I agree that a lot of what I didn't like about Animal Farm could have been fixed in a different context (deep dive into the theory of socialism as a classless society, overloading of the word communism, actual history of Russia and how it didn't achieve a classless society, history of Orwell as a person and his own political beliefs, exploration of Animal Farm as polemic tool and analysis of its effectiveness as a tool, analysis of how it's misunderstood today as a criticism of the idea of communism, McCarthyism and how Animal Farm was introduced to classroom during the coldwar)

But here's my main thesis -- we have a situation where not-reading books is incentivized:

In an information-rich environment, I just learned more about animal farm in 10 minutes by asking AI all of the above questions than I did in 10 hours of reading without proper context back in highschool.

If reading itself (and not shaping the values of youth) is really just the goal, then we could solve this by assigning materials to kids that are likely to match their interests (I don't know slenderman, twilight, harry potter, ender's game, whatever).