Got lists? The Open Syllabus Project
The Open Syllabus Project is an intriguing attempt to identify, quantify, and rank what texts are taught in university curricula, including which texts are taught with each other, in what fields, and even in what geographical and institutional locations. Currently, there are approximately one million syllabi in the database (which are not available to viewers, only the data). This is a fascinating and complex project, but right now I don't think you can draw fully meaningful conclusions from it--although it's certainly interesting to explore. What follows is not an argument against the project's use-value, because indeed it promises to be hugely useful, but a warning about the dangers of using its current results to write apocalyptic (or, for that matter, even non-apocalyptic) op-ed pieces about The State of Education as We Know It:
1) Aside from errors caused by the nature of scraping (e.g., Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, multiple variations on Blake's Songs... and Shakespeare's Complete Works, and generally anything that has a subtitle), there are at least two key gaps in the data that mean any conclusions need to remain non-conclusive. First, we don't know in what courses these texts were taught; instead, we have everything from College Composition to British Literature I and II to upper-division seminars jumbled together. Second, we don't know in what way the texts are being taught. Do we regularly teach all of the Canterbury Tales or all of Aurora Leigh? It looks like later iterations of the project will tackle these problems.
2) Again, right now, the top two hundred list as a whole looks remarkably canonical and Anglophone (i.e., very little in translation). Do World Lit instructors not post their syllabi? Not counting the comp handbooks and the occasional work of theory, maybe a third or so of the list was published in the twentieth century.
3) It's worth noting that the general English list of two hundred texts appears to be virtually identical to the United States list, so the results are skewed (there are over three times the number of texts in the US dataset than for the next country). Moreover, some of the other geographical breakdowns produce really odd results, which also suggests that the syllabi available aren't representative of the general curricula. You would think, for example, that almost no literature was taught in the UK, a conclusion about which I have, shall we say, doubts, or that almost no Canadian literature was taught in Canada, something about which I also have doubts. I don't think it's possible to make any useful generalizations about a country that isn't the USA at present (the Australian list, for example, looks awfully non-representative of anything right now).
In other words, one million syllabi sounds like a lot, but it's actually a lot less than the project needs, especially for countries not the USA. Indeed, the English dataset consists of less than 300,000 syllabi at present. Which is not actually all that many, once you start calculating things like number of instructors, course loads, and date ranges. As the creators point out, if one goes back to the beginning of the twenty-first century, there have been probably something like "80-100 million" syllabi in their geographical search range.
4) Presumably the high ranking of all those handbooks comes from lumping in the freshman comp courses with everything else. Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the shorter pieces, especially King's "I Have a Dream" speech, were from comp classes.
I...actually would like to know just how many comp courses are in this database.
5) Which reminds me that courses are structured differently in the UK, and there isn't any freshman comp there in the first place. I think it would help users interpret the data if there were some mention of the different forms curricula may take.
6) You could definitely use this list to discuss the pragmatic aspects of syllabus construction. For example, in the USA, I suspect Frankenstein is up so high because you can teach it over a couple of days or so in British Literature II; it's pretty difficult to get a novel of any length into a survey like that (where, by necessity, one tends to do a lot of poetry and perhaps some short fiction).
7) So, everybody is teaching Hamlet, then?
The short version: do not write ranty op-ed pieces about the state of secondary education using the results as they stand. Wait a few years until the project has more syllabi. Even then, refrain from ranting.