Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.
I honestly don't know if that really works, or if it's just cargo cult. I do know that I considered my English classes, and now I run a Shakespeare theater troupe. Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I can't tell if I'm here because, despite, or totally disconnected from my education.
I think there's something to this idea. I remember we first read the apology in translation sometime in early highschool. everyone thought it was boring af and no one cared. totally different when we read it later in my ancient greek class. the teacher really knew how to play to her audience, and at every bit of (mostly untranslatable) wordplay she would stop to point out how socrates was roasting his interlocutors. to be fair, it's a certain kind of student that self-selects into highschool ancient greek, but the class definitely got a lot more out of it that time around. you might not like to teach the apology as "the story of socrates the chad", but you gotta meet your audience where they are.
This is an interesting situation, because it creates a reading list that is a "projected aspiration". We hope, I guess, that kids will read precociously. Education is, after all, the teaching of civilization's most important messages compressed into a fixed, very short time-span. School gets kids "caught up" on the civilizational conversations about things. But so much of the art and literature of humanity is like Lolita, in that it requires lots of actual living to appreciate (unlike algebra), so its position is...odd.
I wonder if, by being exposed to these things at a young age, we give kids a "shared coordinate system" to interpret and express their world, and so shape their choices in it.
Certain things like Shakespeare I'd contend will appeal at least on a surface level to children too. Something like Lolita not so much.