Less controversial but equally as important are the books our young people read. If parents and teachers are trying to raise students of good character and send them off to college or into the workforce with a degree of optimism, then why do they hand them bleak works of literature depicting depravity and despair?

In her excellent article “6 Reasons Parents Shouldn’t Blindly Trust ‘Classic’ Book Lists from Corrupt Academics,” high school English teacher Meg Marie Johnson asks that question and supplies some answers.

Johnson points out that certain books on her school’s reading list—including Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”—show “hardship without hope.” They focus on “negative examples, not heroes,” fail to instill a healthy morality in students, and desensitize readers.

She rightly contends that “older classics are firmly rooted in our Western values, while many modern works are expressly fatalistic,” noting that even a grim story such as Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” offers pathways of redemption for its characters.

“Modern literature, on the other hand, tends to have the message that ‘life is terrible and that is it,’” she writes.

Equating reality with the bad and the ugly while ignoring the good is a root of modern thinking that needs to be dug up and chopped to pieces.

Literature that presents reality as it is—joy mixed with sorrow, triumph with defeat, courage and wisdom battling back against evil and vice—inspires readers to pick up their bucklers and swords and fight back when dragons come their way.