I don't disagree, but I also don't totally agree with you. I think there's a certain amount of resistance you'll get out of making children do things they don't want to do, all day, 180+ days a year, making the issue of "inspiring, useful material" moot. I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 11th grade. I stopped after 30 pages and would've been content if this asshole Kundera shut the hell up and never wrote another goddamn thing. I then reread the book 4 years later (remember you nudging me to read some Kundera kleinbl00?) and it rearranged the contents of my skull. I have reread it several times now, including stuff by different authors my higher level English teacher assigned us, and I have a qualitatively different reaction to all of it. I think you say it later in your post that "Education not being inspiring is a firmly upper-middle class problem..." and I agree. It's a luxury to follow your academic curiosity, be tested and challenged by able teachers, when you go home to roaches crawling through your hair at bedtime, a screaming match between Mom and her boyfriend, and McDonald's for dinner -- maybe.The first problem is that the material we're teaching is boring, uninspiring, and useless, and that problem exists because boring, uninspiring, useless material is the easiest thing to teach.
It is also the thing that pushes the disadvantaged classes further into disadvantage and the advantaged classes higher into the stratosphere. This is part of the "charter schools" feint - white liberal parents are likely to support it because they love hating on the school system they live in (guilty!) so if they just got some vouchers the world would be a wonderful place! But they can't really fathom the idea that a voucher for less than 100% the cost of tuition and ancillaries isn't going to be any use whatsoever to poorer families who are going to be going to a public school system that's since been impoverished by those wonderful voucher programs and charter schools. You have to be a pretty conscious liberal to recognize that you want the schools your kids don't go to to be great so that the overall crime rate goes down, the employment rate goes up and everybody benefits. If you don't have the stomach for magnanimousness across the socioeconomic spectrum, you are legitimately part of the problem.It's a luxury to follow your academic curiosity, be tested and challenged by able teachers, when you go home to roaches crawling through your hair at bedtime, a screaming match between Mom and her boyfriend, and McDonald's for dinner -- maybe.