For today's time-pressed and career-minded schoolchildren, many of whom by the eighth grade have begun planning their Ivy League admissions strategies, the thrill of literature, I hear, is gone. What a relief for them when they're eventually told it's not their fault. Yearly the news media decries the sharp decline in adolescent reading, and inevitably the ensuing discussion fingers the culprit: the high school English curriculum.

Recently, a fellow English teacher, Nancy Schnog of The McLean School in suburban Washington, D.C., published a Washington Post op-ed wherein she argues, "All too often, it's English teachers ... who close down teen interest in reading." Ms. Schnog marshals battalions of evidence: student after devastated student whose wholesome love of reading was defiled by some out-of-touch English schoolmarm bent on analyzing "The Scarlet Letter" word for polysyllabic word.

The testimonials continue, even after Ms. Schnog ends her column, with commentators the world over posting their own traumatic encounters with soul-sapping teachers who insist that the classics deserve closer reading than the more immediately enjoyable line-up of contemporary best sellers.

One such post comes from a parent, who describes her child's harrowing ordeal of having to read two classics over the summer as "trudging through syrup." Another, whose screen name, "mullet," should not go unmentioned, characterizes a year in high school English class as "total drool, nonsense," before launching his incisive thesis: "We spend 30 percent more time than any other country focusing on language and english [sic], which would explain the decline of jobs and the economy in this country."

I fault "mullet" only for the short-sightedness of his argument. The English classroom has poisoned far more than the economy; verily, the world's greatest ills -- totalitarianism, famine, disease, corruption, pollution -- can be traced back to your 11th-grade English teacher who made you write a five-paragraph essay on Shakespeare's development of the sleep motif in "Macbeth." Had that irresponsible teacher taught you, instead, that Shakespeare logarithmically inverts the polynomial derivative of sleep, not as it approaches zero, but as it approaches infinity, such that the parabolic asymptote of its exponential cosine can be graphed as a four-dimensional rhombus, you might have grown up to save both the American automobile industry and the endangered Beluga whale.

Certainly Ms. Schnog should not be held responsible for the inanity of some of her followers, but the heart of her turncoat argument, bold though it is, troubles me.

I teach English to more than 120 students every weekday, and, yes, many do not enjoy reading the classics. Once upon a time I even taught "The Scarlet Letter," and I'm man enough to admit that my approach to the novel likely produced a few "mullets" of my own.

But I also teach a good number of students, both in advanced placement and in college-prep English, who genuinely like to read. I even prefer to think that my scholarly approach to a work of literature occasionally deepens students' enjoyment. They may not re-read "Antigone" at the beach next summer, but they leave class with an appreciation for why that story has lasted nearly 2,500 years.

My experience is that students who like to read usually come from families who like to read. There are exceptions, to be sure, and to turn those kids on to literature can be a greater reward. But critics of English education, such as Nancy Schnog and her six attendant pages of commentators, dismiss the externalities, such as family, that come to bear on the distressing issue of teen reading. Worse, they write off our students' innate resilience when in fact a new teacher, a different book, or simply another day can be all a kid needs to be reminded of his attraction to a well-told story.

To argue that teachers possess the dark power to eradicate a kid's enjoyment of written stories suggests that our students are fragile and hopelessly at our mercy. At the very least, to argue that dusty, antiquated classics must be stricken from the English syllabus because kids find them hard to read implies that we're running mere book clubs.

Actually, I can't recall a single student in my 10 years of teaching who has hated or has loved every book we teach in our classics-heavy high school curriculum. Even with an oft-maligned book, such as [insert Victorian novel here], there are always a few kids who vocally defend it against the madding crowd.

Can English teachers do better? No doubt. The heaviest book in a student's bookbag is typically his literature anthology, the very antithesis of a bedside page-turner. The prevailing notion that no book in English class may be read lightly should also be questioned. And there will be no argument from me that some heavy-handed works of literature are misplaced in classrooms of younger or more reading-averse students.

But make no mistake; literature lasts because it penetrates everyday fads and banalities, and, in doing so, it challenges our complacency -- one must trudge, not through syrup, but up the rugged pitch. It takes time, and it is only when we reach the top that the achievement can be apprehended.