[CGTRWK]

Sometimes you don't know what you like. I think it is important to teach the classics.

Reading is a recreational pastime you're trying to impart on a new audience. You don't make excuses about them not knowing what they like yet, you make it fun for them or they won't do it again without coercion, period.

Would you take someone who had never had foreign cuisine before and start them at a Japanese restaurant with raw octopus?

Or take someone who had never been camping before out in February to shiver in freezing rain eating cold canned beans for a week?

How about take a novice shooter out and start them out with a .458 elephant gun and no ear plugs?

Start a non drinker friend off with straight scotch whiskey?

So why would you ever start a novice reader off with boring classic books? It may be important to read them at some point in life, but youth is not that point.

[AnAmericanMother]

You're just assuming that "classics" is some sort of fungible category. Some classics are appropriate for the younger grades, some for high school seniors. A clever teacher will assign appropriate classics for the class at hand.

And reading is not merely a 'recreational pastime'. It's necessary for the old-fashioned "liberal education" - that is, what makes a gentleman.