However much it may disappoint cynics, we must confess a hopeful fact: most of the books assigned by high school English teachers in this country are worth reading. Many of them may well be termed classics.
One recent study of what books were most often taught in American public schools had these as the top ten: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Huckleberry Finn, Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies. Although the order varied, the list for private schools was identical but for one difference: The Odyssey took Of Mice and Men’s place. This is a powerful argument for privatizing public education.
It is not that John Steinbeck’s novel is of a slightly inferior quality to the other books listed. Rather, it is that it would be like submitting both Mother Teresa and Angelina Jolie to a Vatican office concerned with beatification under the like principle that they had each taken in numerable orphans and had publicly engaged in rituals involving the drinking of blood—belief in transubstantiation being presumed to be not all so different from having walked about with a sanguinary vial around one’s neck taken from a husband named Billy Bob.
Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird may not be works of the first rank of literature, but they are intelligent, well-wrought and substantive novels. Of Mice
