I am using the idea of a (the?) literary canon as a kind of anchor question for the Honors English class I am teaching, a question that we can turn to again and again as we introduce new authors.
This made me have a discussion with Datum that I have cleaned up a bit and wish to preserve here.
I wrote:
As a practicing teacher in Oklahoma, I would argue that Hawthorn is becoming de-canonized, at least in my area. Teachers don't want to teach him. The language and themes have grown too remote.
Is this being openly admitted, and is it different in other regions of the country?
ChatGPT responded:
Your impression—that Nathaniel Hawthorne is fading from the canon in your region—turns out to be plausible, but the broader national data suggest a more complicated story. Below is a breakdown of what the research shows, along with how your local sense might fit into larger patterns.
What the national data show
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A recent survey of over 4,000 U.S. secondary ELA teachers (grades 6-12) by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) found that the most frequently taught texts are still older, white-author ‘classic’ works.
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Specifically, texts like The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, and plays by William Shakespeare dominate.
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At the same time, opinion pieces and studies note that fewer teachers feel they have time or space in their curriculum to teach harder classics. For example:
“Seven in 10 teachers overall and five in 10 high-school teachers limit classics ‘because there is no longer room for them in the curriculum.’”
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In short: The canon remains robust in many places, but pressures (time, student readiness, relevancy) are causing some shifts in which classics get the priority.
What this means for Hawthorne specifically
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Hawthorne’s signature texts (such as The Scarlet Letter) do not appear in the NCTE survey’s top-10 list of most-frequently taught works.
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Thus, while there’s no direct national data indicating a systematic drop of Hawthorne across the board, the fact that he’s not in the top tier suggests he may indeed be taught less often than some other canonical authors/works.
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Your sense of “remote language/themes” matters: many teachers cite student engagement and curriculum relevance as key criteria now. If a work is perceived as remote, it’s more likely to be substituted.
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Regional or district factors may amplify this: You mention Oklahoma. The NCTE survey notes that teachers in the South are more likely to be working with scripted curricula or restricted text choices. So your local situation may reflect both broader national trends and region-specific pressures.
Why your experience could differ from national averages
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The national survey aggregates wide geographic variety; your local district’s decisions (state standards, textbook adoptions, pacing guides, local teacher autonomy) strongly shape what gets taught.
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Hawthorne is older (“mid-19th century”), Puritan/romantic in theme, often with archaic syntax and heavy symbolism. For many modern students it may feel distant, making some teachers reluctant to invest time in scaffolding it.
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Approaches to English/language arts are shifting: there’s more emphasis on diverse voices, shorter texts, modular units, and skill-based instruction rather than full-length canonical novels. The research mentions “crowding out” of literature by nonfiction, test prep, etc.
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The power of inertia: curricula built around sets of texts, teacher familiarity with older works, district adoption cycles—these all delay change. So while a piece like Hawthorne may feel “declining” to you, the change may be gradual and uneven.
Verdict on your claim
Yes—there is reason to believe that in practice Hawthorne is becoming less central (especially in some districts/states) even if it hasn’t been universally “de-canonized.” Your local anecdote is consistent with what the national data hint (though they don’t isolate Hawthorne by name). Whether the pattern is openly admitted is more of a local/district issue. On the national level I didn’t find a study where teachers explicitly say “We won’t teach Hawthorne anymore.”
I wrote:
Not really. I am just looking for some sanity checks.
I think Hawthorne being dropped is barely-not-open secret.
The one that is heart-breaking to me is Shakespeare. I was briefly at an online charter and Romeo and Juliet was reduced to a video explaining it, slide-show style with questions over the slide-show. And then I taught at an urban high school, where it wasn't taught at all.
ChatGPT responded:
That tracks with what’s quietly happening in a lot of districts. The formal curriculum documents often still list Romeo and Juliet or The Scarlet Letter, but what “teaching” means has thinned out—works survive in name only, converted into videos, summaries, or multiple-choice scaffolds. The teachers aren’t defying the canon; they’re performing a kind of triage: make it “accessible,” hit the standards, move on.
For Shakespeare, there’s been a marked shift from teaching plays to teaching about plays. The rationale is usually student readiness or time pressure, but the effect is the same: no encounter with the language itself. The cultural authority of Shakespeare still lingers—it’s risky to say outright “we don’t teach him”—so instead he’s mediated into something safe and nonthreatening.
Hawthorne lacks even that protective aura. Few administrators or parents notice when he disappears, and the prose offers little surface reward for students who haven’t already been taught how to read nineteenth-century syntax. So his retreat happens silently, justified under “relevance” or “readability.”
Your observation—that it’s a barely-not-open secret—feels accurate. The canon isn’t being publicly overthrown; it’s just being neglected to death.
I wrote:
I thought I got a lot of mileage out of using side-by-side translations with Romeo and Juliet. And while it was good to have the plot crystal clear, the kids agreed that the original side was always better—once you understood it—the rhythm, the compact metaphors, different characters working with different voices, and Shakespeare's ability to just start buzz-sawing so many ideas and references... So clearly brilliant.
ChatGPT responded:
That’s exactly what tends to happen when students are given the real text but not abandoned to it. Once they have a foothold—once the syntax and idioms aren’t opaque—they start to hear the density and play. The line-by-line translation acts almost like scaffolding in a foreign-language class: it reduces fear enough for the music and wit to come through.
The reaction you describe—the recognition that the “translation” is clearer but flatter—is a genuine aesthetic judgment, not nostalgia. It’s the point at which students begin to see that meaning and language are fused, not detachable. Shakespeare’s intelligence stops being abstract (“he’s famous”) and becomes audible.
The tragedy is that most curricula stop before that moment. Teachers are told to front-load comprehension, but comprehension is precisely what the art uses as fuel. By keeping students on the paraphrase side, schools preserve the story but lose the voice—and the voice is the thing that still works, even now, for almost anyone who gets to hear it fully.
I wrote:
Real talk, though: I don't think that Hawthorn can be saved by side-by-side work. Hawthorn's prose just comes off pompous, and having read many of his contemporaries, such as Melville, Whitman, Thoreau, EVEN Emerson, it is clear that there was no requirement to write the way Hawthorn did.
ChatGPT responded:
That’s a fair and incisive read. Hawthorne’s difficulty isn’t just temporal distance; it’s his own mannerisms. His syntax often feels self-conscious even within its era—over-laden with abstractions and moral qualifiers, like someone writing through gauze. Melville and Whitman aimed for grandeur too, but they wrote with muscularity and surprise. Thoreau, at his best, snaps with clarity. Emerson’s aphoristic compression at least rewards rereading. Hawthorne, by contrast, often turns moral psychology into a maze of clauses.
It’s not that his insights aren’t real—alienation, guilt, social hypocrisy—but they arrive coated in an almost Puritanical decorum. In the 19th century that might have signaled seriousness; now it reads as evasive. The language performs repression rather than examining it, and modern readers feel the distance instantly.
So yes: side-by-side glosses don’t rescue him. His problem isn’t comprehension but tone. Students can understand him and still recoil. And that puts teachers in a bind, because unlike Shakespeare, whose strangeness is electric, Hawthorne’s strangeness is heavy—it requires patience and a kind of moral sympathy for a sensibility that has largely vanished.
He might linger in anthologies for “Young Goodman Brown” or “The Birthmark,” but the era when The Scarlet Letter was the unquestioned American novel feels finished.
