I got a lot out of reading young adult classics like A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game, And Then There Were None, etc.

I read A Tale of Two Cities in high school (had to) and hated it. I just read it again earlier this year (by choice) and loved it.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from that but yeah, that happened.

#TeamNoShakespeareInHighSchool (unless it's optional)

There are tons of good books that can be used to teach whatever you want to get across that teenagers will actually enjoy reading. Jamming the curriculum with loads of books that most kids hate and won't bother reading just discourages them from ever becoming readers.

There needs to be a balance between the readable and not so readable. During senior year you may want students reading waiting for godot, metamorphosis, heart of darkness, infinite jest, or whatever, for reasons beyond just "knowing how to read." Goofy has a good point, though. The Bros. Karamazov or The Magic Mountain or Two Cities or Moby Dick can be radically different books when read at 17 y/o vs 25 y/o.

By the way, the Chinese and many other countries totally cheat at these tests, and if you subtract the South for the US results, we do pretty decent. Chris Hayes discussed the issue last night http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/ar...ng-79675459718

Uh, the percentage of people who can get anything of value out of Waiting for Godot, The Metamorphosis or Infinite Jest is in the very low single digits. I mean ALL people, not just HS seniors.

simp, sometimes I get the distinct impression you have absolutely no idea what normal people are like.

Shakespeare is an integral part of the English language. He not only coined over 1700 words, many of which are in common usage today, but he has dozens if not hundreds of passages that are frequently quoted in pop culture and even casual conversation. His plays are the foundation of modern theater and cinema. If you don't understand Shakespeare, it's because you don't understand English. Teaching people to understand English is a worthy goal of English classes.

I was going to write something similar. The importance of statistics cannot be overstated - it is the formal process of making a hypothesis and examining actual outcomes to decide if the hypothesis can be supported or rejected. The importance of being able to do this kind of analysis should be very evident on a politics forum, where people are throwing out all kinds of hypotheses about how the world works or should work or whatever, and being able to test those ideas rationally should be an important part of the political process. Of course it is not, in large part because legislators can't/won't do appropriate math.

We are talking about high school students, right? The "we need to turn them into readers!" ship set sail long ago, bro. If they can't handle grown-up literature by 10th grade, then they should be shipped off to the salt mines. WTF are they going to do when they get to college and the Prof hands them some William Faulkner to read?

So, a quick google of a suggested reading list for 10th graders turns up:

Animal Farm - George Orwell
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
1984 - George Orwell
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Return of the Native Thomas Hardy
Saint Joan - George Bernard Shaw
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Wuthering Heights - Elizabeth Bronte

There are some enjoyable reads in there: Heart of Darkness, Brave New World, and Lord Jim are excellent. Some Bronte and Austen for the girls. And teenagers pretty much always like Orwell.

I do agree that Tale of Two Cities is zzzzzzzz. If you can't get through Shakespare's English, Chaucer will make you lose your ****. Aside from Chaucer's middle English, if there's anything in that list you can't handle, you shouldn't get to be a HS junior.

Wow, it's even worse than I expected. A sample of 1% of China's elites cherrypicked by the Chinese gov't outperforms American students? You don't say!

Completely absurd. Kids don't understand Shakespeare because the language is archaic to the point of being very nearly another language, and because they lack the historical and cultural perspective to understand something written over 400 years ago.

I've read like 2 of those books lol

We wouldn't want them to learn about history and cultural perspective though, that's true.

Jesus ****ing christ, this is exactly the problem. Only four of these works were published in the last hundred years. You know what books these kids will say they like the best? The Orwell and the Huxley. You know why? Because they understand the language more easily and have the cultural perspective to understand the plot and the characters. There is plenty of contemporary quality literature that will be far more relatable to these kids than a book published two hundred years ago set in a country they've never been to.

ITT we stop trying to educate people after 8th grade unless they're going to college.

Good list for 10th grade, except ****ing Silas Marner. Had to read that in 9th grade. It's way too disconnected from the modern world and particularly the world of 9th/10th graders from what I remember. It is an easy read for a book from that era though. Haven't read Canterbury Tales, the language seems like it would be a pretty big barrier for 10th grade.

Canterbury Tales was the only one I had to read for school from that list.

Somewhat agree, but the books on that list are classics for a reason. They are not that easy to replace and most people can get into works like Pride and Prejudice. The books I've read on the list are generally straightforward and pretty compelling reads (Dickens is probably too convoluted). Of course I'd want to add books like "Dune" or some Ray Bradbuy or Vonnegut (read Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch 22 in 11th grade) but the US seems to do ok with the reading curriculum, 17th place, woot!.

Cat's Cradle tho.

I recall...

ToTC
1984
The Things They Carried
Things Fall Apart
All Quiet on the Western Front
Lord of the Flies

ToTC was the one I disliked the most at the time, don't really recall how I felt about the others. I think I liked 1984 somewhat.

I'm not saying that none of the books high schoolers read should be from the 19th century. Sure, put a few classics from the 19th century like Huck Finn (which students generally like, again because it is fairly accessible) and some Austen and even some of the shorter Dickens. But there are plenty of classics from the 20th and 21st century as well that are as good as any of the more traditional "classics". But the focus should generally be on 21st and 20th century American literature, particularly in 9th and 10th grade.

LotF came a lot earlier in school I thought. Around the time of Catcher in the Rye.

Maybe, I'm probably fuzzy on the timelines.

The only thing I remember about Romeo & Juliet from HS is that we started referring to the guy who sold us pot as 'The Apothecary'. That's where I was at in 10th grade.

Trying to recall what we read in 11th grade, I think it was something like

Scarlet Letter
A Farewell to Arms
Huckleberry Finn
Great Gatsby
Turn of the Screw
Red Badge of Courage
My Antonia
Grapes of Wrath
The Awakening
Long Day's Journey into Night
Streetcar Named Desire

Probably some stuff I"m forgetting. My Antonia, The Awakening, and The Scarlett Letter were bleh, everything else was pretty good tbh.

And in tenth grade we read

To Kill a Mockingbird
Macbeth
Our Town
Inherit the Wind
Glass Menagerie

And that was the last year we had like an "English Book" that was basically a reader with a bunch of stories in it.

For one thing your high school made sure you knew the book existed. You also knew that other people thought it was important enough to be compulsory reading. So there is a function of showing students the best guesses at the educational side of a well rounded life. I think this alone is enough to justify making kids read hard to read classics. I won't make believe that doing so constitutes, by itself, a real educational experience for the HS students.

But it might sow the seeds. We should give HS students what we think is the best humanity has to offer. Of course not all of them will get a lot out of it. It's like here, this is what has withstood the test of time to be a highly valued human expression. Read it. Read the cliffs. Come back to it later. No? We tried.