100% agree @LTmomof2 The more controversial books gave rise to opportunities to teach healthy debate and discussion. A lost art these days!
“It can be done” is different from “it will be done”, and it is likely that lots of parents and school officials will prefer a biased (to their side) teacher and curriculum over a true neutral party, or will accuse a true neutral party of being biased toward the other side.
A school district fighting a civil war over the Civil War may be hesitant about going near any more recent political issues. Especially since politics is mostly hate politics these days.
@ucbalumnus
I will still take the chaos over these outdated books that my 77 year old mother read in school are are still assigned to my kids. They HATE to read because of these outdated “classics”. I hated them too in school.
If the political books stoke a fire then so be it. These ancient irrelevant books are ruining my kids desire to ever read outside of school.
As I said earlier, if a teacher presents a book and lets the class know that a thoughtful discussion of opposing ideas is going to ensue then that is what will take place. If a teacher has an agenda…Well thwy have an agenda no matter what book is being discussed. Their “views” will make it into a discussion on a book from 100 years ago.
To be fair, I read non stop as a kid. In HS and college - I read almost nothing unless required for school. My free time was spent socializing (a lot) and watching a lot of TV, I didn’t become an avid reader again until I was in my late 20’s or 30’s.
So I don’t judge teens and young adults who don’t read much.
The more likely result in many school districts is that the school board has an agenda and will only approve book lists and lesson plans promoting its view, rather than promoting thoughtful discussion of varying viewpoints on the matter.
Even when not constrained by the school board, some teachers will do that on their own to promote whatever viewpoint they prefer.
@ucbalumnus
Very good points. Sadly agendas rule in education these days. Precisely why we pulled kid 2 from public school.
With all due respect, the vehemence of your statement suggests that you may have influenced your kids in terms of your suggestion that classical literature is “boring” and “outdated”, kind of like my mom suggesting that girls tended to not be good at math did for me. Both attitudes are pretty unfortunate.
As someone who read non-stop though my own childhood and who raised one reader and one non-reader, I believe that it’s not possible to be truly educated without familiarity with at least some of the great classical works of literature, even if the student’s interests lie elsewhere. Reading also tends to make people better writers and that has certainly been true with comparing the written communication from my two kids.
Fortunately, I do know many millennials who are well-read enough to recognize a quote from Dickens or Shakespeare and so the notion that young people don’t read anymore is nonsense. They may not sit down with a newspaper over breakfast or buy as many paperbacks as I did, but there are still plenty of 20 and 30 somethings who keep up with best sellers and whose education included those dreaded “classics”.
And I have never seen a green light at the end of a dock without thinking fondly of The Great Gatsby, which I read in my teens (not for school either).
Complaining about kids having to read “the classics” strikes me as being surprisingly anti-intellectual on a college-related forum. No one in the average American high school is overburdened by a classics-heavy curriculum compared to their counterparts in other developed parts of the world. And surely there are some things educated people should know, in addition to math and science?
To expand on this (as much as I love the discussion of reading), Gen-Xers grew up with computers, in that as we grew up, so did computers. We started programming in Basic, Fortran and Pascal, and learned through those a bit how the computers work with software. We worked with desktops that we opened, and added new parts as the old ones because obsolete, so we learned about what the motherboard does, drives, hard drives, memory chips, etc.
I truly love Millennials and Gen-Zs, and I think that they are awesome in many things, but to them, a computer is a black box, and most of their programming is done by putting pieces of existing code together. So they know how to work with computers, and use the the code using the pieces, and that, for them, IS computers and coding. For Gen Xers, the computers were Tinker Toys and Erector Sets. For Millennials and Gen-Zs, they are just the tools that they use to work and play games.
There is also the fact that schools have become so focused on testing that too much of classroom times is wasted on practicing how to answer test questions, rather than on understanding the why and how of anything.
To go back to reading, there have been many more kids’ and YA books that were phenomena among Millenials and Gen-Zs than there were for either Gen-Xers or Boomers. Neither Gen-Xers nor Boomers waited overnight at bookstores for the newest book in a popular series. YA movies for Boomers and Gen-Xers were mostly either “why we are better than adults”, “how adults don’t understand us”, “the kids who rejected adult values and saved the world”, and the Gen Xer specials on Slackers or Hackers (sometimes both). YA movies for Millenials and gen-Zs are based on the books that are the the kids are reading. Harry Potter, Divergent, Hunger Games, Ready Player One, The Maze Runner, The Fault In Our Stars, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, etc.
What were YA movies for Gen-Xers? Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dumb and Dumber, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Breakfast Club, etc. For Boomers? American Graffiti, a large number of horror movies, a large number of beach party movies, Beatles Movies, etc. Not that the teen movies of the 1960s, 1970, 1980s, and early 1990s were bad. Many were excellent or amazing. However, very very few of the most popular were based on books that were popular among teen of those years, because for Boomers and Gen-Xers, reading wasn’t a thing that teens did. Teens that did read were “Nerds”.
Some of the Judy Bloom books were targeted to YA and were wonderful. I read all the time growing up. Guess I was a nerd 
Personally I think some of the best YA books of my D’s generation were about empowerment, especially for girls.
And to clarify, I’m not advocating for no classics (my D read the Iliad, Grapes of Wrath, many Shakespeare works, etc…) but there was very good balance with contemporary novels as well.
I grew up in the 1970s, which with the possible exception of the 1920s is the most embarrassing decade in modern US history. When my kids start wearing plaid bellbottoms I’ll start worrying.
70s win the embarrassment contest over 20s IMO. 80s weren’t much better. 
Me too. I still remember one Sunday afternoon when my mother came into my room to say “are you just going to lie in bed all day reading??? Get out here and unload the dishwasher!”
I just love it when I get into a book that is so good that I find myself putting off pretty essential tasks. 
At least now no one can yell at me for not unloading the dishwasher.
The hair! My God, the hair.
My 19 year old has some dyslexia and now uses audiobooks effectively, but has never been one to read for pleasure – developed a negative attitude toward reading around 2nd grade and started to feel stigmatized for not being able to keep up with the required reading. My 23 year old on the other hand is a big reader. She was born in 1996 so she’s on the tail end of the “Millennial” generation. She tracks her reading on Goodreads and has read at least 52 books every year since she started tracking in 2015. She estimates about 1/3 each print, kindle and audiobook formats. She reads classics, modern novels and lots of non-fiction including recently the 1344 page “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s biography about Robert Moses. I don’t track my reading but I know I’m far behind her pace. She’s also taught herself knitting, needlepoint, spinning yarn and sewing her own clothes. (Oh, and she has a full time job.)
I’m impressed with the young people of this generation, and saddened by the raw deal they are getting economically, environmentally, etc.
The one thing that continually puzzles me is the way these “digital natives,” who have grown up with a portal to all the world’s knowledge in their pockets, seem to have so much more difficulty finding needed information than those of us who acquired the same tools later in life. It’s a continual refrain that college-aged young people insist that some crucial piece of info cannot be found, and the parent is back five minutes later with said information in hand. I don’t know what that’s about, as I would have expected the skill-differential to tilt the other way. Maybe it’s a product of information overload?
But the generational moral superiority trip that some older adults are on is just straight-up nonsense. Also, my kids and their friends read an amazing variety of stuff, of their own volition.
My son’s English class is currently reading The Great Gatsby. I think it’s wonderful! We’ve been discussion Nick Caraway, Gatsby and life on Long Island in the Hamptons in general here at home. I love that we can have these conversations and I love that he is being exposed to the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I really appreciate the variety of books his English teacher chooses. She selects everything from the classics to books off the NY Times best seller list.
As was I. However, luckily, not growing up in the USA, I dodged the bullying from which the more intellectual leaning kids who grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s suffered. In Israel in those years, while being geeky was far far from being cool, there wasn’t the dislike of smart people that was common in the USA (and still is, as a matter of fact) at least in the society in which I grew up. There was a good amount of respect for kids who were smart, on the part of the other kids as well. Not that there wasn’t bullying going on, but being smart or well read would more likely protect a kid from bullying than cause bullying.
Reading about current events is only one aspect of reading to expand the mind. Only one.
@Doschicos add War and Peace. D1 ate it up.
Forget “best sellers,” when they’re little more than the latest “story” or meant to tug on the easiest of heartstrings, aimed at some lowest common denominator and profit. Don’t judge this based on what you can idly converse about (with others with limited interests.)
An open mind is an open mind. Sorry, but I wouldn’t even pretend my kids weren’t into an exploration of life beyond their own craniums. Or that their interest was for entertainment value only. And nope, not on a college forum. (There, I said it.)
D2 was later to love reading. But when you value this, you work with your kids.
And let’s not turn this thread into some thinly veiled complaints about school systems’ political concerns.
Anyway, it’s useless to crtiticize the younger generation if you don’t know them. Or you only encounter them at random or standing in line for the next Star Wars movie.
They’re pretty danged amazing. Not just in the volume of work they can take on, but the depth. Not all of them, certainly CC proves that true. But our world will continue based on the efforts of the best, not Joe Average.
Get to know them.
My son was assigned to read The Great Gatsby the summer before ninth grade. The assignment was literally, “Write an essay on the book.” No guidance or suggestions. I thought that was expecting a lot of kids not even in high school yet. My son worked so hard on it and I think he got an 80. Not a great way to introduce young people to literature. 