Catcher in the Rye dropped from US school curriculum

[frazzled]

55. This sounds incredibly misguided

I can't imagine staying awake myself through the EPA "Recommended Levels of Insulation" document, much less the "Invasive Plant Inventory" paper. A teenager is just going to zone out.

I think non-fiction reading is important, but it should be incorporated into biology and history classes, etc.* Adolescents need to be engaged by good literature and their imaginations need to be fed. We will regret creating a generation of policy wonkish, noncreative citizens.

*My daughter attended an IB program at a public high school. The focus of that curriculum is text based, so history classes and science classes had no textbooks but rather used primary documents and papers, much like a college course in science or history. (Also, rather than objective tests, the students had to write papers and essays.) That's where they got those kinds of nonfiction, technical reading and analytic skills. But English class was all about fiction and poetry.