The Jungle is one of the half dozen or so things I remember from high school.
Its incredible it hasn't been banned given the book's obvious affinity for socialism.
My middle school only read excerpts about how bad the meat was, and then how that was completely fixed by regulations. It was never covered in HS.
Oh yeah I read it later, my point is there's no reason to ban it since it's already been recuperated.
You ban a thing or remove it and a kid might realize their ignorance on the subject and do primary research or listen to someone else on the topic.
You give them white-washed caricatured versions and they walk away secure in whatever propaganda you inserted into it.
If they were going to replace curriculum with comic books they would of done it by now.
What the kids prefer doesn’t matter, and I doubt the kids preferring fast food had an effect on that change over something like cost.
The more plausible thing would be that the teachers themselves don't read anything but YA novels and think TVTropes is deep media analysis, so they assign it themselves. Which we already sort of see in that YA novels are supposedly very didactic now and tuned to the hyper-normie liberal politics of the adults reading it and not the kids it's supposed to be for.
You guys read Steinbeck in HS? The only thing I remember reading that explicitly had communists was Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. There were a few glimpses of communist thought (I think) but they exist mostly to take advantage of the black guy's hope to end racism for solidifying their own power.
