Comment by crtified

The reality is that the average high school student will not have truly read 50-100 novels, and the opportunity cost of doing so would be substantial for the diverse aptitudes that comprise the entire youth population.

I believe my life has been richer and more joyful for having had some companions whose minor concessions to the fiction reading hobby in childhood leant more towards Asterix and Obelix than to Charles Dickens; I'm certainly not getting "second best" from them in either company or conversation!

Nonetheless I take your point about the potential benefits of shared corpus, despite contending that the extreme of One Universal Prescription also brings the potential downsides inherent to any artificial scope constraint. Diversity and balance of focus are important too.