Tuft

I would have to disagree with this. While I read Shakespeare in high school (and a good lot of it), it was dispersed between the grades, and within more contemporary readings. The bulk of great reading I did was in my final two years, while in the international baccalaureate program. Authors like Isabel Allende and Arundhati Roy transformed the ordinary curriculum into something that did inspire, challenge, and motivate students with complicated, and sometimes controversial, material. Even books like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Things Fall Apart seem to have integrated into the collective "to read as a high school student" list, and I read them outside of the IB program. I think that there should be certain requirements, such a number of "classic" texts (Greek playwrights, Chaucer (in modern English, but with an introduction to middle English), Shakespeare, maybe even Donne or Pope), along with the established curriculum of literary history (Puritans, Transcendentalists, Romantics, Realists, et al.), but also a required number of "contemporary" texts, anything from Walter Mosley to José Saramago (though his narrative style would probably be too challenging/a deterrent to read; but the theme here is international author) to Maxine Hong Kingston to Stuart Dybek. The classics are great, but so are many contemporary authors. It isn't the books that make the critical reading skills, it's the teaching of the books. If students are more willing to work with Of Mice and Men than The Grapes of Wrath, let the students work with the former, so long as they do so while preparing for assignments like The Grapes of Wrath in the future. By that I mean, shorter, or more contemporary texts that still teach critical thinking and reading skills are just as effective, if not more because they engross students further than the significance of 1-dimensional love in Much Ado About Nothing.

I think the problem is that the reading materials provided in high school don't work as well as resources with which high school students care to build their critical reading and analysis skills. Because that's why students read the materials: to learn the methods necessary to read, analyze and process the literary elements in the texts. I am a bit cynical about pop culture: television, obsession with fashion, trends, Hollywood, et cetera, and would pessimistically blame things like the OC or MTV as deterrents from critical thinking. I know my English teacher for the last two years of high school also taught standard English classes, which had The Lion King on their curriculum. They had to watch it, and write a paper concerning the symbolism in the movie. See, that to me is copping out, but at least the students were learning how to construct decent papers. But reading Toni Morrison? I don't see the problem there. Skipping over some Shakespeare for more contemporary books that still challenge students to learn the skills for which they are in high school doesn't seem a problem to me, so long as the curriculum still pushes students toward critical thinking.

I don't think the problem is the challenge. It's not the height of the basketball net, it's that the classic basketball court is in an amphitheater across the Atlantic, and the ball's a little deflated. Fresher material isn't any less of a challenge, so long as it still contains the necessary elements to learn.