Lexington High School transitioned to the “Honors for All” program for its English courses in the 2023-2024 school year, and it was met with mixed reactions. I personally did not like the change, though I can understand the reasons and the research that went into making this decision. However, this transition highlights how much LHS’s academic culture has suppressed the humanities in favor of STEM. Whereas STEM-oriented students seem to have endless possibilities of classes to take, students who want to take rigorous English courses have many fewer options to challenge themselves within school. In my experience, this has forced me to take hard STEM classes that I am not as interested in to compensate for the lack of more challenging humanities courses in order to maintain a high course rigor. Though I enjoy the harder STEM courses that I have taken, I would like the opportunity to choose to challenge myself in English as well.

That’s the key word: choice. At the moment, every student has to take Honors English. It is difficult to measure how challenging Honors English actually is, since it varies from class to class and teacher to teacher. However, not having options for how rigorous the class is negatively impacts both students who enjoy English and those who do not. If an English class lives up to the Honors difficulty, students with less interest in English may find the class too challenging. Meanwhile, if the class has to compensate for a mixture of English levels, some students can feel that the class is too easy or tedious.

Part of the argument for the Honors for All system is the belief that any student can meet the requirements for an Honors English class. While this is arguably true, when factoring in the many other challenging classes that many students take at LHS, it can be difficult to keep up with having too many honors and AP classes. Well, why not just cut down on those other classes if you can’t keep up? Firstly, if you are more interested in STEM than the humanities, it doesn’t make sense to have to sacrifice your time spent on other classes for an honors class you didn’t choose. Secondly, the fact that everyone is taking Honors English makes this level feel like a baseline; if you want your course rigor to stand out among your peers, you may feel the need to take these additional rigorous courses because Honors English isn’t necessarily eye-catching anymore.

Another argument for the Honors for All system is that students who are particularly interested in English have plenty of opportunities outside of school to challenge themselves, which I agree is completely true. For instance, you can self-study either of the English AP courses, just as with any other AP course not offered at LHS. That being said, we can’t just keep adding more and more extracurricular activities to our schedules. We can’t just create free time—we’re students, not magicians. When challenging classes are built into the school day, it’s much easier to engage in that subject without overloading yourself with unreasonable amounts of extracurricular work.

Honors for All wasn’t a devastating change by any means, but I think it would be beneficial to have more opportunities for students interested in English to challenge themselves in school, just as they would with a math or science class. I’ve heard more discontentment with the Honors for All system from other students than positive opinions, and it’s great that the English department recently surveyed students to gain insight from our perspective. Though such reforms are ultimately up to the English department, whether they look at adding AP Lang or AP Lit to the LHS curriculum, or just releveling English.