What's required reading in English schools?

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Originally Posted by Jay

Not 100% sure I understood the question, but this semester we were working with:

Gulliver's Travels
Mrs Dalloway
Brand New World
Walden
The Importance Of Being Earnest
Heart Of Darkness
Waiting For Godot
The Bell Jar
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Absolom, Absolom
Bartleby The Scrivener
The Horse-Dealer's Daughter
Modest Proposal
some of T.S. Elliott's essays
Canterburry Tales
Humphrey Clinker
Tristam Shandy
Macbeth
several sonnets and poems

Aside of a few works we were only required to read parts of the novels.

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All in one semester? Blimey!

I go to an American school (in London), but here's what we had to read in grades 9 and 10

9: (I had a teacher who was pretty radical and adventurous and he went outside the traiditional curriculum quite a bit by introducing two very recent novels, and I thought it was great that he was willing to take such a risk and I was taken aback by how passionate he was about the subject, and he's now my favorite English teacher)
The Odyssey
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Catcher in the Rye
Everything Is Illuminated

10:
Huckleberry Finn
Hamlet
A few Hemingway short stories
The Great Gatbsy
Death of a Salesman
The Bluest Eye

For 11th and 12th grade in my school you get to choose what to take out of a list of classes, each of which lasts one semester. I'm in 11th grade, and at the beginning of the year I took Art of Poetry in which we looked at poems by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Frost, Yeats, Eliot, Wilfred Owen, E.E. Cummings, Bysse-Shelley, and a few others (can't remember them all) and then had to write our own poems, and right now in the second semester I'm taking Shakespeare, and we've done King Lear, King Henry IV Part One, and Othello. Next year I've enrolled for, in the first semester, Russian Literature and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland (one entire semester spent on one poem, and we'll also be reading some of the works he references), and for the second semester I'll be doing 20th Century American Lit (by far the best century for American literature IMO, and really if there's any single country that outshone all others in the 20th century in the field of literature, you just can't beat a country that claimed Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Heller, Vonnegut, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison, to name but a few).

It's been 10 years since I was in high school and I don't remember reading many of the great books on your lists. I have read many of them since and often wondered why we didn't read them in my school. For many of them I think it is because they are not "safe" books. For instance, 1984 and A Brave New World I really wish I had read in high school. However, the books deal with a lot of issues my school district would never allow in a reading program, issues such as sex and substance abuse. I think the closest we came to dealing with a sex in a book was The Scarlet Letter. And I think some parents spoke up against that one! I think it's great that superunknown had a chance to read modern authors like Eggars (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) in his class. I have read his other 2 books and look forward to reading this one soon. I think all the books I read in high school were by dead authors.

GCSE: Romeo and Juliet, Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, Poetry Anthology

AS: Hamlet, Translations, The Return of the Native, Keats

A2: Othello, Wuthering Heights + The Return of the Native, Carol Ann Duffy, Captain Corelli's Mandolin

::sigh:: oh, it's been a good few years' reading... :nod:

Goodness, many of you seem to have attended schools with far more interesting syllabi than I did!

9: Romeo and Juliet
The Oddysey (thoroughly abridged, of course)
Lord of the Flies
The Gift of the Magi

10: Julius Caesar
Animal Farm
To Kill a Mockingbird

11: British Lit:
Some of the Canterbury Tales
Macbeth
Excerpts from Beowulf and Gulliver’s Travels
A Modest Proposal
The Merchant of Venice
Various samples of English poets: Gray, Pope, Marlowe, Donne, and so on

American Lit:
The Scarlet Letter
The Great Gatsby
excerpts from Walden
Civil Disobedience
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (those Puritans sure had a knack with titles, didn't they?)
The Crucible

12: AP American Lit
Hamlet
Brave New World
The Stranger
Frankenstein

(I took a dual-credit class in addition; we read the following)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
various short stories and essays, among them The Art of Fiction (James), Hills Like White Elephants, Barn Burning, The Loons, The Story of an Hour
plus three novels by an author of our choosing, for which I did three early novels by Henry James

It's been a few years... let's see.

The Odyssey
Hamlet
Romeo & Juliet
The Canterbury Tales
Night
Brave New World
Lord of the Flies
Heart of Darkness
Things Fall Apart
Animal Farm
Jane Eyre
The Great Gatsby
Black Like Me
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Farewell To Arms
Oedipus Rex and Antigone

We read a few pieces by Kafka. I remember we read "The Awakening" by Chopin... and assorted poetry.

I find it somewhat disheartening that virtually every American school teaches nearly the same course of study. Many of the books mentioned were the very same ones we were required to read when I was in school, and that was 30 years ago. It isn't so much that these are not classics, but that we are still teaching the same thing Dad and Grandad read.
As a student, I found many of these works to be vital and exciting, but others were dry and dull; especially to young minds. Why are these reading lists never revised?

I have to say that in public American schools book shortages seems to be a huge issue that needs to be addressed. My generation is barely literate, unversed, potato couches. The books that are avaliable to the school, and happen to be avaliable in the appropriate quantity are the ones we read. I must say that until my sophmore year of school when we got a heaven sent teacher that we had no materials to care for. He brought his own books and let use them at times and through this we have gathered a wider range of reading.
Eigth grade advanced Engish....
Romeo and Juliet
The Odessy
Ender's Game
Treasure Island
The Invisible Man
Freshman year(Themes of Literature)....
The Pigman
Juius Ceaser
Antigony
Sophmore year(American Literature)....
The Crucible
The Scarlet Letter
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The American
The Pilgrim Delima
Junior year(Classical European Literature)....
1984
Frankenstine
Dracula
Robinson Crusoe
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Macbeth
Gulliver's Travels
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Stranger
Oedipus Rex
Canuberry Tales
Othello
Senior year(Advanced World Literature)...
Yet to be known.

They seem to be more interested in training young people for the business world, these days.

I really don't understand why the force it down our throats. We have one principal at our school that tries to force feed us the belief that the business world is the only world. I myself, find that I hate business. I don't want to be a skirt suit kind of girl. I'm more of a maiden skirt and corset girl. Haha...funny. Err..The United States public school system sucks. Well, it's the State's fault.

During the summer semester I took a Literature class, the class was broken up into three different sections: Short Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. We also had an optional section on the Fiction Novel. In the Short Fiction section I read "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner, along with other selections. In the Poetry section we cover many different styles of poetry written by many different poets; the poems that I wrote about were "Sonnet 18" by William Shakespeare, "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, and "she Being Brand/new" by e.e. cummings. We read "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles and "Death of a Salesman" by Auther Miller for the Drama section of the class. I did take on the optional assignment on the Fiction Novel, and I read "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I wrote essays on all of these works and I truly enjoyed all of them.

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Originally Posted by readingrainbow

I really don't understand why the force it down our throats. We have one principal at our school that tries to force feed us the belief that the business world is the only world. I myself, find that I hate business. I don't want to be a skirt suit kind of girl. I'm more of a maiden skirt and corset girl. Haha...funny. Err..The United States public school system sucks. Well, it's the State's fault.

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I once heard it said that it is the job of the wealthy to rule, and the job of the educated to facilitate that rule. Everyone else, I suppose, are unsuspecting victims of the system. Welcome to facilitation 101.

10th grade:
Animal Farm
Little Red Pony
Of mice and Men

grade 11:
Ferenheit 9/11
Barometer
Cat's Cradel
The Chrysalids

Grade 12:
The Wars
Edible Woman
1894
One flew over the cookoo's nest
Maiden's tales ( not sure of the title but from Margeret Atwood...)


p.s this is from a second language class.. from what I remember.....Last year

9th-
Romeo and Juliet

10-
Antigone
Animal Farm

11-
To Kill A Mockingbird

British Lit-
Beowulf
Canterbury Tales- Well, 7 or 8 of them.

this is a place to talk about the books you have and are reading for school

i just finnished Hullabaloo in the guava orchard by Kiran Desai
unless absolutly nessisary i would not sujest any one read this book

now tell me about what your reading....

well since i am in fact a high school student... The joys of low expectationsin the public school system
So far we have started To kill a Mockingbird and stopped at chapter 17 when the trial started then we began reading Romeo and Juliet and never finished that and the odyssey is yet again another book we started and never finished. Thank the lord that I've already read all of these more than once and so I'm not a complete ignoramous and don't form my opinions on the movie adaptations of classical literature. Well i have just been shoved off my soap box but do not dispair I'll soon return to rid the world of all people ignorant of the womderful world of literature.