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I guess I'm showing my age, but I thought everybody had to read Shakespeare in school, and the ones everybody read generally included "Macbeth", "Hamlet", and one of the comedies, usually "Twelfth Night" or "As You Like It". I think the author kind of misses the real point about Polonius - he pronounces lots of maxims to his son, but he doesn't live by them, and his lack of morality and sinful behavior (as opposed to his words) precipitates the crisis of the play (and gets him killed).

Also, we used to have to read Dickens, whose Scrooge would have made a good point in this essay. Got "Great Expectations" in the 8th grade, I think, and "Bleak House" in 11th or 12th.

What may have happened is that political correctness now requires that the kids read a certain quota of authors from various racial, ethnic, and other special-interest groups, regardless of their merit. It crowds out the classics, especially the ones written by Dead White Men.

You may have been victims of that wrong-headed thinking.