"We feel safe when we read what we recognise, what does not challenge our way of thinking.... a steady acceptance of pre-arranged patterns leads to the inability to question what we are told."

Reading should be fun. But it should not just be fun. At a high school level, it's important to be helping students begin to, to quote another person (Phillip Pullman, this time), "see that they are the true heirs and inheritors of the riches - the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, the literary riches - of the whole world." Themes are important. In the end, they're more important than having fun. And, to be honest, there aren't a lot of high schoolers who are going to suddenly start to love reading. That, on the whole, happens earlier in life.

Granted, Pullman's next sentence was urging people to "set... children's minds alive and ablaze with excitement and passion" instead of merely "filling them with facts and testing on them." But students need to be doing more than just reading Harry Potter, which of course is far below a high-school reading level. Is teaching five plays of Shakespeare excessive? Certainly. But it's difficult to overstate the man's influence, and he deserves some credit for that.

There is a reason most classics are labeled such. Not all, of course. But I think you'll find that most "boring, dry books" chosen "because of their themes" are critically important to understanding what makes us, as humans, who we are. They do it in a way few modern books taught in school even begin to achieve. And I've realized that very little is boring which is taught well. St. Augustine's Confessions went from being one of the less enjoyable reading experiences of my life to one of the most fascinating over the space of an hour and a half lecture on it. It's amazing what a good teacher can do.