While I'm not an American, I read a bit of American literature, and sometimes I feel that many American children/teenagers are exposed to the classics slightly early, before they can accurately pick up nuances, understand the social structure of the setting, and are able to grasp the different strengths and foibles of human beings, both real and fictional.

This tends to make them either misunderstand the text, read it literally, or just get bored of books in general. On one hand, I admire the fact that great books are read by young people (something which isn't true in my country), but I wonder whether it ends up being counterproductive.

Adaptations running away from the main story to focus overtly on stuff that attracts the audience instead of being faithful to the crux of the source material doesn't help either.

I think it’s probably counterproductive. It’s like religion - there’s arguably a lot to be gained from it, but people form negative early experiences and associate them with the thing itself. I’d love to re-read The Great Gatsby but dont want to relive middle school.

I completely agree. Even if I was able to understand the story and appreciate the prose in middle school, I can see looking back that I lacked the life experience to appreciate a lot of the undertones and unspoken themes.

I distinctly remember being completely bewildered when we read "Hills Like White Elephants" [1] and our teacher told us it was about an abortion, and ultimately about commitment and relationships and the ungraspable decision points that define a life. I remember rereading the text, not finding those words anywhere, and being confused about how a man and woman having a halting conversation at a train stop might have possibly given her that takeaway. But now of course it's achingly obvious.

Jane Austen similarly passed me by in high school. I needed to understand women a lot better before Pride & Prejudice started to make sense.

Even still when I read the classics, there are some where I can appreciate the themes but which are too abstract to me for them to resonate. The difference from when I was young is that now I can tell that there's more story waiting to be told once I've lived more life. Maybe in another 20 years.

[1] https://jerrywbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Hills-Lik...

I found my German curriculum to be a lot worse at this. Basically zero books I read in German classes that I liked, compared to most of the "classics" in English lessons I all found ok to good. Maybe because some were more accessible or at least relatable or closer to my interests, but we're talking about educating teenagers here. (E.g. Animal Farm, 1984, Poe, Shakespeare (quite some overlap to what people read in their native English)) vs ... I don't even know which of the ones we read are known to an international audience...

Some of them are also just badly written, like The Scarlet Letter - the impression that stuck with me was it took way too long to get to the point, so much so that the second half of the book contained needed context for the first half to have any meaning at all.

And I was one of the few who got it when we read it. I don't think anyone I knew realized the movie Easy A shared any themes with that book, but it was just so much better done they understood the relevant themes from it.

Americans are often shocked when they reread the classics in their 40s. But that's one of the nice parts of the classics - you get something very different from them depending on where you are in life.

I completely agree. To this day it still drives me crazy that people think Animal Farm is about communism being bad, instead of what it was trying to warn us about authoritarianism and propaganda.