What's the point of required reading?

Jamie Davis9 said:Exactly—it’s just like how people who struggle with math often face the brunt of the blame when their teachers failed to properly introduce them to basic intervals.
Honestly, I don't understand where this obsession comes from regarding whether children "must" love reading; some kids will enjoy it, and others won't, and that's just life.
Children who already possess an affinity for reading will naturally find the curriculum easier to navigate than those who don't, but you can't force that spark.
The required reading list isn't to blame for a lack of interest in books.
When I talk about high school reading lists, I'm referring to a curated collection of the finest literary works ever produced, organized chronologically so that any true lover of literature can always find something profound and engaging.
In elementary school, the selections are age-appropriate—some might be dull and others fun—but I find it utterly baffling that people think school holds more influence over a child's interest in books than, say, their own parents do.
At its core, required reading is just a monthly assignment to be completed, and there is no logical way it could serve as the primary or most decisive driver for a lifelong passion for reading; I hope it's clear to everyone just how absurd it is to expect such a thing.

p.s. I should also mention that the death of Smail aga Cengica is an exceptionally well-written epic.

Believe it or not, most kids develop a hatred for a subject simply because they had incompetent teachers—people who either couldn't teach or just didn't care enough to actually reach their students.

James Perez54 said:Believe it or not, most kids develop a hatred for a subject simply because they had incompetent teachers—people who either couldn't teach or just didn't care enough to actually reach their students.

It seems most children are naturally wired to push back against anything that feels forced upon them. I suppose I really should have said something earlier, though I’ve always been a bit too slow to catch my own mistakes. It’s just one more thing that needs doing, isn't it?Most kids find scrolling through Facebook for hours endlessly more entertaining than actually picking up a book—any book, for that matter. And let’s be honest, most parents just enable this by letting them rot their brains on social media all day, mostly because those same parents spend their own lives glued to a screen too. It’s rare to see a parent who actually reads anything of substance anymore. Instead, you have entire families sitting around in the evening binge-watching Turkish soap operas, only to switch over to some other trashy foreign drama during their lunch breaks. When these kids show any lack of interest in anything outside this mindless cycle, their parents always jump to their defense, blaming some lazy, incompetent teacher for their failure to focus. They'll even go as far as to claim Faulkner is garbage and that Proust is nothing more than a pretentious hack. 🙂

Look, I'll grant you that there are terrible teachers out there—just like there are incompetent waiters, dentists, or crooked politicians—but your post makes it sound like they make up the vast majority. I simply can't bring myself to agree with that assessment.

I never really struggled with the required reading; I actually enjoyed even the stuff most people find annoying. My only gripe was that Romanticism felt a bit overly sentimental, but it was manageable.
What I find truly baffling, though, is how contemporary literature is completely ignored.
Instead, there's this constant push toward these incredibly long, tedious classics.
I’m not sure how things are handled in schools these days, but I honestly think it would be better to let kids have some agency—let them choose whatever they want from that era, or at least offer a few alternative options.

The focus remains on postmodernism, though if time permits, we might touch upon 21st-century literature. Honestly, that era feels far too raw and unrefined to be studied through any rigorous lens of representative patterns—whether you're looking at theme, style, or linguistic nuances.

Kids have the freedom to dive into whatever they want, regardless of what's assigned in class. Who is actually stopping them from reading? The fact that only about ten percent of available content gets vetted through required reading lists doesn't restrict their ability to pick up whatever catches their eye.

Jamie Davis9 said:It seems most children are naturally wired to push back against anything that feels forced upon them. I suppose I really should have said something earlier, though I’ve always been a bit too slow to catch my own mistakes. It’s just one more thing that needs doing, isn't it?Most kids find scrolling through Facebook for hours endlessly more entertaining than actually picking up a book—any book, for that matter. And let’s be honest, most parents just enable this by letting them rot their brains on social media all day, mostly because those same parents spend their own lives glued to a screen too. It’s rare to see a parent who actually reads anything of substance anymore. Instead, you have entire families sitting around in the evening binge-watching Turkish soap operas, only to switch over to some other trashy foreign drama during their lunch breaks. When these kids show any lack of interest in anything outside this mindless cycle, their parents always jump to their defense, blaming some lazy, incompetent teacher for their failure to focus. They'll even go as far as to claim Faulkner is garbage and that Proust is nothing more than a pretentious hack. 🙂

Look, I'll grant you that there are terrible teachers out there—just like there are incompetent waiters, dentists, or crooked politicians—but your post makes it sound like they make up the vast majority. I simply can't bring myself to agree with that assessment.

You’re overgeneralizing here. It’s not like every single student is some kind of burnout who refuses to study just because they're forced to. In reality, it’s actually the exact opposite. A huge chunk of students are putting in the work; the problem is that nobody ever bothered to teach them how to actually study, because everyone just assumes that skill is somehow hardwired into their brains from birth.

Sure, a good professor can definitely light a fire under a student, pushing them to actually dive into the material or at least get around to meeting their deadlines, but let's be honest about the limits of that influence.

When we talk about postmodernism, I’m not referring to those pretentious, nonsensical pieces that people try to pass off as "modern classics." Instead, I’m talking about stuff like Harry Potter—those massive, mainstream hits that actually capture the imagination of students and get them genuinely excited about reading.

Learning is an incredibly individual journey, and honestly, trying to apply a one-size-fits-all set of metrics to everyone is a fool's errand.

I don't think these students are failures by any means. It’s just human nature—especially for a child—to resist things they're forced to do. Most kids only engage with learning because they have no other choice.
It’s perfectly valid to question whether our entire educational system is obsolete; forcing this top-down, authoritative style of teaching in the 21st century feels outdated, though I realize that's a much larger issue than what we're debating right now.

A truly great professor can inspire a student to do meaningful, productive work, but if they find themselves fighting that battle entirely alone, all that effort often ends up being wasted.

I have no idea who you people are or what kind of nonsense you're peddling, but I fail to see a single logical reason why a kid wouldn't pick up Harry Potter on their own without some teacher breathing down their neck about it.

Jamie Davis9 said:Learning is an incredibly individual journey, and honestly, trying to apply a one-size-fits-all set of metrics to everyone is a fool's errand.

I don't think these students are failures by any means. It’s just human nature—especially for a child—to resist things they're forced to do. Most kids only engage with learning because they have no other choice.
It’s perfectly valid to question whether our entire educational system is obsolete; forcing this top-down, authoritative style of teaching in the 21st century feels outdated, though I realize that's a much larger issue than what we're debating right now.

A truly great professor can inspire a student to do meaningful, productive work, but if they find themselves fighting that battle entirely alone, all that effort often ends up being wasted.

I have no idea who you people are or what kind of nonsense you're peddling, but I fail to see a single logical reason why a kid wouldn't pick up Harry Potter on their own without some teacher breathing down their neck about it.

Alright, let me try to explain this—maybe I can make it make sense:
Your average American high schooler—not a genius, but certainly not some "failure just dragging through life"—is sitting in class for maybe 6 or 7 hours a day. On average, at least four of those subjects involve giving them homework, often quite extensive homework; you have to account for learning new material, plus reviewing everything, and then you add in the required reading, which is often dense and totally incomprehensible (like some classic American literature from the 1800s where the language is so archaic that you have to check a glossary for every other word, making it impossible to follow the plot). Add in the fact that this teenager probably has extracurricular activities or just wants to be a normal teen and hang out with friends... when is this poor kid supposed to read Harry Potter, unless they basically have zero social life? 😬

That one specific classic is just too much for a sixteen-year-old; it's completely uninteresting and written in such a way that nobody can summarize it without constantly checking a dictionary—it really ought to be taught in class, much like many other old American literary works from that era.
And I don't think anyone is being cheated out of anything by that.

But now we're back to the question that, I guess, no one has actually answered logically: what is the actual purpose of required reading?
Is the goal that students (in high school) must be introduced exclusively to "great works" and nothing else?
Or is the point of reading assignments to encourage kids to actually read books, to practice reading comprehension, analysis, characterization...
If it's the latter, then the specific book mentioned here is a total failure. I mean, seriously, an American honors student might struggle less with a Latin text than with a book written in some archaic regional dialect 🙄 where you're trying to analyze and characterize something you barely understood because it's practically written in a foreign language. 🙄

Perhaps if they weren't so sheltered, they might actually learn that the Equinox wasn't written in some archaic dialect from the coast.

Jamie Davis9 said:Perhaps if they weren't so sheltered, they might actually learn that the Equinox wasn't written in some archaic dialect from the coast.

Man, I finished high school and even wrapped up college, yet I still have no clue what dialect Equinox was written in. I guess I should've stayed in tenth grade.

That’s basically how much interest a teenager has in stuff like that. ☕

On a side note—back when I was in high school, we actually had music appreciation classes. We studied different historical eras of music and listened to period pieces. We even had exams where we had to identify a specific musical work just by listening to our teacher play it.
At the end of class, if there was any time left—which there usually was—our teacher would encourage us to bring in our own tapes (I mean, I went to school back in the era of cassette tapes 🤣), and every single period we'd listen to whatever one of the students picked.
So why is that impossible to do with American literature and those required reading lists or short stories?
In my entire life, I haven't heard of a single high school teacher asking for or allowing something like that during their class. I saw it in middle school, sure, but never in high school 🤷

Jason Ortiz5 said:I absolutely loathed Proust and his damn *In Search of Lost Time*. Back when I had to read him for school, I remember thinking, "Is this guy seriously just obsessing over toast and jam?" Honestly, those little madeleines were pure torture to me. I also couldn't stand *Germinal* or *Crime and Punishment*. They were just way too dark for my taste at the time. ☕

I actually thought Germinal and that whole Naturalism movement were pretty decent—kind of liked that gritty, documentary-style vibe.

As for War and Peace? After page 20, I was totally checked out and just tossed the book back at the library.

James Perez54 said:Back when I was in high school, my professor told me that Mazuranic basically ripped off that epic from Njegos and just did a little bit of "editing" on it—which is a totally proven fact (not going into details here)—but everyone stayed quiet about it because of the need for national unity and social cohesion 😁 regarding the matter.

Regardless, based on what my professor said, I actually found the death of Samil aga Čengić to be an interesting read, and I certainly didn't regret spending my time on it.

Man, I had no idea about that.

amberskipper3 said:Look, the whole point is to actually pay attention to the language itself—it gets students thinking about how much a language can evolve over time.
Plus, there's the moral of the story, which basically hammers home that every single crime will eventually be caught and punished.
And don't forget the heavy-hitting characters in the poem; they're incredibly well-drawn.
You've also got all the technical literary stuff to dig into—meter, verse, epic structure, those big-picture themes...
There's plenty more where that came from, but honestly, that’s enough for now.
If you can pull just one meaningful insight out of this "disgusting" book, then Mažuranić didn't go through all that struggle for nothing.

The point of the book is learning Turkish.
Or maybe the point is just that the book is way too damn hard.

Everything you listed is stuff for English majors, not for a 16-year-old kid in high school.

Honestly, I feel like arguing about this topic is pretty much pointless until someone provides an actual, concrete definition of what the required reading is supposed to be—like, what should it specifically represent or aim to encourage?

Jamie Davis9 said:It seems most children are naturally wired to push back against anything that feels forced upon them. I suppose I really should have said something earlier, though I’ve always been a bit too slow to catch my own mistakes. It’s just one more thing that needs doing, isn't it?Most kids find scrolling through Facebook for hours endlessly more entertaining than actually picking up a book—any book, for that matter. And let’s be honest, most parents just enable this by letting them rot their brains on social media all day, mostly because those same parents spend their own lives glued to a screen too. It’s rare to see a parent who actually reads anything of substance anymore. Instead, you have entire families sitting around in the evening binge-watching Turkish soap operas, only to switch over to some other trashy foreign drama during their lunch breaks. When these kids show any lack of interest in anything outside this mindless cycle, their parents always jump to their defense, blaming some lazy, incompetent teacher for their failure to focus. They'll even go as far as to claim Faulkner is garbage and that Proust is nothing more than a pretentious hack. 🙂

Look, I'll grant you that there are terrible teachers out there—just like there are incompetent waiters, dentists, or crooked politicians—but your post makes it sound like they make up the vast majority. I simply can't bring myself to agree with that assessment.

Just as I wouldn't agree that most kids and their parents actually fit the mold you're painting... though, granted, there are certainly some who do.

Look, I couldn't care less what some kid or parent chooses to do within the four walls of their own home, but I care immensely when it comes to the quality of education my children receive at school. It genuinely concerns me that they might be stuck with incompetent teachers who could actually cause them harm by failing to provide a proper education...

Peter Doyle2 said:Honestly, I feel like arguing about this topic is pretty much pointless until someone provides an actual, concrete definition of what the required reading is supposed to be—like, what should it specifically represent or aim to encourage?

If you ask me, it's just about building up some vocabulary and general culture. I can't think of anything else, really.

Peter Doyle2 said:Man, I finished high school and even wrapped up college, yet I still have no clue what dialect Equinox was written in. I guess I should've stayed in tenth grade.

That’s basically how much interest a teenager has in stuff like that. ☕

On a side note—back when I was in high school, we actually had music appreciation classes. We studied different historical eras of music and listened to period pieces. We even had exams where we had to identify a specific musical work just by listening to our teacher play it.
At the end of class, if there was any time left—which there usually was—our teacher would encourage us to bring in our own tapes (I mean, I went to school back in the era of cassette tapes 🤣), and every single period we'd listen to whatever one of the students picked.
So why is that impossible to do with American literature and those required reading lists or short stories?
In my entire life, I haven't heard of a single high school teacher asking for or allowing something like that during their class. I saw it in middle school, sure, but never in high school 🤷

There you have it. 🙂

Regarding the second point, the American English and Literature curriculum is incomparably more extensive than music education, which, as its name implies, is categorized as an elective. English is one of the core pillars of the SATs, meaning every single student has to tackle it, requiring a massive amount of effort just to cover the necessary ground. There is a heavy burden on the instructor to properly address everything within the syllabus; otherwise, they’ve failed their students, potentially costing them admission to their preferred universities.
Furthermore, a cassette is a format you can actually finish listening to during a single class period, whereas reading a book is quite another matter entirely.

Larry Walker24 said:If you ask me, it's just about building up some vocabulary and general culture. I can't think of anything else, really.

How can you say that?
Let's—and this is what I’ve been saying all along, even if nobody really listens to me—let's focus on the era we actually live in. We need to look at the media surrounding us, which, especially for kids and teenagers, is way more engaging and attractive than books.
In that context, shouldn't the required reading be adapted to the times to actually encourage kids to read? Why not offer them stories that are actually relevant and interesting to them—something they *have* to read, unfortunately—so they can see that reading has its own charm, rather than just mindlessly staring at a screen?
Do they really think they'll get that from reading the Iliad, the Odyssey, or Proust? Seriously?
No.

General culture and knowledge? I think standard literature covers that well enough. In an age where reading habits are dying out, the current state of high school reading lists—which has been like this for a long, long time—just makes kids want to run away from reading even faster.

Peter Doyle2 said:How can you say that?
Let's—and this is what I’ve been saying all along, even if nobody really listens to me—let's focus on the era we actually live in. We need to look at the media surrounding us, which, especially for kids and teenagers, is way more engaging and attractive than books.
In that context, shouldn't the required reading be adapted to the times to actually encourage kids to read? Why not offer them stories that are actually relevant and interesting to them—something they *have* to read, unfortunately—so they can see that reading has its own charm, rather than just mindlessly staring at a screen?
Do they really think they'll get that from reading the Iliad, the Odyssey, or Proust? Seriously?
No.

General culture and knowledge? I think standard literature covers that well enough. In an age where reading habits are dying out, the current state of high school reading lists—which has been like this for a long, long time—just makes kids want to run away from reading even faster.

I'm with everything said here. Spot on.

Jamie Davis9 said:There you have it. 🙂

Regarding the second point, the American English and Literature curriculum is incomparably more extensive than music education, which, as its name implies, is categorized as an elective. English is one of the core pillars of the SATs, meaning every single student has to tackle it, requiring a massive amount of effort just to cover the necessary ground. There is a heavy burden on the instructor to properly address everything within the syllabus; otherwise, they’ve failed their students, potentially costing them admission to their preferred universities.
Furthermore, a cassette is a format you can actually finish listening to during a single class period, whereas reading a book is quite another matter entirely.

Fair enough.
But we aren't talking about English as an entire subject here, we're talking about required reading lists. What exactly is so vital and absolutely essential about these specific works that every single one must be read in its entirety? I mean, why can't most of them just be summarized through a certain passage and discussed during class?
To really grasp the point or the motivation behind Dante's Beatrice or Petrarch's Laura, is it—I guess—really necessary to read their complete works? Why?

Peter Doyle2 said:Fair enough.
But we aren't talking about English as an entire subject here, we're talking about required reading lists. What exactly is so vital and absolutely essential about these specific works that every single one must be read in its entirety? I mean, why can't most of them just be summarized through a certain passage and discussed during class?
To really grasp the point or the motivation behind Dante's Beatrice or Petrarch's Laura, is it—I guess—really necessary to read their complete works? Why?

and I suppose you're just tossing out information claiming that isn't how things are done?