[The following is a comment I made today to a post on Catcher in the Rye made by Colorless Wonderland published four years ago.]
Excellent presentation and discussion! I am going to play the age card here and say that I recently turned 68 (born in 1957, 6 years after Catcher in the Rye was first published). The culture I grew up in was only a few years after the culture shown in Catcher, ergo, not much difference. I disagree with your opinion that Catcher should not be taught in high school. It definitely should be taught in high school, but not for the usual reasons that communities have for banning this book or for the reasons you state.
I believe it [Catcher in the Rye] should be taught in high school because these are the issues teens face or will face once they go to college, just as Holden did. Once in college, students will learn how phony the world is, if they haven’t already.
This is a coming-of-age novel, at a point in which many teens START discovering the phoniness of the world. However (somewhat in agreement with you), high school teachers should not be the ones discussing Catcher with students. Teachers will only teach what the local school board says they should teach or they put their jobs on the line, and a lot of communities still, even in 2025, want to teach the idealized American Dream, which is a textbook example of phoniness.
The people with which students should be discussing Catcher are a) other students or b) their parents (ideally). High school students need to prepare themselves for encountering the phoniness that lies ahead for them and which they will be encountering for the rest of their lives, as I have for 68 years. Of course, many parents will just try to teach the ideal American Dream or sugar-coat the future, but the honest ones, the good parents (or friends) will honestly prepare their children for what lies ahead. So, while the “teachers” may present the local school board’s view of what teens should learn, the student’s friends and family will teach the down-to-earth, worthwhile lessons.
The great thing about literature which is most valuable for the reader is not reading something and then discussing it with the teacher the community hired to teach its values, but discussing the material with classmates, family, and others, i.e. getting a lot of opinions and then having to decide, based on experience, which are the opinions worth considering, which are the most valuable, which are the most truthful and accurate, and deciding what one should take from them to help oneself prepare for the coming future.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 