Here's what your 10th-graders will be tested on under Common Core: Ovid

[wickerwoman]

90. The 1% don't read; they have people to do that for them.

When I was in college you could get trade paperback classics for $1 a piece because they weren't in copyright, unlike all the modern fiction which went for $15-20 a paperback. I read heaps of classics for precisely that reason.

My grandfather worked as a railway conductor all his life which was a union job but definitely blue collar. He never went to college but he could recite literally hours worth of poetry by heart. Before he died, my uncle taped him doing it. There's like five hours worth of material with no repetition and that's when he was in his early 70s and practically in the hospital. When he was younger, he probably knew days worth of material.

Poetry and the classics isn't for the 1% at all. Before we had TV and radio, everyday people used to gather around the fire and recite or sing or read this stuff out to each other almost every evening. It's a cultural inheritance that everyone is entitled to and should have access to.