The other day, I went into my local library in Palatine, IL. It has a wonderfully huge selection of manga and comics but that’s for another story. Next to that section is the high school summer reading list selections. To my surprise, there wasn’t a single classic work of fiction or non-fiction on that list. To be fair, there were two works that could be considered important: The Audacity of Hope and Road to Perdition. I’m not sure what the point of a summer reading list is. Is it to keep kids bored with irrelevant or unimportant books that haven’t shaped our culture? Are these book lists prepared in hopes of propagandizing them into a certain way of thinking? Are the lists catering to lowest common denominator: easy reads that serve up violence, sex, and drugs? Who are we to question a team of college trained English teachers? They must know better. But what if the whole team was built by one person with an agenda? Oh, that sounds like how some schools select teachers. What’s the point of a department head if they can’t decide which ideas get into the classroom? Perhaps the intelligent books have been expelled? My local high school could have selected books from the ALA’s huge list of non-fiction and fiction books, so there would at least be some classics on them that way. Anyways, inspired by my outrage and Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, I will provide a summer reading list. Unlike other teachers, I’ll tell you my agenda up front: I want to provide a challenging list that encourages thought and encourages the thinker to be a better person. So go to your library and check these out! 10 Non-Fiction books. 10 Fiction books. Hopefully, this short summer reading list will enlighten and entertain you more than what has been offered by some academics. Please feel free to reply and expand this list.
Sensei no Otaku says: “Expect much from your students and they will exceed those expectations.”