A study compared the results of a 1986 survey on the opinions of preservice teachers with those of a survey conducted in 1984 by William Bennett (at that time chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities). Bennett's survey asked respondents to list 30 works that students should be expected to read before high school graduation. "Macbeth" and "Hamlet" were listed by 71% of the 325 respondents to this survey, and 50% listed documents of U.S. history, such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. The 1986 survey sought responses from 44 preservice teachers enrolled at Mississippi State University; subjects were asked to list 10 works that students should be expected to read before high school graduation. A comparison of responses indicated that the preservice teachers felt more strongly about some of the works than those in Bennett's survey. More than half of the subjects listed the following five works: Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter"; Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet,""Hamlet," and "Macbeth"; and various U.S. government documents. Twenty of the works or authors listed in Bennett's survey were mentioned in the survey of education students. The choices of the preservice teachers seemed to refute the statement of some scholars that high school students may not be equipped to read sophisticated material. Most of the preservice teachers had been out of high school less than four years, yet indicated they believed in high school students' ability to read such books. (SRT)