Love it or loathe it, Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" has served as a rite of passage for high school students for generations.

In addition to the Bard, teachers have long relied on Socrates, Kafka, Steinbeck and a host of other authors whose works earned the distinction of being a classic — albeit rarely landed on teens' top 10 lists.

While few dare challenge the texts as exceptional literature, high school teachers throughout the Chicago area and beyond are swapping out the canon for the contemporary, arguing that their selections impart the same themes and skills, with one important caveat:

Students don't audibly groan when they whip out their books at the start of English class.

For the first time in decades, teachers in northwest suburban Township High School District 214 aren't teaching "Romeo and Juliet" this year to the majority of freshmen. "Hamlet" didn't make the cut in some classes in Glenbrook High Schools District 225. And some teachers at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire replaced Kafka with "Life of Pi," a novel written in (gasp) 2001.

"We're always going for balance," said Susan Levine-Kelley, instructional supervisor at Glenbrook South High School in Glenview. "So often in the education world, the pendulum swings."

That pendulum, teachers and experts agree, has swung toward more modern, multicultural novels written in the same lifetime as the students. Lest Shakespeare devotees feel betrayed, teachers are quick to reassure that they haven't done away with the classics — especially not their beloved Elizabethan playwright.

"We've scaled back, but we've realized that anyone living in the world should have some cultural knowledge of Shakespeare," Levine-Kelley said.

The shift is forcing teachers to consider how much time to devote to classics and how much to recent works of equal merit, said Jordan Catapano, a district leader with the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. Catapano, who teaches English at Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, recently decided to trade in Socrates for "Life of Pi." His Advanced Placement colleagues opted for the 2003 novel "The Kite Runner."

"I think the perception used to be that those (classics) had an inherent virtue in and of their own that every generation should be exposed to," he said. "I think, especially as lovers of literature, we still believe that, but we definitely are much more flexible now in which texts get those priorities because we want to make sure students are exposed to a diversity of texts."

Some districts have an approved list teachers must pull from, while others give educators the autonomy to forge their own. At Stevenson, teachers gravitate toward the classics, but they've opened the doors a bit to include more modern books such as "The Secret Life of Bees," said Doug Lillydahl, director of communication arts.

Laurie Elish-Piper, a distinguished teaching professor at Northern Illinois University, is hopeful that high school teachers will continue to push for adding more current texts written by a greater mix of authors. The key, she said, is balance.

"I think that students will be willing to go along with the program and read something that maybe they feel is written by old, dead, white people — usually old, dead, white men — if they know there's something coming along that's going to be a little edgier, a little more modern and closely related to their lives as adolescents," she said.

Instead of grappling with archaic language — and resorting to SparkNotes, which offers study guides on a variety of books — students can immerse themselves in the compelling, relatable narratives, she said.

"One of my hopes is that we can create not only students who can read, but students who really enjoy reading," Elish-Piper said.

Although Shakespeare's language can prove challenging, working through it benefits the reader, said Jeffrey Masten, a Northwestern University professor who teaches Shakespeare. The plays also can get students thinking about gender and race in new ways, he said.

"There's a real value in identifying with, relating to, characters and texts that don't look or talk or act just like ourselves, whoever we may be," Masten said.

Glenbrook South English teacher David Knudson said his students didn't complain when he told them they would read the 2007 sci-fi novel "Unwind" instead of "Hamlet." To his surprise, the book created a different challenge. Students, some of whom said they had never read ahead for class, were doing just that.

"All of a sudden, one of my biggest problems is trying to figure out what to do with the kids who are 100 pages ahead or have finished the book a week after we've started it," said Knudson.

In Julie Schaefer's classroom, students switched between annotating their paperback copies of the 1994 novel "In the Time of the Butterflies" and pulling up questions about the day's reading on their laptops.

Grace Poulos, a sophomore from Glenview, said it was the storyline that captivated her; she was inspired further when she learned the historical novel was written by a woman.

Her classmate, Charlotty Herman, said she, too, felt empowered by reading such a remarkable book by a female writer. An avid reader, Charlotty said she loves Shakespeare but appreciates the opportunity to branch out.

"It doesn't have to be old to be beautifully crafted," she said.

University of Illinois at Chicago English and education professor Gerald Graff called the debate about which books to read "a red herring," saying the problem isn't so much the type of text as it is that many students are unable to comprehend and write intelligently about what they've read.

"You can make the text more contemporary and more accessible to students, but a lot of them are still going to need the Cliffs Notes in order to figure out what they're supposed to say about the text," he said. "I think it's kind of a blind alley to think that if we just get the right text and reading list that students will just get better."

Some districts are reluctant to fully embrace novels that haven't stood the test of time. But a number of instructors said they found they could incorporate some books, including the wildly popular dystopian series "The Hunger Games," as independent reading options.