American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014.
A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace.
Books such as JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced by "informational texts" approved by the Common Core State Standards.
Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California's Invasive Plant Council.
The new educational standards have the backing of the influential National Governors' Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and are being part-funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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I am completely horrified. This is the enforcement of an incredibly dehumanizing and lifeless worldview in which the company comes before everything: before the individual, before learning, and before the arts. Education in the US is becoming more and more ruthless, coldly practical and opposed to creative thinking. It makes perfect sense that Bill Gates would support this, as it's a proposal in a long tradition of mind-numbing managerial control.