High School Confidential

William, or “Mr. Able” as his students and colleagues know him, is having a crisis of faith. An English teacher in the far western flatness of Kansas, he too is being flattened — worn down by his fourth year of teaching at the high school from which he graduated, a job he fell into through haphazard idealism and his father’s school board connections. “It’s not the kids . . . and not their parents,” he explains in the opening pages of Why Teach?, Peter Shull’s earnest new novel. “It’s the admins . . . and the legislators.” Chief among the indignities the latter have visited upon him is their insistence on “test prep” as the overarching goal of education, along with the extirpation of literature from the secondary school curriculum. As the communication of his love for the classics of the American high school canon is his main source of pleasure in teaching, Mr. Able is becoming increasingly depressed.