Should schools assign difficult literature to teenagers?
I've been rereading some of the classics I was forced to study in high school, and I'm surprised by how different they feel now that I'm older. Catch-22, which I once found tedious, now seems painfully funny and bleak at the same time. What I'm wrestling with is whether our schools are doing a disservice by teaching these books to teenagers who often lack the life experience to grasp their themes, or whether that early exposure is actually valuable because it plants seeds that bloom later. Does assigning difficult literature to young readers create more harm than good, or does it enrich their education in ways we can't measure immediately?