Kids can read junk on their own. They need to be exposed to first rate material in school. I was at a dinner recently where the host’s teenage daughter had recently read The Odyssey in school and kept telling me how boring it was. She would never have picked it up if not for school.
It’s the same reason an Art history class teaches about Michaelangelo and not the guy who draws Garfield cartoons or billboards. And music classes should teach Bach and Mozart and not Top 40 pop tunes.
FW is unreadable to some English Profs much less students. It’s not taught outside of specialty courses. And Ulysses is also way to big and complex too manage as part of something else.
There’s a big gap between reading junk and reading literature they won’t like. And forcing stuff on them they won’t like accomplishes nothing. Your dinner party girl is learning nothing from being forced to read the Odyssey, other than books suck. Let her read something she might actually like, there’s plenty of good books out there, respectably literary, that teen could actually connect to. I personally loved the Odyssey but I got hooked on mythology at an early age and read it as part of that. Actually I’d just finished the last mythology book our public library system had about 2 months before my jr high English class started the mythology section, which actually made that section kind of boring, but easy.
Art history classes are about HISTORY, thus not teaching anything modern, meanwhile art NOT history classes teach a lot of modern stuff that’s better than Garfield. And actually music classes tend to teach a lot of more modern stuff, it’s hard to teach a kid how to play an instrument if they don’t know what the end result is supposed to sound like. Sure eventually they’ll move into the classics, but there’s a lot of top 40 early for a lot of reasons, familiarity, enjoyment, and let’s face it, it’s easier. Start them with something easy, and move them to the harder stuff, it’s a pretty typical way of teaching and generally gets positive results. Except of course in the English world, where they dump hard to read stuff teens can’t possibly connect with on them, and then complain they come out with no appreciation of the classics (just like your young friend). It’s funny how addicted they are at throwing books teens won’t like at teens. My freshman year they made us read The Old Man and the Sea, now Hemingway is good stuff, often very exciting, but do they throw any of that at us? No, they throw at a bunch of 14 year olds a book about an old poor guy flashing back to the life he’d led before; the book in his catalog we’re probably LEAST likely to be able to connect to, not that it’s a bad book, but we were 14, there’s nothing there for a 14 year old to grab onto. There’s an old joke in the software business about commenting (not) commenting code that goes “it was hard to write it should be hard to read”, that describes the seeming goal English departments have, throw books at them that will be as hard for them to read as possible.
The problem is you and the teachers have a self defeating, and frankly moronic, all or nothing approach. You think that if they aren’t teaching the “best” then they aren’t teaching anything. I’m pointing out what should be taught is the “best stuff they’ll actually ENJOY” and trust that some of them will learn to like it and go voluntarily read the “best” later in life when they can actually appreciate it. The problem really boils down to reading being taught like math. Both are getting taught under a method that worships repetition, an approach that doesn’t care if they like it, but makes them do it assuming they’ll learn something. The problem is reading ain’t math, repetition by force teaches nothing other than loathing of the activity. They need to grasp that there’s a big section of literature that only the right type of nerd can possibly appreciate under the age of 30, and they should stop trying to push it on teens, nothing is accomplished. If the goal is to TEACH then they need to skew the material to something teens can actually LEARN from.