On rhetoric: you learn rhetoric by writing more than reading. That's why they make you write about books: it is practice for writing with evidence since the evidence to back up your ideas is contained only in the pages of the book (children are idiots and the book is a replacement for knowledge). While you're doing this exercise, you might as well get exposure to a variety of different books to learn about the culture and history of the world you live in.
Modern writers including Pratchett make lots of references to this canon. Some people also learn that they enjoy Shakespeare in school, and they would never read a play like that otherwise.
What makes Pratchett more "relevant" than Shakespeare? I would posit to you that the same order of magnitude of people (or more) read and watch Shakespeare plays by choice as read Pratchett books. Let alone modern adaptations like West Side Story. I get that you prefer the one, but not everybody does.
English classes also have you read lots of other more recent and more modern works. It's not exclusively Shakespeare. I remember, for example, Death of a Salesman, 1984, and Slaughterhouse-Five being part of my high school's English curriculum.
Lord of the Rings is apparently in several English curricula now.
Comedies of all kinds (from Aristophanes to Pratchett) usually take a backseat to tragedies, bildungsromane, and other more "serious" genres in English classes because they tend to be much less timeless and much more current in terms of their themes and references.
> That modern writers reference old works is true, but so too did Shakespeare, and we don't reference his cultural ancestors to understand his works.
Schools do generally have you read ancient writers, often including Greek comedies and tragedies, and some have you read medieval British literature and those references do, in fact, come up. It's possible that you did not fully enjoy Shakespeare if you did not get that context.
> That fine, but it's not the job of school. If it was, we'd also have mandatory watching of foreign language horror films.
Believe it or not, if you take advanced French classes, you're going to watch a lot of French films and listen to a lot of French music for school! Since most students in English-speaking schools spend a lot more time studying English than French, they read a lot more English literature than French.
> What makes Pratchett more "relevant" than Shakespeare?
The language, the content, and the characters.
We don't live in a world where someone could fail to hear from their ship for a few weeks, thinking themselves unable to pay a weird debt, and have their loan shark's daughter dress up as lawyers and waltz into the trial to save the day. And we definitely don't encounter people who speak in Shakespearean English (even Victorian English is pushing it).
We do live in one where people try to commit insurance fraud as soon as they hear about it, a world where Magrats' have excessive candles (even if the magic isn't real), and a world of Vimes' Boots.
> Let alone modern adaptations like West Side Story
Or the Lion King. The adaptations are fine, the success make the connections to the world in which they are created.
> English classes also have you read lots of other more recent and more modern works. It's not exclusively Shakespeare.
I didn't say otherwise; I'm saying focus on those other things. I think the most modern thing we had was Ethan Frome.
> Believe it or not, if you take advanced French classes, you're going to watch a lot of French films and listen to a lot of French music for school! Since most students in English-speaking schools spend a lot more time studying English than French, they read a lot more English literature than French.
Again, that's fine for those learning French (and etc. for each other second language) to a higher level — given my experience with teaching myself a second language, and my self-tests over the years, there's a huge quality gap between what's a good grade in school and what's enough to get by with in practice — but that's not most people, and as there's exactly 18 years in the first 18 years of your life, my point is: what should be mandatory in schools? You've got limited time, what is the "you must" rather than "here's something you may like"?
Modern writers including Pratchett make lots of references to this canon. Some people also learn that they enjoy Shakespeare in school, and they would never read a play like that otherwise.