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While I agree with your general approach, I would like to add the following exceptions.

At the high school level, some "bad guys" can and should be read critically. As long as the material itself is not indecent, reading Dewey and Kant and Marx and O. Holmes have their place.

One of many problems with public schools (and some private ones) is that they feel obliged to treat most lefty and perverse authors and writers in a (supposed) value-free way. The stidents are free to read Ayn Rand or Karl Marx and come up with their own conclusions. Since real philosophy is no longer taught in these schools, those students are thrown in way over their head without realizing it. Most just memorize what they have to memorize and spit it out. The bright ones sometimes glom onto some "bad acid" (Descartes or Locke, for instance), buying into a false premise (sometimes unstated, and wind up with bad metaphysics or teleology, which messes everything else up). It might be useful to teach Dewey or Holmes or Mein Kampf as long as the teacher is willing to show the problems with these writings.

I will also add the "blind squirrel" exception to Elk's analysis. I loved the negative utopias of 1984 and especially "Brave New World". While Orwell was the relunctant and unhappy socialist who died before his cure, A. Huxley did not fall far enough from Humanist father Thomas's family tree. I read other material by both authors. Orwell is simply an excellent writer. A. Huxley is completely self-indulgent and egotistical, painfully so at times. But, "1984", "Animal Farm" and especially "Brave New World" are great literature (even where they all lack the really deep textures of a Doestoevsky) because the stories reveal hidden truths. These works, Animal Farm for all ages, maybe a lightly censored version of the others for early high school, are great reading.

Of course, all this really misses Elk's deeper point. The state does not have primarily responsibility for the proper instruction of children, parents do. Walt Whitman himself did not have to read Whitman, Orwell did not have to read John Barth to be a great writer, and my kids don't have to read Albee to learn how to be nihilistic narcissists (in fact I'd rather they not).

No school has the time to teach children all that is worth reading. The prep school I went to varied in material with the teacher's taste. What's essential to Borges or MI5 or BlackElk or the Kansas Dept. of Education will vary. We must presume that parents that are good enough not to belong in jail care more about the well-being of their children than the state, which has repeatedly made them the guinea pigs in the educational theory du jour. Since there were excellent thinkers before the 19th century, it cannot be said that 19th or 20th century reading is essential to make a whole person. Since the parents have the greatest commitment to the child's well-being, the parents have the final say.

Pressure and coercion from well-meaning but amateur "parents" is most unwelcome.