What was the curriculum when you were in school?

Growing up, I thought the stuff the adults were giving me to read was ever and always the best of the best. Now that I am an adult, I realize the ‘Canon’ is always in flux. I’ll put some of my canon below and maybe others can add to it. The criteria for officially canonical books would be those given to you by a teacher, and unofficially canonical books would be those obsessed over by you and your peers.

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|age / time period |official |unofficial |
|:-|:-|:-|
|earliest / early 90’s|Bible stories, The Giver, Ramona Quimby, Boxcar Children, Hardy Boys |No real reading on my own except whatever was there|
|grade school / mid-90’s|Maniac Magee |Hitchhiker’s Guide|
|middle school/ late-90’s|I’m blanking. Maybe I went to a bad middle school. |Asimov’s Foundation, David Eddings, Piers Anthony|
|high school / early 2000’s|Thomas Hardy, Chinua Achebe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Pride and Prejudice|Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings|
|college / late 2000’s|Faulkner, Shakespeare, Jean Rhys, The Well of Loneliness (early 20th c lesbian novel), Master Harold and the Boys (South African play), Amy Hempel, ‘Pet Milk’ short story, ‘Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, Joyce |Nuyorican Poets, Bob Dylan’s ‘Tarantula’, Lorca, weird meta linguistic stuff by acid heads talking to dolphins, ‘Be Here Now Remember’, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, House of Leaves |
|post-college (Obama era) |RIP my official education |Plato, Bob Woodward, any post-financial crisis journalism (Taibbi, Tett) – no fiction for awhile, until recently, when I looped back to Maniac Magee|

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I guess specifically I’m curious about how the official and unofficial canons are changing, because when I was young we were on that 90’s high of ‘post-history’ (see Francis Fukuyama) where the great wars had been fought and democratic capitalism was going to last forever and be friggin awesome. Ooooops.

Also, not a book, but Fern Gully, Captain Planet, and fixing the hole in the ozone made me think the adults were handling things correctly. Again, oops.

by aeiouicup