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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]

Exactly right.  I taught at and tutored students at a BASIS school and had to help them through Julius Caesar in 6th grade and Macbeth in 7th grade.

It's ridiculous.  No one that young remotely has the emotional maturity to grasp the grand emotional themes and issues in those works.  BASIS just wanted to punch the ticket that they started kids on serious Shakespeare earlier than anyone else.

My own HS experience long ago being force-fed classics was basically getting turned off by the whole process.  Only when I chose to go back and reread some of the works later in life did I start to appreciate them.  Especially when I could digest them at my own pace, not "60 pages by tomorrow" learning.[/quote]

Every kid is different.  I first read Shakespeare in elementary school and didn't get much out it.  But I still love Shakespeare as an adult.[/quote]

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