If you polled every high school student in America, I bet an overwhelmingly large amount of them would say they found the "classics" boring and resorted to Cliff's Notes to pass the tests that accompanied those books.

I think that is what is wrong with the school system today... that they aren't adapting to society today. They're sticking with the classics and alienating a new generation of students who aren't interested in them anymore.

I'm not trying to stereotype any teenagers or anything, but on a whole, most of them aren't interested in the classics -- at least not at that age -- but they do have interests. We should allow their interests to play a larger role in reading.

If a student wanted to do a book report on The Godfather, I think that would be fine. Like I said there are plently of themes in that book that could really spark a 17 year old's essay.

After all it is better to have a student leave high school having actually read a book -- instead of having him rely on Cliff's Notes or the internet to pass a test on a book he didn't want to read.