Censorship is ridiculous.



I don't think so. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold was banned from a local middle school, for instance, because of inappropriate content.
While it may not be necessary for middle-school students to be exposed to thematic elements such as rape and murder, neither should they be sheltered from it. There is a wide range of maturity in students, particularly in middle-school, and many people are ready for books that their peers may not be.

It should be up for students to decide on an individual basis what is or isn't appropriate for them to read.





I think that substantially more "classics" should be taught in schools, especially in highschools. I read portions of The Iliad and the entirety of The Odyssey last year. We had a extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic teacher and spent the better part of two months analyzing and discussing it in depth, and I got so much more out of it than I would have if I had picked it up on my own. Whereas required reading such as The Catcher in the Rye or A Raisin in the Sun I can fully comprehend and appreciate with much less instruction. While it's good that these books are covered by the curriculum class time should not necessarily be lavished upon them.

How well you appreciate the books you have to read in highschool also largely depends on how well you are taught. If you have a lousy teacher, you won't get everything you can out of a challenging book.





There's a heavy American bias towards a majority of our required reading and it would be interesting to be exposed to different cultural perspectives, both ancient and modern.



Over the course of four years we read six Shakespeare plays. And while Shakespeare is Shakespeare there are so many other good books out there that should be read that it seems like overkill.



The neglected pool of science fiction that is also literature. Also classics, and more-postmodern stuff.