Comment by Pikamander2

I agree wholeheartedly with this.

While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.

There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.

I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."

Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.

I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.