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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To bring some specifics to the table.  Last year our 10th grader at GDS read the following in English:

Gospel According to Mark
Romeo and Juliet
Song of Solomon
The Great Gatsby
Giovanni’s Room
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein
Interpreter of Maladies

Sustained focus on Romantic poets include Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake.

Several other novels and contemporary poets I can’t recall at the moment.[/quote]

That’s an excellent list. I wish my public high school kid’s class did those.[/quote]

Kids at BASIS DC, a public charter, read many of those in 8th and 9th.[/quote]

I am a professor of literature (with children at a Big-3), and it makes me crazy when I hear parents "bragging" about children reading texts at early ages. 
I have PhD candidates who are writing dissertations on Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, and I assure you that with texts like these, the age at which someone engages in them tells me very little about their intellectual ability to analyze and contextualize what's on the page. Statements like yours tell me much more about a parents' understanding of literature (i.e., limited) than about the quality of the curriculum. High school is a perfect age to introduce the writings listed above, which grapple with complex issues of identity, fitting in, and acts of resistance against larger cultural/social/economic forces. There are very, very few 8th graders -and dare I say, even adults - who can understand the revolutionary nature of the Gospel of Mark, its relationship to the other Gospels, and historical-critical interpretations of Mark. Most 8th graders are not going to grasp in any profound way the works of Toni Morrison, much less have the understanding of US history required to appreciate her writing.[/quote]

Sounds like you are the one bragging, "professor of literature (with children at a Big-3)."

Actually, I totally agree with you that 8th or 9th (or even 10th grades) are not going to get as much out of these works as a Ph.D. candidate or college professor and they are not going to "grasp in any profound way."

However, some kids are most advanced than others.  And introducing some great works of literature to, say, 8th graders even if they fully don't understand them is  a hardly a bad thing.   [/quote]

I tend to agree. Various works are used in younger grades for a variety of age- and intellect-appropriate reasons unrelated to how the same work would be studied by a PhD candidate.
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