There are plenty of very good reasons I can think of to standardize a curriculum as much as possible, not the least of which is the demand you're placing on 25 year-olds being paid $40k a year. They can't teach what they don't know themselves and they can't reasonably be expected to read in a level of detail necessary to teach every book every individual student might enjoy and prefer being taught. They can, on the other hand, become experts on an accepted canon that stays largely the same year to year. You're otherwise recreating the JavaScript framework treadmill that everyone here hates so much but for people earning 1/10th the salary.
Back in my HS days, there was a lot of individual choice of books allowed. Effort was tested by writing of "book reports". I read much of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that way.
LLMs, unfortunately, can write you a "book report" on almost anything.
