Remember all those parents of 'precocious' 5-year-olds who insisted on reading Phillip Pullman aloud?
Why do teenagers need to read the "classics"? What on earth do they make of Henry James, whose late novels should be read at a funereal pace? James said this was essential. "Take, meanwhile, pray, The Ambassadors very easily and gently," he told a friend. "Read five pages a day - be even as deliberate as that - but don't break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step - and then the full charm will come out." Sometimes you read James and think you are going mad, so complex is the prose and intricate the thought: this is literature to be interrogated, not read. It is madness to instruct teenagers to read it, and will probably put them off reading for life. Certainly off James.
While I really like this bit, it seems that both he and the people responding to him (if you read the comments) are in the all-or-nothing mind frame. Can't modern books be taught along with the classics? There are so many that would work well paired up. And does every HS English class necessarily have to be the same?
AND.
Classics don't have to be taught in a dull, dusty, stodgy manner. My Shakespeare professor (college, granted, but there's no reason a HS teacher dealing with Shakespeare couldn't do this, too) used to regularly toss out pop cultural references -- he'd talk about The Simpsons, Star Trek, he even quoted a line from Total Recall to show that iambic pentameter was not a thing of the past -- it was a great way of showing that what we were reading was still relevant.
Not just relevant emotionally, or because It Was A Classic, but because classics could be (big shock coming up) FUN and ENTERTAINING and ENJOYABLE. He kept us interested, which I'd imagine is hard to do with a sunny lecture hall full of students who'd just eaten large lunches.