The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

It's totally OK to read more contemporary books. There's nothing inherently better about a well-written novel from 1830 than there is about a well-written novel from 2015, and students are often better able to connect with the more recent novels.

Long form reading, however, IS important. Students need to understand how character development, structure, and theme work through the course of a longer work, in addition to other things I don't know about, I'm sure, because I'm not an English teacher. Our schools have long devalued the study of art in this way, though - completely missing that the ability to analyze a longer work and communicate about it translates to many important life and job skills. My daughter, for example, works as an HR data analyst at a large company. She consistently is tasked with reading long documents and comparing them with spreadsheet data, and then communicating clearly about trends and themes over time to a high-level audience. Her strong background in analyzing literature and historical documents and writing about them have contributed to making her a great fit for this job.

I'll also say that even though we as a society tend to devalue the arts as a profession, the fact is that almost no one goes a single day without enjoying the work of an artist, whether through music, TV, film, visual art, or literature. It is prevalent everywhere we go. If we want to continue to be able to enjoy art, that starts with exposing young people not only to the art itself but how it is created, and analysis of what constitutes high-quality art. For literature, that has to include novel studies. 

Going back to your question about whether kids need to read older novels, I would say that it's important for them to have exposure to some of the works that have left their mark on our society and on future works of art. They should have some background in Shakespeare, and not just in a short passage, but in the history of that time and how his work has influenced the way we talk, think, and enjoy art in the modern day. Probably also Charles Dickens for those reasons. They should also have been exposed to Mozart and Beethoven, and DaVinci and Renoir as well - though that's often left to elementary music and art teachers (if they have them) and never touched on again.

I will repeat what I said above - we need to be looking at what the best private schools do for their students and make that the goal. The advent of high-stakes standardized testing "accountability" has had the opposite effect of what was intended. It's caused public schools to dumb down the curriculum to nothing more than test prep, rather than allowing trained professional teachers to curate standards-based curricula that actually inspires learning.

IMO when the government decided to go after the schools for "low performance," they went barking up the wrong tree. The problem was never the schools. The problem was and is poverty. Low academic performance is correlated more strongly with the family's SES status than any other single marker. Not because poor kids can't learn, but because Maslow's hierarchy is still applicable today. Kids who lack adequate food, shelter, and personal safety aren't in a place where they can think about their learning the way they need to.

Anyway. Sorry you got this morning's novel on this topic.