ARE SCHOOL CURRICULA BREEDING SCHOOL SHOOTERS? A reader emails:

I am curious whether anyone is looking at prevalent trends in English curricula and their impact on vulnerable kids.

I’m the mother of a 15 year-old boy who attends a (very white, very suburban) 7-12 private school. This year the school removed 1984 from the curriculum and replaced it with Parable of the Sower because – as my son’s English teacher (inaccurately) put it – it was written by a white male and featured a white protagonist. No Shakespeare for 10th graders this year: room had to be made for The Handmaid’s Tale.

This follows a pattern of feeding the students a steady diet of modern dystopian horrors that began with Ender’s Game (pre-seventh summer reading) and continues apace. The classics are blessed with irony, humor, and hope. The current curriculum – at least, at my son’s school – is bleak and depressing. My son used to love reading. Now I can barely persuade him to pick up a book in his free time.

I have nothing against modern literature, but my own healthy teenager admits these books drag him down. The essays the kids are required to write are also along the what-does-this-say-about-our-own-future variety. I find myself wondering if the net effect of the English and Science (all climate change, all the time) program is to take many otherwise hopeful young people and turn them into nihilists.

Is anyone looking at this? I have raised it with the school and the administration thinks I’m the crazy one. Of course, I rely not on facts and figures, but on my own fiftysomething reaction to the steady drumbeat of depressing modern fiction the kids are being fed.

Well, a constant diet of that sort of stuff certainly doesn’t help. I’m increasingly coming to think that entrusting your kids to professional K-12 educators verges on child abuse.