I'd have to disagree. My niece attends one of the top-rated high schools in the country. I recently perused her summer reading list and was astonished that the vast majority of them were books for children. Reading comprehension and writing proficiency are much, much lower than they were just a few decades ago, across all levels of schooling.

Memory can be tricky. You need some data, not anecdotes.

Lots of us remember reading e.g. Shakespeare and Faulkner in high school. If the most challenging material they're reading now is Rowling (or whatever GP means by "books for children"), that is data.

> Lots of us remember reading e.g. Shakespeare and Faulkner in high school.

Yes, and my mom just last month retired from teachig English in a nothing-special (in ratings terms) high school in a relatively poor area, and was teaching Shakespeare, Donne, and the rest of the traditional canon of classic literature, as well as a small number of more current bits of non-juvenile literature that isn't part of the Eurocentric canon, works from Amy Tan and others (many of which I also remember reading—in college.)

But in any case what makes it challenging or not isn't what books they read, but what the expectations are of what they'll be able to do having read them.

Yeah, lots of people "remember" doing things when they were sixteen or seventeen, or maybe even 12 or 13, but the memory gets murkier. In my experience, it's very easy for people to remember something they did at a given age fondly, and push it for their kids at a earlier age inadvertently.

Memory is a tricky thing. I wouldn't be surprised if you aren't comparing today's 13 year old to your 16 year old self inadvertently.

I can't believe you're really quibbling over the possibility that some high schools assign Shakespeare...

Which books for children?