Founders Classical Academy Reading List

The eight-year literature sequence at Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, a classical charter school in Texas, posted on 22 September 2026 by the Classic Learning Test with the line: “This is what serious education looks like.” The roster was posted as four screenshots.

Fifty-eight entries, fifty-six unique titles. Two appear twice by design — the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass abridged in fifth grade and whole in eighth, and Julius Caesar adapted in sixth and in Shakespeare’s own language in ninth. That repetition is the curriculum’s method showing through: a text is met early in a form a child can carry, then met again when the child can read it.

The sequence

5th Grade — Don Quixote (select episodes for young readers) · Prince Caspian · A Midsummer Night’s Dream · Sherlock Holmes · Little Women · The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (abridged)

6th Grade — Greek Myths (summer reading) · The Children’s Homer · Julius Caesar (adapted) · The Scarlet Pimpernel · The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) · The Prince and the Pauper

7th Grade — The Jungle Book (summer reading) · The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde · The Call of the Wild · Fahrenheit 451 · Cyrano de Bergerac · A Christmas Carol · Romeo and Juliet · Animal Farm · The Diary of Anne Frank

8th Grade — Frankenstein (summer reading) · Lord of the Flies · Uncle Tom’s Cabin (selections) · To Kill a Mockingbird · Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass · Much Ado About Nothing · The Red Badge of Courage · Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (selections)

9th Grade — The Odyssey (summer reading) · The Iliad · Oedipus the King · Antigone · The Clouds · The Aeneid · Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) · Metamorphoses (selections)

10th Grade — Tales of King Arthur · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight · Beowulf · The Canterbury Tales · Hamlet · Paradise Lost · Shakespeare’s Sonnets

11th Grade — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · The Scarlet Letter · Walden · Self-Reliance · Moby-Dick · The Tempest · My Ántonia

12th Grade — Pride and Prejudice · Metamorphosis · Heart of Darkness · Crime and Punishment · King Lear · Murder in the Cathedral

What the shape of it argues

The sequence is chronological in reverse. It starts with the nineteenth-century novel and the adventure story — the books that are easiest to want — and works backwards into the sources: Greek myth in sixth, Greek epic and tragedy in ninth, the medieval and Renaissance English canon in tenth. A student arrives at Beowulf and Paradise Lost only after seven years of being taught to finish long books.

Shakespeare appears in six of the eight years, and the progression through him is the curriculum in miniature: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at eleven, Romeo and Juliet at thirteen, Much Ado at fourteen, Hamlet at sixteen, The Tempest and King Lear at the end. Comedy, then young love, then wit, then interiority, then renunciation and ruin — ordered by what a reader can be expected to have lived enough to recognise.

The American strand is the other spine. Douglass twice, Twain twice, Stowe, Crane, Hawthorne, Franklin, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Cather, Lee. It is a school arguing that the American canon is neither a supplement to the Western one nor a replacement for it, but the branch its students stand on.

Books on this list Kyle has read

Titles on this list that Kyle has already read.

• Crime & Punishment ✓

Connections

• This Is What Students at Founders… (tweet) — the source post.
• Classical Education — the movement this school belongs to; the list is its curriculum made concrete.
• Classic Learning Test — the alternative college-entrance exam built around exactly this canon, and the account that posted the list.
• Education · Republic of Letters — the shared text base the sequence assumes.
• Four of these Kyle has already read: Animal Farm, Walden, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Metamorphosis.