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I see there's some fierce discourse raging about the "Western canon" and which books get taught to kids in school. I don't really have a strong opinion, but I have some observations from my experience. A thread.
I was required to read The Great Gatsby four different times in high school and college literature classes. It was a miserable experience until the fifth time, when I read it on my own, without it being assigned, and that's when it clicked for me, outside of an academic context.
I've read Moby Dick twice, for pleasure, not for a homework assignment, and I enjoyed it differently both times. I can see how being forced to read it for homework could be an absolutely miserable experience.
In high school, I was briefly in a literature track that eschewed the classics in favor of world literature, which in this case meant I spent a semester smothered in translated from Spanish magical realism. To date, I still can't stand the stuff.
The other class got to read A Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata. I was jealous of the variety they got, so I sought out his works on my time. Snow Country remains probably my favorite novel of all time.
I picked up an appreciation for Shakespeare through extracurricular theater activities. Had to read Romeo & Juliet for class. Yawn city. Other classes got Julius Caesar. Snooze fest. Teach the good stuff. The dirty, greasy, grimy Shakespeare.
As an English lit major in college, I studied Restoration literature (insufferable) and Romance literature (lovely stuff). I still have my Restoration lit textbook. I use it to prop open doors and raise the height on computer monitors.
When I was in high school, one of my English teachers was a secret Randroid. She assigned Anthem as required reading. I described it as "the worst, shallowest, most ham-fisted science fiction story I've had the misfortune to encounter". She didn't like that.
When I was suffering through all the morose magical realism stuff, I found adjacent Spanish language poetry, works by Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca. Beautiful stuff, but in class they stuck me with boring works by Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost.
I can't speak for anyone else's experience, but it seems like the literature I enjoyed the most was stuff I sought out outside of the context of a classroom. Turning reading from leisure into labor strikes me as a terrible disservice.
Also, the idea that pre-college classes are supposed to encourage critical thinking through lit? Nah, dawg. I had several brilliant, passionate English teachers in junior high and high school, but they didn't have the time or the resources to teach anything like critique.
I don't think the constraints of time and class size give teachers much opportunity to allow students to really explore the beauty of a work. There are tests to be taken and scores to be assigned. You don't really have much time get meditative.
