As my son nears teenhood, I find myself a little more concerned about his choices – who he’s hanging with, what they’re doing, and yes, even what he’s reading. While bringing home a book I’m not crazy about – the Goosebump series, for one example – isn’t anywhere near as insomnia-producing as hanging out behind the 7-11 smoking a fatty – it still gives me pause. I’m a little put off by these supernatural horror stories whose cover images and back copy are enough to keep me up at night. But he likes him. And they make him want to read.

But is that enough? Should parents turn a blind eye to whatever book their kids choose, just because “they’re reading, so it must be good?”

A recent article in the New York Times tells of Atlanta English teacher Lorrie McNeill, who decided to let her middle-school students choose the curriculum this year. As a result, instead of studying To Kill a Mockingbird, many kids ended up leafing through teen chick-lit books a la Gossip Girl and the Captain Underpants series. "I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” the Times article quotes McNeill as saying (I‘ll assume she didn’t intend to suggest Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants, as entertaining as it is, to be a novel).

Engagement is a big plus: If kids learn there are books they enjoy, the reasoning goes, they may move beyond Captain Underpants comics and pick up something with a little more meat on its bones. In fact, some kids in McNeill’s classes did opt for works by Toni Morrison and Earnest Gaines.

Critics of student-driven reading say we should tell our kids what to read. After all, they’ll never pick up a classic if they have something flashier in front of them – sort of like it’s hard to expect a 12-year-old to choose the healthy grilled chicken breast with a side of broccoli when there’s a Big Mac and fries to be had.

So where do I stand? With a foot firmly in each camp. While I think it’s critical for kids to follow wherever their interests take them – including comic books and chick lit – I also believe we have a duty to introduce our kids to a common cultural base, from Edgar Allen Poe to Harper Lee to Mark Twain and beyond. These books are important not because they are flashy or cool or fun, but because they are good, well-written literature – something no stretch of the imagination can apply to Captain Underpants (whom I happen to adore). There are plenty of well-written current books I would love my kids to read, books that are engaging, of-the-moment, and even occasionally fun.

What I want for my kids is a melding of the classics and the current – a class where students read Anne Frank and follow up with Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, which presents the Holocaust from a young German’s viewpoint, or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic novel of the Holocaust in which the Nazis are portrayed as cats and the Jews as mice. Where they dissect the horror to be found in The Tell-Tale Heart and then contrast Poe’s work with modern horror, maybe even in the form of Goosebumps. Where they are guided along their path to reading with an experienced leader to point out sights along the way they might have otherwise missed.

Is there a place for Gossip Girl? Yes, definitely. But not in the classroom.