The following passage is from a $$1991$$ essay that discusses the debate over which authors should be taught in English classes.
Now, what are we to make of this sputtering debate, in which charges of imperialism are met by equally passionate accusations of vandalism, in which each side hates the other, and yet each seems to have its share of reason? It occurs to me that perhaps what we have here is one of those debates in which the opposing sides, unbeknownst to themselves, share myopia that will turn out to be the most interesting and important feature of the whole discussion, a debate, for instance, like that of the Founding Fathers over the nature of the franchise. Think of all the energy and passion spent debating the question of property qualifications, or direct versus legislative elections, while all long, unmentioned and unimagined, was the fact-to us so central- that women and slaves were never considered for any kind of vote. While everyone is busy fighting over what should be taught in the classroom, something is being overlooked.
That is the state of reading, and books, and literature in our country, at this time. Why, ask yourself, is everyone so hot under the collar about what to put on the required-reading shelf? It is because, while we have been arguing so fiercely about which books make the best medicine, the patient has been slipping deeper and deeper into a coma. Let us imagine a country in which reading was a popular voluntary activity. There, parents read books for their own edification and pleasure and are seen by their children at this silent and mysterious pastime. These parents also read to their children, give them books for presents, talk to them about books, and underwrite, with their taxes, a public library system that is open all day, every day. In school, the children study certain books together but also have an active reading life of their own. Years later, it may even be hard for them to remember if they read Jane Eyre at home and Judy Blume$$^1$$ in class or the other way around.
In college, young people continue to be assigned certain books, but far more important are the books they discover for themselves browsing in the library, in bookstores, on the shelves of friends, one book leading to another, back and forth in history and across languages and cultures. After graduation, they continue to read and in the fullness of time produce a new generation of readers. Oh happy land$$!$$ I wish we all lived there. In that country of real readers, voluntary, active, self-determined readers, a debate like the current one over the canon would not be taking place. Or if it did, it would be as a kind of parlor game: What books would you take to a desert island? Everyone would know that the top-ten list was merely a tiny fraction of the books one would read in a lifetime. It would not seem racist or sexist or hopelessly hidebound to put Nathaniel Hawthorne on the list and not Toni Morrison$$.^2$$ It would be more like putting oatmeal and not noodles on the breakfast menu- a choice partly arbitrary, partly a nod to the national past, and partly, dare one says it, a kind of reverse affirmative action: School might frankly be the place where one reads the books that are a little off-putting, that have gone a little cold, that you might overlook because they do not address, in reader-friendly contemporary fashion, the issues most immediately at stake in modern life but that, with a little study, turn out to have a great deal to say. Being on the list wouldn't mean so much. It might even add to a writer's cachet not to be on the list, to be in one way or another too heady, too daring, too exciting to be ground up into institutional folder for teenagers. Generations of high school kids have been turned off to George Eliot$$^3$$ by being forced to read Silas Marner at a tender age. One can imagine a whole new readership for her of grown-ups were left to approach Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with open minds, at their leisure. $$^1$$Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bront$$\ddot{e}$$, is a nineteenth-century novel, Judy Blume writes contemporary young adult novels. $$^2$$ Hawthorne was a nineteenth-century American writer. Toni Morrison is a contemporary American writer. $$^3$$ George Eliot was the pseudonym of a nineteenth-century female British novelist.
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