Based on the title I thought you were going to talk more about how teachers have so many more significant works to cover and have to make choices. I think about it in terms of history/social studies. When I was in middle school I remember my history textbook ended with a couple paragraphs on the Vietnam War. This would have been around 1990. In high school my history classes focused on European history and some early American history. I never learned about things from when I was born (1976) through the current day, I never even had lessons that went into the Nixon/Watergate stuff, and I never learned about Asian, African, or South American history. I remember coming across the fact that at some point in my adult life high school students of the day were learning African and Asian history to some extent, like a student mentioned an upcoming test. This sort of helped me understand why the younger generations don't know much at all about the Holocaust, we spent time on it because they weren't covering all this other stuff. I think English classes have an even harder time because you have so many significant books you could cover, but it takes time so they have to choose. I'm sure the list of AP English books that I had in 1995 has some overlap with the list today but there are so many other, more modern books that would have been added that of course they won't know the Odyssey or something else because they actually learned about books written by non-White guys and gals along the way (which I pretty much didn't, maybe one or two White women, that's it).
Based on the title I thought you were going to talk more about how teachers have so many more significant works to cover and have to make choices. I think about it in terms of history/social studies. When I was in middle school I remember my history textbook ended with a couple paragraphs on the Vietnam War. This would have been around 1990. In high school my history classes focused on European history and some early American history. I never learned about things from when I was born (1976) through the current day, I never even had lessons that went into the Nixon/Watergate stuff, and I never learned about Asian, African, or South American history. I remember coming across the fact that at some point in my adult life high school students of the day were learning African and Asian history to some extent, like a student mentioned an upcoming test. This sort of helped me understand why the younger generations don't know much at all about the Holocaust, we spent time on it because they weren't covering all this other stuff. I think English classes have an even harder time because you have so many significant books you could cover, but it takes time so they have to choose. I'm sure the list of AP English books that I had in 1995 has some overlap with the list today but there are so many other, more modern books that would have been added that of course they won't know the Odyssey or something else because they actually learned about books written by non-White guys and gals along the way (which I pretty much didn't, maybe one or two White women, that's it).