If you were in charge of the American high school reading list, what would it look like?

If you were in charge of the American high school reading list, what would it look like?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_United_States
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Complete Works of Plato
Bible + Apocrypha
Complete Dead Sea Scrolls
Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing
Nag Hammadi Scriptures
Book of Enoch
Gospel of Judas

Where are complete works of Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard?

I would unironically replace most of the "classic" lit with modern young adult series. Why?

The entire point of making kids read classic lit is so they understand and appreciate the conditions of the time that inspired that writing. But most kids don't care. Hell, half the kids in my high school classes didn't even read the books and just relied on spark notes

If the classics were so great at inspiring an appreciation of the literary art, why do the vast majority of people never read a single book voluntarily after high school? The first thing we need to actualy instill in kids is that reading is not a chore or a status symbol, it is a method of entertainment just like netflix or video games.

I find it bizarre that as soon as kids leave middle school and the world of YA literature opens up to them, they no longer are told to make book reports or voluntarily choose what to read.

Those are only for the AP students

Keep in mind that, at max, U.S. High School students will read six books in their semester long English courses. They will usually read five novels and one play during that time.

there wouldn't be a reading list, everyone would be sent home

Great way to turn kids off of reading for good.

It doesn't matter. Might as well be a book on programming. No enlightenment-distilling reading list will ever overcome the media saturation of their everyday lives. If I had such a responsibility, I would just shoot myself and leave it to the next in line.

>Grade 9
>Phenomenology of Spirit
>Grade 10
Das Kapital
>Grade 11
Communist Manifesto
>Grade 12
Rules for Radicals
Blueprint for Revolution

The Quran.

That's it.

Interchange between classics and contemporary. Stuff about real shit that doesn't hold back with the language. Kids can handle a lot given what they watch on tv and internet

Crime and Punishment
The stranger
The book of Flying
Dream of a ridiculous man
East of Eden
Old man and the sea
Of mice and men
the outsiders

Probably dairy of a wimpy kid and watchmen and stuff like that to ease kids into reading real books.

Then a book about videogames like pic or wathever topic they are interested in

This. They should be showing kids interesting stories instead of boring ones just because they are classics

>▶
I think what you guys don't realize is that many of the "classics" chosen are there not for literarly value, but something else.

Think about the books you likely had to read

The Scarlet Letter
To Kill a Mockingbird
Up from Slavery
Uncle Tom's Cabin
The Jungle

like 75% of the book you read in high school are screeds on how backwards and non-progressive the past was. Yes, slavery and racism are bad, but how many books do I need to read on the subject? Is the sum total of American history really just slavery and Jim Crow.

I agree that fun, YA literature should be put in, but we also need to teach a more diverse range of classics other than le sad black person novel. Brave New World (yeah its not american but neither is shakesphere) and Catch 22 comes to mind . Books that students will have fun discussing.

The reason students are so turned off of reading is the constant discussions of the same dry shit over and over. We were taught about how women wearn't equal, slavery was bad, and black people were discriminated against for YEARS, why do we need to read more shit about it?

But yeah, I would unironically require the Hunger Games alongside GOOD classics.

Anarchy and diversity basically
I would let the students come together in groups organized by themselves, they can pick whatever book they want the only caveat is they need to find a competent staff member willing to read with their group and to partake in discussion and help them with their scholarship and criticism. There would be no grades, beyond a pass fail determined by the instructor and defended by the group members the reading group would work on a projectoject(s) dividing themselves however they please but always collaborating to get each member to do their best.
The best projects get to do a presentation and get scholarships, aswell as published for the entire class to critize as part of the circulum.
Of course that is just one possibility for one kind of project. The readings for science, history, politics would work the same and the reading in the curriculum wouldn't be that ALEC-PEARSON-DOD propaganda kids are given now.
There would be a huge amount of liberty for the students the only quality control is themselves and their instructors.
So the liberterian way this works is what produces that diversity I mentioned. That's what diversity really is out side of the corporate-democrat jargon

Macbeth
1984
Old Man and the Sea
The Great Gatsby
The Lord of the Flies
The Importance of being Earnest
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

ay yo teacha bitch! What dis whitey statue man gotta do wit out problems? Like, what dis nigga sposed to teach us bout livin an shit?

Also what dis niggas name again *looks at title*, Puh .. puh leh -aaahhh -- t-t-t ........ oooh

this

so you wouldn't change anything

This. All of you forget the majority of American high schools are black/hispanic

That's super racist and completely wrong you sheltered honkeys. I went to a few different highschools with different racial compositions and can attest that class is the most significant factor in a students demeanor, appart from their personal lives and devolpment ofc.
This should be completely obvious, the disrespectful dumbass interrupting class will always be there and they are usually poor.
If you go to a poor highschool there will be more lower class people, who are much less likely to be white.
Literally all teenagers are idiots, especially you two.

To be fair, American schools have de facto segregation because of the AP system

>it is a method of entertainment just like netflix or video games
absolutely disgusting opinion, off yourself.

Abolition of Man
Complete works of
Emerson and Cicero
Mein Kampf

Iliad
Odyssey
Ovidius’ stuff
Excrepts from Augustine’s confessions
Jerusalem Delivered
Eugene Onegin
A hero of our time
Crime and Punishment
Anna Karenina
Dubliners
The master of go
Light in August
The trial
All quiet on the western front

All the books that, for whatever reason, people decide that they don't want others to read. Teach the controversy. let the kids discuss it, and make up their own minds. Screw the powers that be. Question authority. Let freedom ring bitches!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_United_States

>In almost perfect reverse order of difficulty
are you retarded user? nevermind, you're a communist, there's no need to even ask

Most of those challenges are justified. The books at the top are the typical "lol talking about my pussy bleeding is so challenging the patriarchy xD"

You're right. We should only teach dense philosophy, and anyone that isn't intensely interesting should be doomed to blue collar work and low brow corporate entertainment from instantly gratifying mediums their entire life. Afterall, they deserve to be there.

The entire point of the enlightenment was challenging people like you. If you want to actually progress society you have to be willing to go to where people are to educate them.

Enjoy your grave righty

Okay Tyrone.

>one of the reasons cited of harry potter being challenged is 'anti-family'

What?

Plato
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Crime and Punishment
The Odyssey
The Gulag Archipelago

t. no-guns

Grade 9:
Complete Works of Platon
Iliad
Odyssey
Grade 10:
Aeneid
Confessions
Paradise Lost
Don Quixote
Grade 11:
Critique of Pure Reason
Crime and Punishment
Two Treatises on Government
Federalist Papers
Grade 12:
Beyond Good and Evil, Geneology of Morals
The Stranger
A Theory of Justice
Collected Works of Borges

Good god if I ever meet someone so fucking stupid IRL I'll fucking kill em.

Where are you? I'm ok with this

Why?
A lot of it is mandatory in my HS.

White kids should be reading the classics because it's a part of their history. Non-whites shouldn't be in our schools or countries.

I would keep with the general idea of having them read classics, but I would mix up the genres a little more and add in some contemporary lit (ESPECIALLY with poetry, but its obviously easier there to mix and match and really demonstrate variety from classics to contemporary with individual poems) to create a conversation about the nature of tradition and the conversation among texts across time. I'd also try to work in contemporary genre works with some literary merit to show them that reading is still definitely about finding texts that speak to the conditions of life at different stages. I'd try and do six books a year:

Freshman Year:
Ender's Game by Card
Huckleberry Finn by Twain
A Christmas Carol by Dickens
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
Native Guard by Natsha Tretheway
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Sophomore Year:
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Vonnegut
The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway
All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque
A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Pretty, Rooster by Clay Matthews
The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Junior Year:
Girl With Curious Hair by Wallace
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Gilead by Marilynn Robinson
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
A Coney Island of the Mind by Ferlinghetti
Othello by Shakespeare

Senior Year:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez
Dubliners by Joyce
The Plague by Camus
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Waiting for Godot by Beckett

This is an essentially random list of shit that I think would have been valuable for me to have read during those years, working the way up from accessibility to more challenging and difficult texts.

Very true.

One of my HS teachers knew this and, while recommending a list of books, let the choice be open to everyone.

Literature is unironically a European/Asiatic pastime and has a very minor place in the new world. I'd teach botany, woodcarving, and basic military skills.

Students who desire a rich liberal arts education would have the option to spend their highschool years in an elite training camp far from civilization, where they would read:
Year one
the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, Ovid, Robert Grave's Claudius series;
Year two
the Bible (paired with Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Pascal's Pensées), the Koran (paired with Mamar ibn Rashid's Expeditions and Idries Shah's Mulla Nasrudin);
Year three
The entirety of Shakespeare
Year four
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse of Social Inequality, Machiavelli's The Prince, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Marx's 18 Brumiare, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Focault's Discipline and Punish, and Borge's short stories, fictions, and essays.

catcher and the rye. those who ask me if holden really raped his sister get initiated into the inner circle and go on to read the great works, have high level intellectual discussions, etc.

the rest are given dystopian fiction like hunger games and 1984 to make them feel like literary sleuths as they underline every dumb alteration and "symbol"

hahahahahahhaha this guy is so out of touch

literature is an artform not a teaching manual

what a bunch of pseuds ITT

That's not too bad. Remove Wharton, Lee, Stowe, and Washington. The first isn't literature and the two last are merely historical.

>it is a method of entertainment

Before entering middle school:

Tuck Everlasting
The Westing Game
Bridge to Terabithia
Holes
Hatchet
James and the Giant Peach
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
The Giver
Shiloh
Because of Winn-Dixie
Hoot
Esperanza Rising
The Cay
The Pigman
A Wrinkle in Time
Charlotte's Web
Johnny Tremain
Where the Red Fern Grows

>your state where you spent your elementary school years
>how many of these books you've read

I read all of these books in my fourth and fifth grades. I lived in Florida back then. Did anyone else have as intensive classes as I did? I remember being taken out of my regular class every day and be put into a small room where a few of us would discuss these books with a different teacher. I didn't understand it back then, but I suppose that it was a program for gifted students.

Are you American? I really like your list, I really do, but this would crash and burn here.

High school English class is way more than just reading and analyzing books. It's about how to write essays, write concisely, how to think critically, how to formulate a logical argument, etc. Practical things. That's what you all forget.