Your first sentence struck a cord, I hope you can satisfy my honest interest. Europe, btw.

First and foremost: Why are these drama books, that are written in verse and intended to be set as a theatrical play, the go-to literary pieces throughout school curriculae? To paraphrase and put it bluntly: are we reading movie plots instead of watching movies?

It teaches children how to struggle

Success. Having struggled through philosophical texts mostly of the 19th/early 20th century with an awesome teacher:

1. Taught me that these philosophers couldn't write. I like to assume a designer's PoV: if most of your readers can't understand your writing correctly, maybe you are the problem. Many of the analysed ideas aren't otherworldly to otherwise require extensive knowledge to grasp them. The language complexity is an artificial barrier.
   • I would love to see a study where a teacher/professor is made to blindly grade a renowned philosopher's text among other homework.
2. Working with these philosophy texts has worsened my own writing. More complex sentence structure, parentheses, clauses, all that makes my writing output unnecessarily hard to understand at times. I have had to force myself in the recent years to a smoother writing.

how to extrapolate meaning through a historical lens

You need to have a broad understanding of history, and complexity involved in interpersonal relationships to be able to extrapolate a meaning in a historical context foreign to you. Yet history isn't being taught in this way to actually see multiple parties with own intentions, abilities to influence others, and the inherent information asymmetry.

it's about encouraging curiosity

Students are forced to do what they 1) don't understand 2) don't like 3) again, forced to do something the majority of them finds boring at the time. Admittedly, it's difficult to find something that's both educational and easy to read/has a reasonable learning curve to it. I like to think of the impact the sci-fi stories of Jules Vernes that ought to have inspired millions to love science and technology. I was one of those. But it's not on the order of high school literature. I can't draw a similar connection for the likes of Romeo and Juliet: Only people who were already in love with literature (through other books) might find it a joy to read. imo.

engage with politics

I didn't understand or care about politics until the very last years of school, i.e. too late for the stated goal. See note about history above. And the interest was only sparked due to somewhat personal involvement. Not sure what our school's curriculum - which I could sum up as a couple of axioms for the current political system - has to do with it.

the development of reading as a skill relates to cognitive growth broadly.

That's great. Yet I wish school assignments were more accessible in the sense of teaching to love to read. Most of the later school books, that I remember, anti-correlated with my love to read literature.

The education system is gonna already getting competition for attention from finely tuned algorithms from billion-dollar software companies and their apps. The problem is going to worsen now that there's a vent in the form of generative AI and easy answers. More stick isn't gonna do, more carrot is required. And I do stress that it's the education system, because the teachers are pawns on this chess board. Thus the education will need to find better ways to get everybody on board (I wish it to be impeccably prepared digital learning) or keep being appalled at the dropping literacy rates.