— OXFORDEvery generation, it seems, must rewrite its inherited canon, and every generation produces, on the matter, exactly the same two op-eds: one in defence of the old syllabus, one in praise of the new. The latest round of revisions to the secondary-school literature curriculum, announced quietly last month, has predictably produced both.

The new framework adds writers from the Caribbean, from West Africa, from a handful of emerging traditions in postcolonial South Asia. It removes, by my count, four texts that had been on the syllabus since the curriculum was last reviewed in the early 1990s. Critics have called the changes ideological. Champions have called them overdue.

Both sides, it strikes me, are at least partially right, and at least partially evading the more interesting question. The texts being added are, for the most part, genuinely worth teaching: they are intellectually serious, formally inventive, and, crucially, accessible to fifteen-year-olds reading them for the first time. The texts being removed — let us be honest — were not the strongest of the old syllabus. The new framework is, on balance, better than the old.

But the more interesting question is not which books are on the list. It is what happens when those books are placed in front of students by teachers who, for entirely understandable reasons, have very little time to teach any of them well. The deepest crisis of the literature classroom is not curricular. It is temporal.

A school year that allots, by the time examinations and assemblies and unscheduled disruptions are accounted for, perhaps eighty contact hours to a literature class cannot produce serious readers — of the old canon, the new canon, or any canon at all. It can, at best, produce nodding acquaintances. The most important reform of the secondary-school literature curriculum, in other words, is not a question of which authors. It is a question of how many minutes.

Until that conversation is had, the periodic revisions of the canon will continue to generate the same op-eds, in the same numbers, with the same outcome. We will all have read about the books. Almost none of us will have read the books.