Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

I think you can have both. Learning "the canon" is really important to being considered "educated" in society. At young ages, a lot of schools seem to do X minutes of reading per night, with no restriction on what. This makes sense. It also lets kids who are poor readers not feel behind because they didn't read 75 pages and only made it through 18, and it teaches kids to find things they want to read. In high school, most of our reading was all of the class reading the same thing at once. We did have major projects, however, comparing works by the same author, the works of one poet, etc., and we got to pick those. Other places make kids keep journals and reading journals on whatever they read. All of these also make sense as a way to get kids to read things they want, while also keeping the communal learning of the same thing in place. You really can't have a discussion on Hamlet if only half the room has ever opened it. (Yeah, maybe they all just read the Cliff notes, anyway. That's a different problem.)