> I am all for giving the kids a chance to see a different world and get a sense of how things can change. Not if you're discouraging children from reading as

> I am all for giving the kids a chance to see a different world and get a sense of how things can change. Not if you're discouraging children from reading as a hobby by assigning the driest works there are. With the exception of Faust, all 'homework books' were horribly dry and frankly boring. For example, The Sorrows of Young Werther - utterly irrelevant. I would understand any child or teenager who gave up on reading if they were forced to read books like these - and even worse, spend endless hours discussing and being tested on them.