Joyce is really not all that present in high schools. He’s more taught in 300 level college courses. And besides he’s fairly popular. Go to your local Barnes and Noble...they will have him in stock along with books about him. Dublin has tours of the areas mentioned in Ulysses. It’s a popular tourist attraction.
The fact is that kids tend to dislike *everything* they read in school. Even a writer like Dickens who has massive popular appeal. So giving them trash to read won’t help matters any. It will just insure that they will probably never be exposed to serious Literature in their lives. Many of them anyway. Education isn’t supposed to be fun. It can be but that’s not the goal.
Joyce is the easy picking, he is still taught in some high schools, and being that his stuff is taught (thus a section of the population is FORCED to buy it) it’s availability really doesn’t mean much.
The reason kids dislike everything they read in school is because the school make them read stuff that’s just plain not age appropriate. Teenage brains aren’t wired for the dense Victorian prose that makes up the majority of the mandatory reading list. This turns reading into a chore. Dickens doesn’t have massive popular appeal.
Exposing them to “literature” in a way they’re guaranteed to hate accomplishes nothing. That’s the point you always ignore. Yes I read Joyce thanks to annoying school curricula, and hated every single monotonous overwrought word of it. I might actually be able to like it now that I have a grownup attention span, but because I already have memory of loathing it I will never ever pickup a Joyce book to read again. Had they not forced it on me at a time when everybody knew I, and all my classmates, would hate it I might have picked it up at some point in my life. I’ve enjoyed a number of the “great” books that I managed to avoid having forced on me once I got old enough for that kind of thing, but all the stuff that got forced on me is crap to me.
Education is supposed to be educational, forcing junk they’ll hate on kids teaches them nothing. It’s just wasted time and effort.