Forcing antiquated, uninteresting books on captive teenagers leaves such a bad taste in the mouth as to ensure that most of them will never pick up a book again.
Reading should be a joy.
"Antiquated" can just mean "timeless." "Uninteresting" is a question of personal taste. You'd probably find many of the books that fascinate me "uninteresting," and vice-versa.
The real problem is the "Forcing ... captive teenagers." Few people like what they're forced to consume, and, as you say, they can lose their taste for the whole process of reading if the material is poorly chosen, as I believe much reading material in schools is.
Reading should be a joy. It is certainly the greatest one in my life, especially because I can read while pursuing many of my other pleasures, such as walking, snuggling babies, taking a bath ...
I do not recall the originator of this wisdom: "Many delightful passions come and go throughout life, but the only one that will never let you down is reading."
Forcing antiquated, uninteresting books on captive teenagers leaves such a bad taste in the mouth as to ensure that most of them will never pick up a book again.
I disagree -- "classics" are called "classics" because there is a core body of literature that every educated person MUST know. Shakespeare is woven into the fabric of the English language, the best playwright of the age that wrote the most beautiful English ever produced (they also brought you the King James Bible.) Dickens and Hardy each illuminate a time and a place in English history. Like it or not, that is important. Tolstoy is essential to understanding the Russia of his age (just as I would submit you can't understand the 19th c. French without Stendhal and Dumas).
And teenagers are not the best judges of what is meritorious reading. My daughter thought she was going to hate Paradise Lost . . . once she got through the first book, she was hooked. She also didn't care for All the Kings' Men at first, but changed her mind about half way through. (We both still hate Catcher in the Rye, but that's one you have to read to get the flavor of a particularly depressing period in modern American literature.)
That's interesting, I remember when I was first read Shakspeare at school. The Merchant of Venice as I recall. We would read and sit and discuss the various aspects of the book, and I discovered that aside from the writing style, there were lessons, timeless lessons, to be learned from some of that antiquated literature.
As such, I understand the pitfalls of pursuing my pound of flesh.
It's not as black and white as that. If we leave it up to the student to decide what is interesting, then Harry Potter books will be about the extent of that teenagers reading.
When I was growing up, one of my teachers "forced" Jack London's Call of the Wild upon me. As I read the first chapter, I couldn't believe what a stupid antiquated book it was and if it was up to me, I would have discarded it on the spot and gone back to my Mad Magazine. A story told through the eyes of a dog who "didn't read newspapers"? Ridiculous! And what the hell is a chinese lottery anyway?
But as I read on (only because I was forced to and had a book report to write on it), I started to get into the story and when I got to the last few chapters, I couldn't put the book down. I then went to the library and looked for other books by this Jack London.
It was that book that made a lifelong reader out of me but I never would have known about it had I had not been "forced" to read it.