Being an old fogey, I agree. Certainly, my education was far more "academic" than anything my kids did. In English, I was surprised how little reading they were expected to do - e.g. usually only part of a novel or play.
As part of my English Lit. A-Level, we did Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory". We had to read it at least twice - once straight through, and again chapter by chapter as we studied it. But that wasn't all. We had to "read around" it, with as many other GG novels as we could fit in (I remember reading A Burnt Out Case, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter and several others).
And that was just part of the course - there were also two Shakespeare plays (Hamlet and Measure for Measure), Webster's "The White Devil", Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (only two of those, TBF) and an anthology of poetry of the 1930s (my favourite bit, along with Hamlet).