigal Son”, the “Book of Job”, “Genesis”, and “Corinthians”.

Supporters argue that biblical literacy is important for understanding Western literature, history, and American culture. There is considerable truth in that argument. We can see the enormous influence of the Bible on Melville when reading Moby Dick, or recognize how Milton and Faulkner repeatedly return us to Eden, Cain and Abel, sin, exile, and redemption. Even Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude invites comparisons with the Exodus, the Flood, and resurrection. But should this be part of literary education, or is it part of a broader educational project? And in either case, what is missing? Where are Greek mythology and philosophy? Where is Judaism as a living religious and intellectual tradition? Islam? African traditions? Indigenous Mexican and other Latin American cosmologies and religions? What about Asia?

Students will also learn, through the accumulation of these readings over the years, what the word “author” means: who an author is and who can become one. What is overwhelming about the list, particularly as students grow older, is the predominance of male, English-speaking American and European writers. Women writers matter not simply because they are women, but because women have often experienced and written the world differently from men. Without them, our understanding of American and world literature is incomplete. Yet the imbalance increases as students grow older. In high school, of the required texts, only a small proportion are authored by women, among them Margaret Thatcher, Jane Austen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ayn Rand, and Emily Dickinson.

My argument is not that we need a mathematical balance of voices simply because of gender. We need voices that must be heard if we want students to receive a broad intellectual formation and to encounter different sides of a story.

Latino children in Texas will not be required to read Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, or Gloria Anzaldúa. Among the closest voices they will encounter are Alma Flor Ada with Medio Pollito, Pat Mora with Tomás and the Library Lady, and Gary Soto with Too Many Tamales. Don Quixote, by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, also appears in an adapted version.

In a state like Texas, these absences are important. One silence remains particularly striking: Mexico and the border. Texas and Mexico are inseparable in history, language, food, traditions, and geography. Some of this is visible in the first years of school, but Mexican American and Latin American voices become less visible as children approach adulthood.

Texas public schools also have a substantial Black student population. African American students account for roughly 12 percent of public-school enrollment. Although children will not be required to read the great Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison, they will encounter several significant Black writers, poets, and historical voices. Still, it would have been extraordinary to see other essential names included: Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, or Octavia Butler. Their inclusion would not simply provide “representation.” It would enlarge the literary, emotional, and intellectual world available to every student.

Another question concerns contemporary literature. We know that students should read Shakespeare and Austen, but what truly enriches a reader is also the opportunity to see the influence of these canonical authors on new generations of writers. It is a way of showing students that literature is alive, that it changes and moves with our times.

We have already seen what happened during the controversies over “banned books,” and the reactions of some supporters of these initiatives, including attempts to pressure libraries and schools to remove certain books from their shelves. Now, with this mandatory list, perhaps the greatest danger is not that children will read the “wrong” books. The greater danger is forgetting that literature becomes powerful precisely when it keeps us on our toes and pushes us to ask questions. It is not easy to read books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, but difficult books have a place in education. Great literature complicates the person who reads it and, in this respect, I must give credit where credit is due. Through the Texas SBOE list, children will certainly encounter authors who will complicate their worldview: Orwell, Bradbury, Eliot, Kipling, Poe, and Dante, and many others.

But as much as I celebrate these names, I also see the reinforcement of a Eurocentric canon, dominated by American and European authors. When we look at the authors assigned in English I through IV, the literary map becomes miniature; much of the rest of the world has vanished. As Texas students grow older, the books grow more difficult, but the literary world around them seems to grow smaller.

Something similar happens with women. They do not disappear from the Texas curriculum; rather, their presence diminishes precisely as the curriculum begins to define literary and intellectual authority.

The impact of this list will not be seen in the immediate future. It will shape generations to come. It will help build a cosmogony, a collective way of imagining the world and our place within it.

Education always involves choosing. It involves mandatory tasks and the certainty that someone will make decisions about what our children will learn. But is this “someone” opening the world for our children or closing it? Are other voices and points of view being excluded? Who decides which virtues and role models deserve to be followed, and which can be ignored? Are we reinforcing a kind of provincialism through the predominance of English-language, American, and British literature and the worldview that accompanies it?

And finally, perhaps the most intimate question of all: How will this curriculum enter our homes through the minds of our children?

Foto de Keren Fedida en Unsplash

Adriana Pacheco , PhD. es investigadora y es escritora. Fundadora del Proyecto Escritoras Mexicanas Contemporáneas y la fundadora y conductora de la página web y podcast Hablemos, Escritoras. Es coordinadora de los libros Romper con la palabra, violencia y género en la obra de escritoras mexicanas contemporáneas y Rompiendo de otras maneras, cineastas, periodistas, dramaturgas y performers. Es investigadora afiliada de LLILAS, University of Texas, Austin, miembro del Advisory Board del Texas Book Festival y fue miembro y presidente del International Board of Advisors en la Universidad de Texas, Austin. Su Twitter es @adrianaXIX_XXI

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Posted: August 20, 2026 at 8:36 pm