This is, as always, entirely correct. Orwell has been indispensable for making sense of the last 80 years, never more so than today.
Orwell was on our reading list when I was in high school--as was Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne and Shakespeare. To Kill a Mockingbird would not have had enough literary gravitas to make it onto the list.
However, that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away--long before the curriculum went woke.